It occurrs to me that several transformations are taking place at the same time - cultural, technological, political and social. Through all this, one significant change is running through that has been decades in the making. That is more and more choices are being thrust upon individuals to manage their own lives.
For example, there used to be pensions - and they got offloaded to individuals.
Similarly, even though there may or may not be overall health care, individuals have to come to terms with how they want to be treated for diasabling conditions and aging.
The same with careers - the notion of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is long gone in the age of the gig economy. Dr. Joe Coughlin who is at the MIT AgeLab, in his recent book The Longevity Economy describes this transformation in vivid detail. Coughlin dismantles the "narrative" we have been using about old age: "Old age (as a concept) is made up. Most of it was invented by human beings for short-term, human purposes over the past century and a half. Today, we’re stuck with a notion of oldness that is so utterly at odds with reality that it has become dangerous. It constrains what we can do as we age, which is deeply troubling, considering that the future of our older world will naturally hinge on the actions of the older people in it."
However there does not appear to be a unifying framework for how all this comes together from an individual's perspective.
The idea of Whealth Span outlined below, is a play on the term Whealthcare coined by Dr. Jason Karlawish at the University of Pennsylvania. It is an attempt to pull together the threads hopefully into a unified whole.
Life Span
Our lives are increasingly getting longer. At the turn of the twentieth century people were living into their 50s and 60s. Now we are living into the 80s and 90s, a nearly 30 year increase in human life span. Demographers say that babies born today have a 1 in 3 chance of living up to one hundred years old.
I was at a gerontology conference recently and asked some genetic scientists how long a human being can last with today's knowledge of science and biology. The answer was a stunning 150 years old (not the average human mind you, but the extreme end of the normal distribution).
Health Span
While we are extending our life span, we have stumbled into an obvious issue. We are pretty much transferring the diseases of the young (which we have mostly cured) to the diseases of the aging.
And our functional capacity is declining. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control in the US, when we turn 85 years old the chances of going into steep cognitive decline or getting dementia is 1 in 3.
Now that we are living longer, we are finding that our health spans are not matching our life spans. Yet there are things we can do early on that can reduce the slope of that red arrow in the sketch above.
Things like education, exercise, healthy eating, socialization - all the things that have gotten into the zeitgeist these days will have the salutary effect of matching health spans with life spans.
Dr. Laura Carstensen who is the Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity has led a major study on what is happening to lifestyles of the aging population over several decades and paints a picture of the majority of the population going in the opposite direction.
Wealth Span
A super-super majority of us do not understand the power of compounding. Prof. Olivia Mitchell, the director of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton Business school in her famous paper shows that the average person gets the very basic arithmetic and concepts in finance totally wrong.
It is on this population that we are imposing the severe responsibility for saving for their own retirement.
Add to the notion that we are living longer and not healthy in the "bonus years", the fact that we will run out of money (governments will run out of money too!) the later part of life which can last a good two or more decades can be quite challenging to say the least.
Of course, there is no radical surgery, immediate solution for the challenge laid out above. However, as a human society, we can and must comes to terms with this as we all plow forward deepinto this 21st century.
Whealth Span
From the moment a child is born till the day we pass away, health and wealth should be integrated into our notion of life span.
Imagine if a retirement account is automatically opened along with the citizenship card for every child and nominal amount is put in there by the government and then friends and family are able to contribute to it (birthday gifts etc) until the child gets to working age. By the time they enter the workforce they would have had 20+ years of compounding that would have benefited them and give them a running start to saving for later years.
Every hour of investment in one's own health now might be lots of money that might have been spent on medical care or elder care in later years. The health care costs in later years dramatically increase with age. It is said that in the U.S. a dramatic percentage of entitlement spending is in the last few years of a person's life.
With this thought of an integrated view of one's life span, the question becomes:
Policy Makers: What systems, structures and incentives do law makers and policy makers put in place to help their citizens prepare early?
Educators: What types of health and financial literacy do educators instill in its students from a very early age?
Companies: What types of products and services can companies create that earn them a profit but keeps the population healthy?
Individuals: What sorts of habits and "best practices" do individuals adopt that will allow them to live the lives they want but don't create a situation where their current selves are putting obstacles and challenges for their future selves?
Summary
While the title Whealth Span is a play on that original catchy title Whealthcare, it is hopefully meant to spur and continue a conversation on what it means that we are in general living longer and how as a society and individuals we maximize our living potential throughout the ever expanding span.
For example, there used to be pensions - and they got offloaded to individuals.
Similarly, even though there may or may not be overall health care, individuals have to come to terms with how they want to be treated for diasabling conditions and aging.
The same with careers - the notion of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is long gone in the age of the gig economy. Dr. Joe Coughlin who is at the MIT AgeLab, in his recent book The Longevity Economy describes this transformation in vivid detail. Coughlin dismantles the "narrative" we have been using about old age: "Old age (as a concept) is made up. Most of it was invented by human beings for short-term, human purposes over the past century and a half. Today, we’re stuck with a notion of oldness that is so utterly at odds with reality that it has become dangerous. It constrains what we can do as we age, which is deeply troubling, considering that the future of our older world will naturally hinge on the actions of the older people in it."
However there does not appear to be a unifying framework for how all this comes together from an individual's perspective.
The idea of Whealth Span outlined below, is a play on the term Whealthcare coined by Dr. Jason Karlawish at the University of Pennsylvania. It is an attempt to pull together the threads hopefully into a unified whole.
Life Span
Our lives are increasingly getting longer. At the turn of the twentieth century people were living into their 50s and 60s. Now we are living into the 80s and 90s, a nearly 30 year increase in human life span. Demographers say that babies born today have a 1 in 3 chance of living up to one hundred years old.
I was at a gerontology conference recently and asked some genetic scientists how long a human being can last with today's knowledge of science and biology. The answer was a stunning 150 years old (not the average human mind you, but the extreme end of the normal distribution).
Health Span
While we are extending our life span, we have stumbled into an obvious issue. We are pretty much transferring the diseases of the young (which we have mostly cured) to the diseases of the aging.
And our functional capacity is declining. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control in the US, when we turn 85 years old the chances of going into steep cognitive decline or getting dementia is 1 in 3.
Now that we are living longer, we are finding that our health spans are not matching our life spans. Yet there are things we can do early on that can reduce the slope of that red arrow in the sketch above.
Things like education, exercise, healthy eating, socialization - all the things that have gotten into the zeitgeist these days will have the salutary effect of matching health spans with life spans.
Dr. Laura Carstensen who is the Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity has led a major study on what is happening to lifestyles of the aging population over several decades and paints a picture of the majority of the population going in the opposite direction.
Wealth Span
A super-super majority of us do not understand the power of compounding. Prof. Olivia Mitchell, the director of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton Business school in her famous paper shows that the average person gets the very basic arithmetic and concepts in finance totally wrong.
It is on this population that we are imposing the severe responsibility for saving for their own retirement.
Add to the notion that we are living longer and not healthy in the "bonus years", the fact that we will run out of money (governments will run out of money too!) the later part of life which can last a good two or more decades can be quite challenging to say the least.
Of course, there is no radical surgery, immediate solution for the challenge laid out above. However, as a human society, we can and must comes to terms with this as we all plow forward deepinto this 21st century.
Whealth Span
From the moment a child is born till the day we pass away, health and wealth should be integrated into our notion of life span.
Whealth Span = Life Span + Health Span + Wealth Span
Imagine if a retirement account is automatically opened along with the citizenship card for every child and nominal amount is put in there by the government and then friends and family are able to contribute to it (birthday gifts etc) until the child gets to working age. By the time they enter the workforce they would have had 20+ years of compounding that would have benefited them and give them a running start to saving for later years.
Every hour of investment in one's own health now might be lots of money that might have been spent on medical care or elder care in later years. The health care costs in later years dramatically increase with age. It is said that in the U.S. a dramatic percentage of entitlement spending is in the last few years of a person's life.
With this thought of an integrated view of one's life span, the question becomes:
Policy Makers: What systems, structures and incentives do law makers and policy makers put in place to help their citizens prepare early?
Educators: What types of health and financial literacy do educators instill in its students from a very early age?
Companies: What types of products and services can companies create that earn them a profit but keeps the population healthy?
Individuals: What sorts of habits and "best practices" do individuals adopt that will allow them to live the lives they want but don't create a situation where their current selves are putting obstacles and challenges for their future selves?
Summary
While the title Whealth Span is a play on that original catchy title Whealthcare, it is hopefully meant to spur and continue a conversation on what it means that we are in general living longer and how as a society and individuals we maximize our living potential throughout the ever expanding span.
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