The Longevity Imperative

The Longevity Imperative (cover)

Scott, Andrew J. The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives. First U.S. edition. New York: Basic Books, 2024.

I’ve been following Prof. Scott’s work for some time and was glad when The Longevity Imperative was published as it provides an overview of the demographic change we’re in the midst of.  While discussions about aging populations often frame demographic shifts as a crisis to be managed, particularly in policy and business forums, what’s refreshing about Prof. Scott’s work, and this book in particular, is that we can also frame this demographic shift as an opportunity.

The book covers all topics one would expect: aging as a consequence of improved medical care, the challenge of funding retirement, and so on. However, Prof. Scott takes a novel approach by structuring the book into three sections that reframe these challenges as opportunities for societal transformation.

The first part, A New Imperative, sets the scene by exploring how we age and how we’ve progressively addressed the causes of early death. Scott introduces four metaphors for humanity’s possible aging trajectories. The Struldbrugg path (from Jonathan Swift) represents our current trajectory—living longer but still experiencing degrading health, essentially prolonging the period of decline. The “Picture of Dorian Gray” scenario envisions dying young at an old age. The “Peter Pan” metaphor represents slowing down aging itself, while the “Wolverine” scenario imagines finding ‘cures’ for aging’s problems through regeneration. Currently, medical advances have pushed us toward the Struldbrugg path—we’re living longer but haven’t solved the fundamental challenges of aging itself.

The second part explores Building an Evergreen Economy. What if we could push out frailty as well as death? This would result in something like the Peter Pan scenario where we have a long youth followed by a quick decline and death. The implication is that we would be productive for longer in our lives, increasing the area under the productivity curve and resulting in much greater lifetime productivity. This is the opportunity—what could we do with this increase in lifetime productivity? Could we redistribute this productivity across our lifespans? Could we take, for example, some of the productivity in our later years and use it to support working families? The current demographic debate is focused funding ever longer retirements, as we assume that old age starts at a fixed point and that the aged are no longer productive. Neither of these assumptions are true anymore.

The final part, Delivering an Evergreen Society, explores how we might access this opportunity. This is not a problem only for the aged, as people at all ages need to consider where they are in the journey and how they might live in the later years. The current intergenerational debate looks short-sighted through this lens. The 30 year old railing against the Boomers, for example, is not considering what they’ll be doing at a similar age, given that their life expectancy will be even longer. (Will they be an even larger burden?) One of the surprises, late in this part, was that the aging of society is not creating a gerontocracy. Instead, it’s fostering age equality. With more of us living longer than ever, older adults are actually underrepresented in government. This raises interesting questions on representation, voting power, how we fund retirement, the shape of a career, in this new longevity landscape.

If I was to critique The Longevity Imperative, it’s that Scott could have made a stronger case for the opportunities presented by demographic change. While his careful academic approach thoroughly documents the complexities of longevity trends, a more forceful argument for seizing these opportunities might have strengthened the book’s impact. However, this measured and thoughtful approach reflects the methodical research that led Scott to uncover these opportunities in the first place, and ultimately serves to make his conclusions more credible.

Highly recommended.