Bradley Schurman on Super Aging and Ageism

Bradley Schurman

Demographic Futurist, Author: The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny

What would you eat all day, every day, if you could?

I love pizza more than anything else, but my body doesn't love it. Nothing packs on pounds like pizza, but I adore it.

What is the best gift you’ve given or received?

The gifts that I always love as a general rule are personal ones—gifts that have some deep meaning or that I can showcase in my home. So I love art. When folks give me art, either their own creation, something they've purchased or something that my family or my spouse picks up on a trip, I treasure it more than anything else.

Future perfect: Bradley Schurman on super aging

Demographic futurist, we didn't know that was a thing! What does it entail?

I mean, it's not a profession that people would choose necessarily, but it's in essence what I do. I analyze demographic data. One of the things our government, foreign governments and the UN does incredibly well is count people; it’s a legal requirement of our government to do it every 10 years. So because of that, the US is very data rich.

In capturing this data, I'm able to look at short-, medium- and long-term trends around birth and death. I can dig into the labor force participation rate, and look at long-term historical trends and overlay it with past behaviors (because they're always predictive of future behaviors), and make relatively reasonable predictions of what our future can look like as it relates to our population, our workforce, where people might be living.

Is it a perfect science? No. If anything has reminded me of how imperfect of a science it is, it's the pandemic. Because the pandemic really sped up a lot of things those of us in the space had expected to happen in eight to 12 years. These pain points around the economy, this tightening of the labor force. That was something we were looking forward to in 2030 or 2034. We expected companies to have better time to prepare for the departure of older workers from the workforce.

Instead, over the pandemic some people retired, while some have moved into entrepreneurial paths, small business ownership or the gig economy. So the larger labor market looks very different today than it did two years ago. It's tightened. And when you hear this conversation about The Great Resignation in particular, it's really a misread because what got us to this recalibration of the relationship between the employer and the employee was the departure of older people from the workforce—whether they chose to or were forced to leave. 

What is the Super Age?

The Super Age is a UN designation that I co-opted, but it was mostly a pejorative. There are three stages in the aging of society: aging, aged and super aged. The designations relate to a percentage—in this case it's 7%—of the population over the age of 65 for an aging country, 14% for an aged country and 20% for a super age country. And when you hit that last one-out-of-five mark, that's when you’re in a new reality for economies, because it's never happened before.

Countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, were at the tip of the spear, but the US will join another 34 countries in this group by the end of this decade. Perhaps the last stage is not aging so much as depopulation or population contraction; the countries are starting to shrink. Japan loses about half a million people a year. China's in contraction already—a first in the modern era. I don't think they're going to turn this one around. Typically, when countries ascend in economic wealth, they stop having babies at the same rate. Education and empowerment of women are perhaps the two greatest birth controls available; the need to have children at the same rate wanes. 

And children just aren't economic producers like they historically had to be, they're economic consumers; they take from a family’s resources. My grandfather was an economic contributor to his family by the age of 14. And that was late because in 1928, there were already labor laws in place that prohibited him from working when he was seven or eight years old, which would've been the norm at the time. But still, at 14 years old, he contributed to his family's survival.

Can you describe what you started seeing that let you know, hey, this is global and this is enormous?

My first window into this change came on my way between my adopted home in DC and my birth home in Pittsburgh about 25 years ago. In a tiny town called Breezewood, I saw this older man cleaning toilets at the rest stop and it was jarring. I thought, "Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. What's he doing?" He had to be about the same age as my grandparents. My grandfather and my grandmother had a lower-middle-class life, but they were able to retire into pretty good comfort.  He looked like my grandfather and it didn't jibe with me what he was doing there. So I became kind of fixated on it and I started digging into data to see if there was a reason he was still working.

The causal relationship I found was that over the course of the last century, there was a realignment in birth rates. We extended human life by solving for infant and youth mortality. We quadrupled the global population and we doubled the average life expectancy, and it wasn't something that was exclusive to the United States.

What became clear to me—it’s an essential part of my thesis—is that the rural counties, no matter where they are, are harbingers of the future. They show the worst effects of demographic change when they go unmanaged or unchallenged, and you see massive depopulation in some areas. It’s a society that's incredibly old, incredibly poor, at least in this country, and mostly white. And as things heated up during the 2016 election, it became abundantly clear just how much power these older, poor, white communities had in an election. And not to be political, but just talking numbers here. The popular candidate won by 3 million votes, yet lost the election. Rural states hold an incredible amount of power here, and in Japan, Argentina and Australia as well—and all four of these places are struggling with politics and social cohesion right now.

With this insight in mind, how are you seeing this aging population evolving?

Whether you call them modern elders, the super ages or the middle plus, this population doesn’t want the AARP. They want to chart their own path. It's no different than what the boomers did in the 1950s and 1960s, emerging as a new cultural and economic force. Now they’re the tip of the spear. People like us, we're with them on this. We don't want to be dependent on social security at 65. F that. I mean, I'm just not interested in stopping at 65. I hate being sick. I'm a terrible patient. The thought of being in proactive decline for a long period of time. Ugh. No, thanks. When it's time to go, I want to go. I talk about that in the book, this new era of innovation is focused on compressing morbidity and enhancing and extending healthy years—that's something we should all be psyched about.

A picture's worth a thousand words; a meme is worth, what, 10,000. There’s one floating around with “The Golden Girls”and the cast of the “Sex and the City” reboot—and they're the same age. Remove the fact that “The Golden Girls” was a masterfully written show while “And Just Like That” is not. You look at the two groups of women side-by-side and it's puzzling. Because the cast of “The Golden Girls” lived a long life. But getting old or presenting as old happened a lot sooner. There's now a rejection of the forced stereotype—"Well, I’ll get my cardigan on and my high-waisted pants and my thick readers from the pharmacy, and totter around.” That's not what we want to do. Human beings are pack animals—we're tribal people. We want to maintain our part in the community.

What we did in the mid-century, forcing older people out of the workforce, out of our communities, into retirement homes, was terrible both from a commercial standpoint (unless you were the few that profited off it) and from a social standpoint. I often lament that when I entered the workforce in the '90s, there was the lowest concentration of older workers in the workforce ever. It was around 14% of people over the age of 65 in the '90s. It's come up a bit since then. But I was robbed of mentorship, that older person in their 60s or 70s who could show me the way within the workforce. Most of my peers were in their 30s or early 40s; no one had that deep experience to share.

That equation doesn't make sense anymore. Workers across generations desperately want flexibility at work and they want their employers to support them in their personal lives. Because now, especially if you're a knowledge worker, your personal life and your work life are blurred. You are literally working out of your home for at least part of the week. Because that's bled in, I think it's natural for an employee to say, "Well, can you support me a little bit here? I need to get away to take care of my kids or take care of my parents/myself/my spouse." Employers haven't listened to that call quite so well yet. There are obviously going to be some stars and some black holes, but those who adapt quickly will reap the greatest benefits of this new period.

If you were sitting in a room with any CEO of any major corporation right now (as you often are), what's one thing you would tell them to do based on the conclusions of your book?

The first thing has to be around retention and recruitment of workers, because this new era is going to be really difficult for employers to get the talent they want and need. They're certainly not going to be able to get it at the price that they had before, and they're going to have to give up something around benefits. But the easiest way to smooth this transition right now is to engage older workers, get them in.

You have to tackle a lot of bias, often hidden in recruitment, because if an older worker leaves the workforce, it takes them twice as long to get back in and they usually earn half as much. So provide pathways to get that experience in and throw out this notion that people can be overqualified. That makes no sense to me at all. If people have more skills than others, I say bring them to me. I don't want somebody who's a middle level of skill development, I want somebody who's got all of it. Years of experience, especially if it's good experience.

You talk about ageism sort of being the only bias we all actively engage in. What are we failing to do about it? Is it just calling it out and making people aware or is it structural?

Ageism is a funny bias. That’s why it's hard to define and attack. No one is born old. We kind of slide into old age and an ageist perspective is completely dependent upon how other people see us. I think the important thing is always, what can I do to take on some responsibility to break stereotypes at every corner. For example,

stop saying that because you forgot something, you are having a senior moment. I've lost my keys for 40 years, that's not something new. I've never been able to find my keys.

Think about the value our society places on people who remain fit, digitally connected, contributing. Look at ways you can continue to do those things. Tackle ageism as an individual first within your own heart, in your own mind. And then call it out.

But let's be clear here. Not everything is ageist. It's really easy to say things are ageist, but not everything is. If we continue to point fingers and say, "That's ageist,” it actually dilutes what's happening and where the real problem areas are. Because not everything can be ageist, but everyone is, if that makes sense.

It’s clear from your book that you are an optimist. One of your more interesting conclusions is that we not only need to innovate but also to better utilize what we already have. What is the opportunity that demographics are dealing us? Beyond the myriad problems, what is exciting?

There are a couple answers. The first is that a lengthening of life creates new and varying consumer groups. If you're a business, this is a really exciting period of time because you don't necessarily just have to focus on youth. You can be inclusive of all generations and all market segments. You can capture a bigger piece of the pie. I also think from an environmental standpoint, population contraction is a good thing. There are too many of us on the planet today. And if we take some of that pressure off, that will help heal this place, maybe help combat climate change.

With this realignment, we went from a pyramid with large numbers of kids at the bottom and fewer older people at the top, to kind of trapezoidal, where each generation has equal responsibility and measure in society. There's a lot of opportunity with that, to build a place that's more equitable to a larger group of people. Having older people around builds empathy. We’ve often looked at older populations as disposable. Now we're seeing that populations are staying cooler, connected consumers for long periods of time. This idea that 65 is just a stopping point—it's just a starting point. And that's exciting. I love the fact that I'm going to get to live a couple more lives, have a couple more careers. That gives me the most hope for my own future.

I hate to boil it down to such simple terms, but a lot of this is culture change. We've had 15,000 years of human history with a consistently inconsistent approach to older populations. Then we live through the past century where we created consumer culture from the ground up. This consumer culture was fundamentally ageist; it created problems for people to solve. Within the beauty industry, one of the first created problems was middle-aged skin for women. I mean, is that a problem? They made it one. But change will come. I remain positive about it because from an economics 101 perspective, ignoring older populations is not sustainable for business.