Longevity is hot. Whether from tech billionaires, the Saudi Public Investment Fund or national governments, money is pouring into the age-old quest for the fountain of youth. Ironically, we’re already living longer. Canada’s centenarian cohort is up 16% since 2016 and between 2016 and 2021 the number of us aged 85+ grew 12%, more than twice the rate of the overall population.1 Worldwide, there were about 95,000 people aged 100 or more in 1990. Today? More than 500,000. That’s a 500% increase while the global population rose 66% in the same period. What are some of the implications for society?
Medical advances and generally heathier lifestyles – much less smoking, for example – are likely helping us live longer. But those extra years aren’t (yet) free of the aches, pains and worse of old age. So a lot of longevity research focuses on what causes aging and the proliferation of disease it can trigger. Altos Labs, founded by Dr. Hal Barron, a global bio-medical executive, is led by a former director of the US National Cancer Institute. It’s raised $US 3 billion for “harnessing the power of cell rejuvenation to restore cell health and resilience and ultimately reverse disease”.2 Seed investors included Yuri Milner, a tech entrepreneur, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Calico Life Sciences, launched by Google in 2013 (with big cheques from Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) is exploring the biology that controls aging and lifespan, “to develop interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.” 3 To date Calico has raised $USD3.5B from AbbVie, a big US pharma company focused on autoimmune diseases, and Alphabet.
States are investing too. In 2021 Saudi Arabia deployed $USD1B from its huge Public Investment Fund to launch the Hevolution Foundation. It makes grants and investments for “innovation in life sciences and medicine that focuses on the biology of aging itself, rather than disease”. 4 Hevolution’s chair and the country’s de facto ruler for life is Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman, age 38.
Japan is well down this road because its citizens are among the longest living in the world. It recorded 92,129 centenarians in 2023, up from 20,561 two decades prior and 1,354 in 1983. Current projections foresee 300,000 Japanese aged 100 or more by 2040. But the very elderly have many health problems and Japan’s average “healthy lifespan,” the years lived in good health minus those lived in poor health, is much shorter than the average lifespan. The cost of funding that gap is soaring. Total government and personal expenditures on elder care in Japan were $USD76.4 billion in 2021. State backed nursing care costs alone for the elderly (so excluding personal and medical expenses) are expected to hit $USD185 billion by 2040.
Japan’s 2022 fertility rate, the average number of children born to women, was 1.37 (the replacement rate is 2.1 in developed countries) and its population has been falling since 2008. This is a growing problem because the working-age, tax paying population shrunk by 296,000 to 74.2 million in 2022 and is expected to sink to 48 million by 2060. Japan’s old-age dependency ratio, the number of retirees relative to the number or workers, is the highest in the world at 48.6 seniors for every 100 working adults. That ratio is expected to hit 79/100 by 2050.5 Globally, the fertility rate across the 38 most industrialised countries fell to 1.5 in 2022, down from 3.3 in 1960, according to a new study from the OECD.
So living longer is both a personal issue – nobody enjoys the ailments of aging – and a looming public policy challenge. The aged invariably require more care, which is a growing expense for society, while below replacement birth rates could lead to fewer taxpayers in the future for funding those rising healthcare costs – and everything else, including state pensions.
The number of Canadians aged 85 and older could triple to almost 2.5 million people by 2046. According to a new report from the National Institute on Ageing (NIA) at Toronto Metropolitan University, more than 52,000 Canadians were on waiting for space in a long-term care home in 2021. Approximately 167,000 Canadians age 65 and older were estimated to have unmet home-care needs and most elderly people rely on spouses and family for (unpaid) care. Our low birth rates could, absent steady immigration to fill the gap, result in far fewer family members by 2050 to provide that care. Yet the need is growing as the supply drops, with the number of Canadians needing unpaid caregivers expected to double to 700,000 by 2050.6
But not everyone has family who can help. So it’s on us to be prepared. Which is another important aspect of this issue – living longer increases the chances of outliving our savings, otherwise known as longevity risk. A good defined benefit pension helps, and if you have one and are around to celebrate your 100th, you’ll have probably received a lot more than you put in – but DB pensions are becoming scarce.
We won’t all join the century club, but we are living longer. Science may eventually give us more of those extra years in good health, but not yet. The post retirement years, which in our grandparent’s day might have been 10 years, are stretching out further and further. So we need to think about saving more for longer retirements – and even second (or third) careers. And while we’re at it, try to eat less red meat, more leafy greens, get plenty of exercise and rest, drink moderately (or not at all), and whatever you do, don’t smoke.
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