FIRST THE GOOD NEWS: We’re living longer, healthier lives than ever before. Life expectancies in Spain, Greece and Austria, for example, doubled over the course of the 20th century. Now for the bad news: At this rate, we can’t afford to live so long.





For the first time in human history, people aged 65 and over are about to outnumber children under 5. In many countries, older people entitled to government-funded pensions, health services and long-term care will soon outnumber the work force whose taxes help finance those benefits. No other force is as likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances and national policies, according to a new analysis on global aging from Standard & Poor’s, as the “irreversible rate at which the population is growing older.”


Seeing to the needs of the swelling ranks of the aged could lead to World War II levels of debt unless societies are transformed,some experts warn.


How are the most developed countries handling preparations for the boom in the elderly population ? and for the budgetbusting expenditures that are sure to follow? For a majority, not very well. Unless governments enact sweeping changes to age-related public spending, sovereign debt could become unsustainable, rivaling levels seen during cataclysms like the Great Depression and World War II, according to the S.&P. report.

So what is to be done? For starters, governments should extend the retirement age, says Marko Mrsnik, the associate director of sovereign ratings in Europe for S.& P. and the lead author of the report. Another obvious idea, he says, is that governments should balance their budgets.

Alas, private citizens often don’t see the logic in curbing public benefits in order to maintain national solvency. Witness France recently, where more than one million people took to the streets to protest pension reform that would raise the minimum legal retirement age to 62 from 60.

Moreover, global aging experts say, measures like pension reform are inadequate responses to the giant demographic shift that is upon us. If the cost of maintaining aging populations could lead to World War II-era levels of government debt, a solution to the crisis will require a mass-scale collaborative response akin to the Manhattan Project or the space race, says Michael W. Hodin, who is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and researches aging issues.

Governments, industry and international agencies, he says, will have to work together to transform the very structure of society, by creating jobs and education programs for people in their 60s and 70s - the hypothetical new middle age ? and by tackling diseases like Alzheimer’s .

“What we need is a very fundamental and profound transformation that is proportionate to the social shifts that are upon us ,” says Mr. Hodin. One simple suggestion: Influential international organizations and groups should take up aging as a cause, the way they have already done for the environment.

Although the United Nations, for example, set eight “millennium development goals” for 2015, the list did not include ensuring the sustainability and equality of aging populations. “This is quite unacceptable that aging hasn’t been included in these goals,” says Baroness Greengross, a member of the House of Lords in Britain and chief executive of the International Longevity Centre-UK in London. Another suggestion: Governments could start curbing the growth in medical spending ahead of the looming elderquake.

At the same time, politicians must also start educating citizens to understand that greater longevity may entail personal sacrifices, including higher shares of their medical costs. But rewards may be a better approach than penalties, says Laura L.

Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University in California and the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Governments and the private sector could develop incentives to keep older people working, she says. Those incentives might include bonuses for working until 70, and exempting employers from paying Social Security taxes for employees over retirement age . Finally, governments and companies may need to view aging populations not as debt loads but as wells of expertise.

Lady Greengross cites an equality act, recently passed by British legislators, that prohibits discrimination against older people seeking goods and services like car rentals or mortgages. Separately, she says, Britain next year will eliminate its default retirement age of 65 . “In the long run, I’d like to see age irrelevance,” Lady Greengross says, “where people aren’t just labeled by their birthdays.”


NATASHA SINGER/ESSAY