An extra

At Stanford University, economics professor John B Shoven put a different lens on his demographic telescope to explore the Big Shift that has occurred in ageing. He argues that age should be calculated not by years since birth, but years left to live. He has reconfigured the calendar of ageing, creating a long period of youth followed by shorter periods of middle age and old age.

Forget date of birth. You’re young if you have lower than a 1 per cent risk of dying within the year, Shoven explains. Women are 63 before they get to that point.

Sixty and young? He’s not exactly saying that 60 is the new 30. But according to his mortality risk measure, you aren’t old unless you have a 4 per cent risk, Shoven says. That’s a 1-in-25 chance of dying within the year, which could well translate into a lengthy old age. Today people don’t begin to get old until their 70s. Middle age — defined by a mortality risk between 1 and 4 per cent — doesn’t start for a man until he is 58.

In 1940, a man in his late 40s had the same mortality risk as a man in his late 50s today. A woman crossed the threshold into old age when she was in her late 60s. Today she would be in her late 70s.

The Extra Ten. Shoven’s mortality risk measure shows how the Wizard’s gift has reshaped the population, overturning traditional concepts of growing old and creating vast numbers of men and women who should now be considered young.

Look at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 67, the icon of Granny Glam. Look at the presidential candidates, a group of oldies, according to their birthdays. But not by the new age measure: Hillary Clinton, nearly 60, is a spring chicken. John McCain, 71, merely middle-aged. And recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data on life expectancy in the US: A child born in 2005 can expect to live for almost 78 years, an increase of about two years over children born a decade earlier.

It’s all good news, Shoven says. The end is still bad, but it’s being pushed out further. The Extra Ten are good years.

But the people grew wary of the gift and turned against ageing. A vast anti-ageing industry sprung up offering a range of products to turn back the clock looks. No one wanted to grow old. They worried about their future, what they would do in the Extra Ten, how they would support themselves, who would be there for them when they got sick.

Meanwhile, the politicians had fled the scene, fearing a tsunami of old folks washing over the land, bankrupting the treasury, overwhelming health care. They couldn’t see how to care for the sick or to tap the talents of the healthy in this older population.

Meanwhile, Shoven is trying to calm the populace. The dramatic increase in people older than 65 will not be a catastrophe because they will not be like 65-year-olds of yore. Today, people who are 65 or older have a 1.5 per cent mortality risk or higher. They account for 12.5 per cent of the population. In 2050, they will make up 21 per cent of the population — a big jump.

But if the Extra Ten is a gift that keeps on giving, only 14.8 per cent of the population will have a mortality risk of 1.5 per cent or higher — a relatively modest increase compared with today.

What’s more, there’s going to be a lot of people older than 65 whose mortality risk is less than 1.5 per cent. Are they old or not? I would say not, Shoven says.

Will anybody listen? Or will we squander the gift?