USA: Retire at 85 to pay for living longer

LONDON (The Times), February 20, 2006: The world's largest general scientific society has been meeting in St Louis, Missouri THE development of anti-ageing therapies that significantly extend lifespan will lead to retirement ages needing to be raised as high as 85 by the middle of the century, scientists predicted yesterday. If medical advances increase the average age of death by 20 years by 2050, few countries’ economies will be able to cope without forcing people to work for much more of their lives. In countries such as Britain and the United States, the retirement age would have to rise to 85 to maintain today’s ratio of working people to the retired, while in Sweden, which has one of the highest current life expectancies, even this increase would be insufficient to maintain the status quo. The predictions come from a study led by Shripad Tuljapurkar, of Stanford University, in California, that compared how the US, Sweden, China and India would be affected by a dramatic growth in life expectancy. The study assumed that lifespans would increase in line with current trends until 2010, but that anti-ageing technologies would then become available that would prolong life much further. These drugs and therapies would cause mortality to decline five times faster than historical rates between 2010 and 2030, before normal service was resumed. Professor Tuljapurkar told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis, Missouri, yesterday that the projections intensified the need for governments to think creatively about how pensions systems might be managed in a world in which people routinely lived for much longer than they do today. “There are conflicts here between government analysts, who have recognised the problem, and the short-term nature of political decision-making,” he said. “Politicians tend to want to roll this problem over until after their terms of office, and the more this gets rolled over the worse it is going to get.” Professor Tuljapurkar said that the scenarios were realistic, based on the potential of new technologies such as stem cells to repair the damage associated with ageing and dramatically increase lifespans, though they do include an element of speculation. “Some people believe we are on the brink of being able to extend human lifespan significantly, because we’ve got most of the technologies we need to do it,” he said. A report by Adrian Gallop, the Government Actuary, recently predicted that by 2074 1.2 million Britons will live to the age of 100. A report from the think-tank Demos this month also urged the Government eventually to raise the retirement age to 80 or 90. By Mark Henderson Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.