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This document is a comprehensive analysis authored This document is a comprehensive analysis authored by Rick Gorvett and presented at the Living to 100 Symposium (2014). It examines the far-reaching socioeconomic, cultural, financial, and ethical consequences of significant increases in human longevity—an emerging reality driven by rapid scientific and medical progress.
Purpose of the Paper
While actuarial science traditionally focuses on the financial effects of longevity (health care costs, retirement systems, Social Security), this paper expands the discussion to explore the broader societal shifts that could occur as people routinely live far longer lives.
Scientific and Medical Context
The paper reviews:
The 30-year rise in life expectancy over the last century.
Advances in medicine, biotechnology, and aging science (e.g., insulin/IGF-1 pathway inhibition, caloric restriction research).
Cultural and historical reflections on the human desire for extended life.
Radical projections from futurists (Kurzweil, de Grey) versus more conservative demographic forecasts.
Main Implications of Increased Longevity
1. Economic & Financial Impacts
Pensions & retirement systems: Longer lifespans strain traditional retirement models; retirement ages and structures may need major redesign.
Workforce dynamics: Older workers may remain employed longer; effects on younger workers are uncertain but may not be negative.
Human capital: Longer lives encourage greater education, retraining, and skill acquisition throughout life.
Saving & investment behavior: With multiple careers and life stages, traditional financial planning may be replaced by more flexible, cyclical patterns.
2. Family & Personal Changes
Marriage & relationships: Longer life may normalize serial marriages, term contracts, or extended cohabitation; family structures may become more complex.
Family composition: Wider age gaps between siblings, blended families, and overlapping generations (parent and grandparent roles).
Education: Learning becomes lifelong, with repeated periods of study and retraining.
Health & fertility: Increased longevity requires parallel gains in healthy lifespan; fertility windows may expand.
3. Ethical and Social Considerations
Medical ethics: Some may reject life-extension technologies on moral or religious grounds, creating divergent longevity groups.
Value systems: A longer, healthier life may alter cultural norms, risk perception, and even legal penalties.
Potential downsides: Longevity may increase psychological strain; more years of life do not guarantee more years of satisfaction.
Overall Conclusion
The paper emphasizes the complexity and unpredictability inherent in a future of greatly extended lifespans. The interconnectedness of economic, social, family, health, and ethical factors makes actuarial modeling extremely challenging.
To adapt, society may need to reinvent the traditional three-phase life cycle—education, work, retirement—into a more fluid structure with:
>multiple careers,
>repeated education periods,
>flexible work patterns,
and a diminished emphasis on traditional retirement.
The author ultimately argues that actuaries and policymakers must prepare for a profound and multidimensional transformation of societal systems as longevity rises.... |