You're not as old as you think

Touching Social Security's third rail

American politics
Democracy in America

OVER on Passport, Carolyn O'Hara flags some interesting work on how we measure age. Her colleague, John Shoven, makes the case for measuring age not by years since birth, but by mortality risk.

Typically, a person's age has been determined by the number of years since his or her birth. We are so accustomed to measuring age this way that most of us have never given it a second thought. Thanks to the medical revolutions of the past century, however, life expectancies have been radically prolonged. Since 1960, the average Chinese person's life span has increased by 36 years. Over roughly 40 years, South Koreans have seen their lifetimes extended by an average of 24 years, Mexicans by 17 years, and the French by nearly a decade. Given these drastic changes, our conception of what qualifies as "old" has itself become old-fashioned.

Mr Shoven calls this "age inflation" and it effects America too. "In 1940, a 65-year-old American man could expect to live 11 more years; today, he can expect to live 17 more years," says Ms O'Hara. This has implications for government policy, in particular America's Social Security system. If the government took account of age inflation the retirement age would go up and the number of individuals eligible to receive benefits would go down. In a new study, Mr Shoven and Gopi Goda chart the effects:

Accounting for age inflation seems like a pretty good idea for a system under strain. But a large majority of Americans are (vehemently) opposed to raising the retirement age—it's considered the third rail by most politicians. Still, the idea of indexing for longevity—making automatic adjustment in the retirement age to reflect increases in life expectancy—has one important proponent. His name is Douglas Holt-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and the chief economic adviser to John McCain.

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