With Purpose Success, part 13

The notion of shifting your priorities from success to significance has immensely positive implications for the world. While dour economists and fatalistic policymakers have been wringing their hands over the coming retirement storm of boomers, I've been contemplating a more optimistic model. Might this massive generation, which has repeatedly reshaped society since birth, reorder the world one more time-with glowing results?
The worrywarts certainly have troubling evidence to cite. As I've previously written about in Age Wave, Age Power and Workforce Crisis, aging populations across the globe threaten to stretch our resources as folks quit work, stop paying taxes, and suck up pension assets and health care budgets. In the United States, one in four citizens will be sixty or older by 2030. In Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, and Germany at least 40 percent of the populations will be sixty or older by 2050. The oldest living human being (in Japan) just turned 112. Even China (with its one- child policy) has a fast-approaching demographic problem-one in three will be sixty by midcentury. So aging is a global event-and one that is normally referred to as "a problem."
But my own research tells another story, one of extended healthy living, employment, continued involvement, and ongoing personal growth and contribution that could make boomers in their later years net givers to society-not the fiscal drain that is widely supposed. In recent years, governments have begun to get serious about promoting productive aging-getting some kind of return on the accumulated wisdom and skills of people entering their retirement years. So far, the discussion has centered on how to keep people past sixty in the workforce, for two reasons-their retirement threatens to cause a "brain drain" that leaves companies groping for skilled labor and management, and most people that age are physically and mentally able to work much longer. Today's average sixty-five-year-old man has the same 2 percent chance of dying within a year as did the average fifty-nine-year-old man in 1970, notes
John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Says he: "If you have a low chance of dying, you're not old."
Shoven believes the starting of pension benefits should be measured backward from how long a person is expected to live, not forward from how long they've been alive. By his calculations, counting back from the expected end of life would lead to reasonably delayed benefits that boost the labor force by 10 percent by 2050 and add 10 percent a year to the national output. If those who retire are encouraged to volunteer it could add another 5 percent to the gross domestic product (GDP)-and this is his point: such contribution from retirement-age people would pay for a lot of the government's promises. "Seasoned men and women," said David
Walker, U.S. comptroller general, "are the most underutilized asset in
America." Indeed, in the world."We're moving in the right direction, fitfully," says Marc Freedman, founder of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit focused on productive-aging issues. "But we haven't begun to see the kind of creative energy put into productive aging as we saw during the last fifty years go into leisure for the aging. We need our leaders to step up and create a new cultural paradigm.
We need a new vision for what success looks like in the second half of life."
Purpose Has Entered the Mainstream