“What we have is a fundamental change in the age structure of society,” says John Rowe, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Aging Center, referring to the way we’re aging—and also the way we’re creating young people, with birth rates plummeting in most countries. Globally, fertility levels have dropped below the so-called population replacement rate of just over two births per woman.
It is a sea change—and one that raises big questions about how we both individually and collectively navigate what, in a sense, is our new old age. How, for example, should we spend our extra time? Should employment still be confined to a finite number of years, or instead ebb and flow throughout an entire lifetime? And where, in a world of acute housing shortages, will everyone live?
Boomers Daily 