The future of living longer – three key insights from the Longevity Forum

The extension of life expectancy is a uniquely positive trend for people and communities around the world – but the phenomenon of ageing populations also brings its own challenges. In November 2018 the Longevity Forum, founded by economics professor Andrew Scott and entrepreneur Jim Mellon, brought together experts from the fields of science and academia to help achieve ‘longer, healthier and more fulfilled lives for as many as possible’. Dani Saurymper and Peter Hughes, managers of AXA IM’s Longevity Economy strategy, attended this Forum – discover their three key takeaways below.

1. Progress towards longevity is increasing exponentially

For much of human existence, average life expectancy has lingered between the ages of 20-30 – as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. However the confluence of progress across both social and scientific fields has created a landmark shift over the last century.

US academic Laura Carstensen, from the Stanford Center for Longevity, illustrated this neatly with the fact that four million years of human progress produced just an 11-year increase in life expectancy from age 20 to 31, whereas the 115 years from 1900 to 2015 produced a 41-year increase (Source: UN Population Division, World Bank World Health Organisation). Cartensen also shared a breakdown of how life expectancies have evolved across key historical time periods, rising from just 18 in the bronze age to 79 in modern day America:

Source: Stanford Center on Longevity, courtesy of Laura Carstensen. Latest data available as at November 2018.

In fact, the current pace of progress in various fields of medicine, gerontology, healthcare etc. means that average human life expectancy is now increasing by one year every five years. What’s more, the overall quality of that life is improving – it is no longer about simply adding years to the end of your life, but rather to the middle.

2. Companies and governments must anticipate ‘step changes’ in longevity expectations

While this overall longevity progress looks smooth over the long term, it is worth looking at particular scientific or socioeconomic breakthroughs which have led to sudden increases in life expectancies. Such ‘step changes’ include germ theory or antibiotics, which revolutionised the field of medicine by unlocking the causes of disease and identifying readily-available cures respectively, significantly extending lifespans.

While companies and governments are better equipped to deal with slow, predictable or incremental changes in life expectancies, rapid changes can be unmanageable. For example, a sudden uptick in life expectancies could easily disrupt a previously-viable model for funding a population’s retirement costs, creating challenges on both a personal, national and global scale.

What the next ‘step change’ for longevity is remains unclear – but many are committed to finding it. For example the nascent field of senolytics seeks to develop drugs which can repair or retire cells showing signs of senescence – natural age-associated deterioration – in a bid to reverse the signs or impact of ageing.

It may also be the case that scientific progress has reached a point of smaller evolutions rather than leaping revolutions, but ultimately companies and governments must be cognisant of the potential challenges ahead.

3. Education and other lifestyle factors are crucial to understanding longevity

The Longevity Forum also explored the concept that education may be a better predictor of someone’s healthy lifespan than their actual age. While the link between life expectancy and education of course is just one aspect of a multi-factorial equation, there is some evidence that the lifestyle factors associated with different levels of education can have significant implications on not only how long people will live, but how much of that life they will be able to enjoy in good health.

Stanford’s Carstensen illustrated that the proportion of people with ‘functional limitations’ begins to vary markedly according to education level around the age of 40 – and this gap doesn’t begin to close until peoples’ 70s. Indeed, high-education groups see barely any decline in functional limitations until their 50s, at which point an approximate fifth of the low-education cohort has already reached a state of partial impairment.

Source: Stanford Center on Longevity, courtesy of Laura Carstensen. Latest data available as at November 2018.

The role of education is thus crucial in the development of people’s ‘multi-stage lives’, as the traditional model of frontloading education in the earliest years of one’s life becomes less relevant for the long term. Instead, we see many people eschewing traditional working models to change career multiple times, which requires re-training, a concept which one of the Forum’s founders, Andrew Scott, explores in-depth in his book ‘The 100-Year Life’, co-authored with Lynda Gratton.

Indeed another of the Forum’s speakers Lord Willetts commented that he believes more education uptake will occur in older adults, and we agree that this idea of lifelong learning could lead to people ‘un-retiring’ and re-entering the workforce at many different stages of their, increasingly long, lives.