Yes, boss, you’ll still need me when I’m 94
On Saturday evening, 80-year-old Paul McCartney headlined Glastonbury, the UK’s premier live music festival. Over in Hyde Park, the Rolling Stones, fronted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 78, will strut their stuff. Other touring rockers include Bruce Springsteen (72), Elton John (75) and, of course, Bob Dylan (81), who is on an optimistically conceived “never ending tour”.
This refusal to fade away is not confined to wrinkly rockers. The best new book I’ve read recently is Leadership: Six Studies in Strategy by the 99-year-old Henry Kissinger. Rupert Murdoch is back on the marriage market at 91 and Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to make a political comeback at 72. Lately more and more old people are not so much raging against the dying of the light as continuing with business as usual well into what used to be regarded as the twilight years.
Our youth-obsessed culture has always underestimated the enduring power of older people. Ray Kroc was in his 50s when he began building the McDonalds franchise system while Colonel Harland Sanders was 62 when he franchised the formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
CM “Dad” Joiner, a legendary Texas wildcatter, didn’t hit the big one until he was 70, when he sank his last few dollars into a makeshift drilling rig. George Mitchell didn’t crack the secret of fracking — an innovation that has revolutionised the world’s energy industry — until he was in his 80s. A study of new US firms conducted by the Kauffman foundation discovered the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity among 55-64-year-olds and the lowest rate among 20-30-year-olds.
This obsession is particularly silly now that 80 is the new 40. Over the past 200 years, life expectancy has increased at a steady rate of more than two years every decade. (There is depressing evidence that life expectancy is shrinking for poor men in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in post-industrial areas, but that is still an exception to the overall trend.)
A child born in the west today has a more than 50% chance of living to be over 105. Queen Elizabeth, who is herself 96, sends a message of congratulation to every Briton who reaches a hundred. A decade ago, she had one assistant to help her with this happy task. Now she has seven.
Many people worry that a long old age means decades of mental fog or physical frailty. Yet most people are living healthier lives as well as longer ones. In the industrial era, people were worn out by heavy manual labour (hence all those ailments such as miner’s cough and housemaid’s knee).
Today most of us spend our working lives sitting in front of computers, with the Urban Institute calculating that almost 50% of American jobs make almost no physical demands on workers whatsoever. There are plenty of drugs to slow the passage of time or ease the pain of disintegration. Morbidity problems are being compressed into a shorter period just before the grim reaper wields his scythe. In the United States, for example, the proportion of 85-89-year-olds classified as disabled fell from 22% to 12%. Diabetes, cirrhosis, arthritis … all are starting later in life.
The new reality of aging confronts the world with one of its greatest challenges — and one of its greatest opportunities. The challenge is that we will all be bankrupted by the ever-rising cost of pensions. The old age dependency ratio — the number of people of retirement age as a percentage of those of employment age — is set at least to double in the next few decades with Japan leading the way and other rich countries following. (In 1960 Japan had ten workers for every pensioner. By 2050 it will have seven workers for every pensioner).
The most humane way to deal with this problem is to raise the retirement age along with life expectancy. When Otto von Bismarck, the unifier of Germany, introduced a retirement age of 70 in 1889, the average Pomeranian peasant would be lucky to live another two years. Now, European retirees regularly live two decades beyond retirement, enjoying a life of golf, cards, hiking and theatre-going (I recently saw a production of Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mocking Bird in the West End and was struck by the fact that the audience consisted entirely of elderly white people).
Yet so far only a few countries, mainly in northern Europe, have embraced fiscal responsibility. Norway has raised its retirement age to 67, despite its enormous wealth, and will continue to push it upwards. But southern European countries still think that the siesta years should start at 60. The supposedly welfare-averse US has a retirement age of 66 and, thanks to the Republicans’ opposition to raising taxes or the Democrats’ refusal to cut entitlements, a pension system that is headed towards bankruptcy.
This patchy arrangement is true of companies as well as countries. A few are rising to the challenge. Professional service firms allow older employees to work four days a week. Retailers have discovered the virtues of older workers, with Walmart Inc in the US and Asda and B&Q in the UK being particularly innovative in producing “geronto-friendly” policies such as flexible working arrangements. BMW introduced a production line staffed exclusively by older workers. At first “the pensioner’s line” was less productive but with a few technical changes — new chairs, comfier shoes, magnifying lenses — the difference was removed.
But many companies remain as benighted as southern European politicians. They link seniority to salary and position then weed out workers in their 50s and 60s because they’re too expensive or don’t fit into the managerial grid. And they allow millions of dollars of institutional experience to walk out of the door because they don’t debrief exiting employees.
One of the secrets of economic growth is that rich countries have always had new sources of labour to draw on. There were agricultural workers who could be brought in from the countryside (in the 19th century more than 90% of the population worked on the land). There were immigrants who could be brought in from poorer countries (this was a particular boon for the US). There were women who boosted war production in the 1940s and then flooded into the professions from the 1960s onwards.
But with all these sources already tapped, rich countries need to discover new sources of under-utilised labour. One obvious source is less-well-off communities whose talents are still under-recognised. But another is older workers who are being eased out of the workforce by corporate short-sightedness or who are bribed into retirement by poorly designed pension systems.
Paul and Mick helped to lead a youth rebellion in the 1960s that forced society to pay more attention to the creative energies of the young. Let’s hope that they can lead a senior rebellion in the 2020s that will change society’s benighted attitudes toward the old.
‘‘ More old people are not so much raging against the dying of the light as continuing with business as usual.