Looking forward to retirement? You better hurry before this fellow's idea catches on:
The age of retirement should be raised to 85 by 2050 because of trends in life expectancy, a US biologist has said. Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University says anti-ageing advances could raise life expectancy by a year each year over the next two decades.
That will put a strain on economies around the world if current retirement ages are maintained, he warned.
Dr. Tuljapurkar is right, of course. There's no reason to maintain economic structures designed around the demographic facts of life in the 1930s in an era in which those facts no longer obtain. We have to admit, though, that 85 sounds a bit extreme. We were expecting the retirement age to be raised to 67 - 70, at least for the near term.
