The "Impending Demographic Crisis"?

John Shoven argues we should raise the Social Security retirement age to solve the "impending demographic crisis":

The Truth About Aging Boomers' Effect on Our Economy, by John B. Shoven, Foreign Policy and Alternet: There is a looming catastrophe stalking the developed world. It promises to devastate the global economy, overwhelm hospitals... What is the calamity... It's the aging of the world's baby boomers, the coming tidal wave of senior citizens who will live longer, consume more, and produce less, seriously challenging societies' ability to care for their graying ranks.

At least that's how the dire warnings generally sound. Alarming forecasts bombard us about an impending demographic crisis in the United States, Europe, Japan, and even China that will reshape the way we live and work. ... The fiscal burden of supporting this rapidly expanding segment of the global population not only threatens to bankrupt national healthcare systems..., but also revolutionize electoral politics, with political clashes no longer governed by right versus left, but young versus old.

If it sounds distressing, it shouldn't. The gloomy projections are deeply flawed. The reason lies in the misleading way in which we measure age. Typically, a person's age has been determined by the number of years since his or her birth. ... Thanks to the medical revolutions of the past century, however, life expectancies have been radically prolonged. Since 1960, the average Chinese person's life span has increased by 36 years. Over roughly 40 years, South Koreans have seen their lifetimes extended by an average of 24 years, Mexicans by 17 years, and the French by nearly a decade. Given these drastic changes, our conception of what qualifies as "old" has itself become old-fashioned.

Measuring age by years since birth is just as foolish as using the dollar as a timeless unit of value. ... Just as with the dollar, it is time to introduce inflation-adjusted ages as a superior method for measuring age. The best replacement gauge is mortality risk, or the chance a person has of dying within the next year. The higher the mortality risk, the "older" a person is. It's a measurement that reflects a much more accurate picture of a person's health, likely productivity, and remaining life expectancy.

When the U.S. Social Security system was designed seven decades ago, the 65-year mark was deemed the moment when Americans moved "beyond the productive period" and into dependency. That age was chosen based on mortality risk: a 65-year-old man in 1940 could expect to live an additional 11 years, a 65-year-old woman another 15 years. But medical advances have shifted mortality risks enormously. ...

The implications are significant: The magnitude of the elderly wave that demographic forecasters have predicted is, in reality, far smaller. Forecasts today tell us that the fraction of the population over the age of 65 will grow enormously. But consider what would happen if we replaced the 65-year marker with a mortality risk measurement that governs who is considered "elderly." In 2000, 12.4 percent of the U.S. population was over the age of 65... By 2050, only ... about 15 percent of the population ... will have a mortality risk greater than 1.5 percent. That's hardly a demographic tidal wave. The global outcomes are similarly striking: A mortality-based measurement lowers the projected elderly population in 2050 in Japan, Spain, and Italy by an average of 30 percent.

Just consider the consequences of altering the age when entitlement benefits kick in or retirement becomes mandatory to these new inflation-adjusted measurements. It doesn't mean shortening retirements, just stabilizing them. In 20th-century America, the average length of retirement grew from two years to more than 19 years. As life expectancies continue to rise, retirements will continue to get longer -- and the pension bill far larger. If benefits and retirements are governed by mortality risk instead of age, the costs will be far more manageable. ...

Three comments. First, there is no guarantee that the ability to work and lead a productive life expands at the same rate as life expectancy (e.g., if most of the extension in life expectancy in the future comes from expensive interventions toward the end of life rather than improvements in health during, say, the late 60s, that make working easier then there would be no reason to extend the retirement age). It would be better to define retirement in terms of the minimum of these two concepts, the time at which the typical person can no longer be expected to work full-time on a typical job that may have physical demands, and the life expectancy adjusted retirement age discussed above. But that is not the main objection. A second issue is that Social Security is not the entitlement problem we should worry about, that title belongs to Medicare where costs are expected to increase rapidly in the future. And the problem with Medicare costs brings up the third issue, demographic change is not the driving force behind rising healthcare costs (e.g., see this article from the CBO, "The rate at which health care costs grow relative to national income—rather than the aging of the population—will be the most important determinant of future federal spending."). Most projections see large increases in health care costs in the future, but the main problem is not from the growth of the elderly population. Even if the population remained stationary, costs would still be expected to escalate rapidly.