news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4726300.stm
Printable version Retirement age 'will rise to 85' By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter, St Louis The age of retirement should rise to 85 by 2050 because of trends in life expectancy, a leading biologist has said. He says anti-aging technologies could contribute to a significant increase in longevity over the next two decades. But the rise in life expectancy will bring with it significant challenges, he warns. Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University in California was speaking at a conference in St Louis, US. "People are going to do things they didn't get round to in their working lives. Current institutions are really not equipped at the moment to deal with such long lives," he said. "We are going to have to plan a lot more carefully, which people are not very good at." Lifestyle trends The Stanford researcher has been looking at relationships between historical trends in aging, population growth and economic activity. Based on this, he came up with a scenario in which anti-aging technologies will increase the most common age of death by one year per year between 2010 and 2030. Dr Tuljapurkar then applied this scenario to four countries: the US, China, Sweden and India. In the US the cost of social security and medical care would almost double if people retired at 65 He found that his projected trends in life expectancy would have profound effects on the economy, lifestyle and population demographics. "It might be possible to go through two mortgages, for example, or even have 50-year or 75-year mortgages," Dr Tuljapurkar explained. In the US, the cost of social security and medical care would almost double if people retired at 65 under Tuljapurkar's scenario. But an increase in the retirement age to 85 would bring costs down to today's levels. However these trends would also create a "permanent underclass" of countries where opportunities for increased life expectancy were not the same as in the industrialised world. "We can't even get retrovirals to some countries now," he told journalists. Dr Tuljapurkar was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis.
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