The Longevity Economy is Already Here
Life expectancy in the United States has actually dropped in the last few years. Here's the real story behind the puzzling numbers.
… it’s just not evenly distributed.
That’s a play on a quote from author William Gibson who said, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” It’s a sentiment with multiple layers.
From Gibson’s standpoint as an author of science fiction, he maintains that he doesn’t write about the future. He’s trying to get us to understand the present.
There’s a more literal take on the line as well. Futurists will tell you that the trends that will become mainstream are already out there at the edges. For the last several years, this has included technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and 3D printing.
In the context of his famous quote, Gibson opined on an aspect of the longevity economy directly:
Consider the health options available to a millionaire in Beverly Hills as opposed to a man starving in the streets in Bangladesh.
The man in Beverly Hills can, in effect, buy himself a new set of organs. I mean, when you look at that sort of gap, the man in Bangladesh is still human. He’s a human being from an agricultural planet. The man in Beverly Hills is something else. He may still be human, but he, in some way, I think he is also posthuman. The future has already happened.
While it may seem like more science fiction, bioethicists worry that coming age-reversal treatments may be only affordable by the very rich. In the United States, however, the longevity and healthspan gap is very real right now.
It doesn’t necessarily come down to those who have money versus those who don’t, though. In many ways, it’s cultural.
The U.S. Life Expectancy Conundrum
If you’ve been reading Longevity Gains and are otherwise intrigued, you may be troubled by recent news about life expectancy in the United States. In short, life expectancy in America has dropped for a second year in a row – down to 76 years.
Life expectancy around the world decreased in 2020 due to COVID-19. Countries worldwide saw life expectancy go back up after the arrival of vaccines, but in the U.S., it did not.
How can we be entering a period of economic power for older adults when citizens of one of the world’s wealthiest nations are actually dying younger? The key is to take a closer look at how “life expectancy” is determined while also challenging the notion of a “United” States.
By definition, life expectancy is based on an estimate of the average age that members of a particular population group will be when they die. Given that we’re dealing with an average number, it doesn't really reflect how long older people live. In fact, very few people will actually die at age 76, or whatever expectancy number we may have at any given time.
When it comes to lifespan, as opposed to the statistical average that determines life expectancy, some percentage of humans have always lived into their later years. The difference now is more people make it to “old” because fewer people die young.
The biggest component of the remarkable increase in life expectancy over the last 120 years is a massive decrease in child mortality. But that’s not all, as fewer people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties died as well. That’s why if you survive to age 65, you’re statistically likely to make it into your mid-eighties.
We know COVID-19 disproportionately impacted older people when it came to fatalities. But you may be surprised to learn that once the pandemic is accounted for, the continued drop in U.S. life expectancy is from deaths of people under 50, with an alarming return of higher child mortality rates than other wealthy nations., with gun violence being the leading cause of death among children and teens.
The American diet definitely puts the U.S. at a disadvantage compared with other countries, especially when it comes to cardiometabolic conditions — a category that includes diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. But so do drug overdoses, gun violence, suicide, car crashes, acute alcoholism, and a lack of universal healthcare.
Contrary to what you may think, having a higher income doesn’t necessarily protect you from an early death in the United States. Statistically, wealthier Americans are less healthy than their well-off counterparts in other countries.
Disturbing findings, for sure. But now we need to examine what it actually means to speak in terms of averages in a population as diverse as the United States. For this, a graphical representation speaks volumes.
As you can see, when it comes to life expectancy, there is no “United” States. In some areas of the country, life expectancy meets or exceeds that of Japan, the world leader in longevity. In others, life looks much like it did in the 1930s when Social Security assumed you wouldn’t collect benefits for long, if at all.
The map clearly mirrors a concentration of one of the core issues, with the five most obese states being West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Beyond that, there are many root causes for the national divergence in life expectancy, including political, cultural, and educational.
The longevity economy is already here in the United States. It’s just not evenly distributed.
Healthspan is All About Education
One thing the United States does well is keep you alive after 75, assuming you have access to healthcare. But it’s important to once again distinguish between lifespan and healthspan because it’s the latter that matters most for our purposes.
While definitions vary, healthspan is most commonly expressed as the time that a person is free from the serious diseases that are leading causes of death, such as heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer.1
The number of years one lives means very little if decades are spent seriously disabled and in and out of the hospital. But that’s not really what we’re talking about. An increase in healthy life expectancy (another way of saying healthspan) will drive the longevity economy well beyond elder care and end-of-life solutions.
According to Susan Golden of the Stanford Center for Longevity, the key determinant of healthspan is a person's level of education, not income. In fact, education predicts long-term health outcomes more than any other factor.
Of course, education and income are also highly correlated, so we can’t ignore this aspect – especially when it comes to purchasing power. But the point is that treating older adults as one giant group above a certain age is as ridiculous as thinking the “United” States is one big homogeneous cohort.
In other words, there is no such thing as a “silver” or “gray” market based on age alone. Smart segmentation is the key to winning in any market. Yet, for some reason, the idea has historically gone out the window when most businesses consider dealing with older people.
Some of these older adults are already “younger” than their chronological age and need to be treated accordingly with differing products and messages. So as a starting point, identifying and speaking to healthy agers is a core function of any marketing strategy aimed at viable older people.
For obvious reasons, the financial services industry has been at the forefront of attempting to segment by healthspan. Some planners have adopted a five-phase approach to describing functionality and health, developed by the Gerontological Society of America:
Go-go: excellent health, active, few or no limitations
Go-slow: very good health, some self-limiting situations
Slow-go: good health; needs assistance with activities of daily living
Slow-slow: fair health; limitations on their activities of daily living
No-go: physical and mental conditions that require advanced care in senior nursing or assisted living facilities
This framework is a good start to developing different messages for functionally different people based on varying levels of healthspan. The next logical step is a deeper dive into the kind of values, attitudes, and lifestyles that led these people to embrace healthy aging behaviors while others do not.
As we’ve discussed, the overall opportunity of the longevity economy is across the board of products and services, not just a concentration in certain market segments. And yet, at this point, every business serving older people is in the healthspan business, one way or another.
Healthspan is the Longevity Economy Catalyst
Given the magnitude of the demographic shift we’re experiencing and the years we’ve known it was coming, remarkably few people among the general population understand what’s happening. And if you asked them to guess what the “longevity economy” is all about, they’d likely tell you about the health and wellness information industry dedicated to living a longer, healthier life.
There are scores of books, magazines, newsletters, videos, and podcasts dedicated to longevity, often offering dubious supplements and other shady solutions to living longer and healthier lives. And yet, the consumers of this information are often already among the more highly educated. The data related to higher healthspan reveals that one generally needs a baseline of knowledge to have an interest in healthy aging to begin with.
What’s largely missing, though, are the logical consequences of living a longer, healthier life. And that’s where the seismic shifts in retirement, an expanded midlife, and a general restructuring of society also become topics for education.
For example, at Further, we cover health, wealth, and personal growth for people at midlife. While the health aspect of getting older is obviously important, we know that economic and career issues are of primary concern to our audience, whether that be tied to efforts for a traditional retirement or simply trying to remain economically viable in a rapidly changing world. And given the shift in priorities that happens after age 50, we know that an examination of meaning, purpose, and self-actualization has to be part of the work equation.
Education that helps more people pursue a longer healthy life expectancy is the baseline catalyst for the longevity economy. And that opens up a plethora of other issues that need to be explored and addressed, with related demand for products and services that are entirely new.
While education determines healthspan, longer healthy life expectancy creates demand for even more education. The current assumption that “education” means the initial twenty or so years of life spent in school will finally give way to lifelong learning, or in this case, “long life” learning.
As we approach the reality of a perpetual learning society, the opportunity to lead in the longevity economy will come from a different form of education – marketing in the form of instructive, motivating, and enlightening content. As we’ll explore, developing “customers for life” will take on a whole new meaning, especially in the realm of assisting those at the “new midlife” with transitional tools that set them up to win in the second half.
Golden, Susan Wilner. Stage (Not Age) (p. 22). Harvard Business Review Press.
Great post. Valuable distinctions.
Great post. I appreciate the thorough distinctions. The desire to keep learning should not be underestimated. It's a powerful motivator for longevity often despite other factors.