Our communities are living longer than we did just a century ago. Health and technology are moving at incredibly fast rates enabling us to live well into our 80s, 90s, and beyond. In your new book, you talk about “The Super Age.” Tell us more about this new demographic.

 The Super Age is a novel period in human history when many of the world’s populations will be going over a tipping point where one out of five people will be over the age of 65. This is a first in all of our history. And it’s happened in a number of countries already– places like Japan, Germany, and Italy. By the end of this decade, 35 nations in total will become part of this club, including the United States.¹ So it’s a big dynamic shift. 

Because there will be more older people in the population, we’ll have to adapt some of our norms to meet them where they are. Because as we know, the prevalence of chronic disease in particular and age-related decline does happen more later in life. So it’s simply a numbers game at the end of the day.

Great innovation comes from conflict. The innovation that we’ve had up until this point has really focused on solving infant and youth mortality. We typically don’t look at the fact that this actually caused the global population to quadruple in size from about 2 billion people roughly in 1900 to just shy of 8 billion people today.² As we began to globalize, this explosion caused increases in the pool of labor all over the world, especially in the US and Europe. 

However, today the vast majority of the world does not have a replacement rate for their populations. In this century, the global population will stop growing, and we’ll start going into decline. It’s coming, and this will require us to have new workforce strategies.