America Is Getting Old. (How Old Is It Getting?)
Spoiler alert: super old.
I think that conceptually, most people understand that America is aging. The Baby Boomers are a huge generation, the Baby Boomers are getting old. Many of us have parents actively entering the twilight years of their lives. What I’m not sure people fully grasp, though, are a few interconnected points:
America’s population is, as of 2025, in the midst of an inflection point that launches a rapid aging curve the likes of which we have never seen before, with a peak around 2040;
This aging is not just about the size of the Boomer cohort, it’s also because (in a broadly positive development!!) Americans are living way longer. That also means we’re going to have way more “very old” people who live beyond age 85.
There is a meaningful difference between lifespan (the literal number of years you’re alive) and healthspan (the number of years you’re alive, active, and free of serious disease), and in the U.S. the gap is quite large; per the Mayo Clinic, “The U.S. recorded the world's highest average lifespan-healthspan divide, with Americans living 12.4 years on average with disability and sickness.”
There will be innumerable downstream effects of this aging on just about every social, political, and public policy issue you can think of — some of which present positive opportunities, many of which are going to be Problems.
We are not in any way — not even a little bit, not even if you squint — ready for this demographic change. (But we could be getting ready!)
I want to emphasize that America is about to get really, really, really old.
I know people respond to stories more than data, but indulge me while I hit you over the head with data for a minute. Since I’m sure you’re sleeping well with everything going on these days, here’s an infographic from a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article to help keep you up at night:
A few other statistics for your middle-of-the-night ruminations:
At the turn of the Millennium, slightly more than 1 in 10 Americans was over the age of 65. By 2040, it will be nearly 1 in 4.
By 2050, in aggregate numbers, the U.S. will have roughly the same number of people over the age of 85 as under the age of 5. (that ratio was about 1:5 in 2000)
I also want to pause here and say that this isn’t primarily a story about declining birth rates. It doesn’t help to have smaller birth cohorts coming behind large old-age cohorts, but this was going to be a problem even if the U.S. births were steadily at the 2.1 ‘replacement rate.’ While America isn’t going to be a young country anytime this century, the relative percentage of elders is projected to peak around 2040 (the peak roughly represents the point at which, sad to say, half of the Boomers will have passed away).
In fact, that’s one of the frustrating things about the aging discourse: we’ve seen this coming forever, yet like so many public policy cans, continually kicked the issue down the road. For example, here’s the May 1996 issue of The Atlantic:
The cover story, by Peter G. Peterson — not a random journalist, but a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and former CEO of Lehman Brothers — is revealing.1 He writes:
When we consider the great demographic shift that will shape our national future over the next fifty years, we are speaking not of a mere transition but of a genuine transformation. Just fifteen years from now the first batch of Baby Boomers will hit sixty-five, bringing changes -- economic, political, social, cultural, and ethical -- that will transform American society. This transformation will challenge the very core of our national psyche, which has always been predicated on fresh beginnings, childlike optimism, and aspiring new generations. How we cope with the cultural dimensions of this challenge I will leave to others -- to sociologists, political scientists, historians, and philosophers. I am none of these. I am a businessman who has long participated in public debates over the political economy of rising living standards. What concerns me most about America's coming demographic transformation is simply this: on our present course we won't be able to afford it.
Indeed, there seemed to be a brief window (perhaps opened by the otherwise prosperous economic conditions of the ‘90s) to think about what it meant for America to get old. This was the decade that saw a bipartisan commission on entitlement reform; there were multiple West Wing episodes centered around the future of Social Security. Alas, little durable action was taken. I was put in mind of those efforts when the news came out recently that Social Security is barreling toward insolvency even faster than previously thought.
Turns out at some point, you run out of road down which to kick the can.
I want to emphasize here, as Peterson did, that the economic implications are only one dimension — if perhaps the most obvious and easiest to grasp. There are myriad consequences for community infrastructure, state budgets, faith communities, even the development and application of technology.
The family consequences run deeper. As the HBR infographic shows, the elder care demand on caregivers is already tremendous, and a large number exist in the sandwich generation of caring for young children as well (plus an increasing number are also part of what has been called the “club-sandwich” generation, where great-grandparents are still alive as well).
Much of this is wonderful: how lovely that children get to know their great grandparents; how meaningful the experience of caring for a loved one in their later years can be. Yet in some ways, elder care is actually a more difficult challenge than child care: a child getting sick can throw you off your regular work schedule for a few days; an elderly parent falling and breaking their hip can require life rearrangement that stretches for months or years. And, as U.K. writer Emily Kenway explains in her book Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It, the work of elder care is simply harder to outsource and can be both physically and emotionally demanding: the day-to-day of caring for a toddler is no picnic, but a qualitatively different experience than bathing or changing the adult diaper of an infirm elder — particularly a parent who for so much of life was the one caring for you.
Ok, so population aging is a challenge. What now?
The HBR article the infographic comes from is entitled, “Your Company Needs an Eldercare Policy.” That may be fair, but my area of focus isn’t the private sector. I would argue that Your Policy Area Needs a Population Aging Strategy.
Take family policy. There are multiple angles here: population aging may call for renewed interest in intergenerational care facilities that combine child and elder care, a promising model but one that is “still so rare,” as an article this January put it. As Kathryn Anne Edwards has suggested, population aging may be a new arrow in the quiver in arguing for better public investment in child care, as we’ll arguably need a higher percentage of mothers in the labor force. Some version of social security caregiver credits sure seem like they should be higher on the priority list. This is also a good reason to stop taking such a myopic look at families: more child care subsidy may be great, but it’s not going to be a salve for a family that is going bankrupt or dealing with the acute stress of elder care.
You can see the intersections glowing by now, I hope. In an aging population, is the question merely affordable housing or affordable multigenerational-sized housing? How are we preparing the nation’s housing stock to support individuals ‘aging in place’ to the maximum extent possible/desired? When it comes to labor policy, items like banks of dependent care leave — separate from an employee’s personal sick leave — should likely be part of the conversation. From an environmental perspective, the elderly are deeply impacted by climate change-enhanced hazards, and our adaptation plans should reflect the fact that we’re going to have a lot, a lot, a lot of elderly people just as climate change effects are worsening.
You’ll note that one area I’m not talking about a whole lot in this piece is the elder care policy sector itself — as in, what are the policy and community responses that directly support elders and those who care for them. Part of that is because I’m still learning! There are some great organizations who take a broad, intergenerational view of care that I find valuable resources, such as the National Alliance for Caregiving and Caring Across Generations.
And in fact, as I close, I don’t want to pretend I’m the first person to figure out that hey, the population is getting real old and it seems like we’re not doing much to prepare. Obviously I’m not! But I do think this is an area where there is a yawning gap between the consequences and the amount of attention being paid. For instance, I can count on one hand the number of child care policy conversations I’ve had where population aging has come up. We need more people speaking up about it.
When Capita was starting to do work around the confluence of early childhood development and climate change, we frequently quoted the writer Alex Steffen’s line that climate change is not an issue but an era; it’s a context that surrounds everything and one cannot escape it. Population aging is like that. Either we’re going to do something about it, or we’re going to be forced to react once things have gotten real bad. And, like climate change, there are also real opportunities here to find a more humane and human path forward, not just for the elderly, but for all of us. That starts by reckoning with — really, truly reckoning, not just skimming over — how old America is going to get over the next 15 years.
While long, the whole piece is actually worth a read as a sort of missive from the past.