The FT's Martin Wolf has selected his best mid-year reads and has chosen The Longevity Imperative: Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives by London Business School's Professor Andrew J Scott as one of 18 top reads for economics scholars and followers of the FT this summer.
In the UK in 1965, the most common age of death was in the first year of life. Today the most common age to die is 87 years old. This startling statistic, writes Wolf, comes from Scott’s "superb book on what is arguably humanity’s greatest achievement — huge reductions in the probability of death among the young". This has opened up opportunities and challenges, writes Wolf, for both individuals and societies. "Scott, a professor at London Business School, rightly stresses the former. Our ability to live longer is a blessing, not a curse."
Earlier in the year, Mr Wolf wrote an opinion piece in the FT on ageing populations. In Increased longevity will bring profound social change, Wolf writes: "... the crucial point Scott makes [in his book] is that it also creates opportunities. We need to rethink old age, as individuals and societies. We must not shuffle a huge proportion of our society into unproductive and unhealthy “old age”. We can and must do far better, both individually and socially. This is his “imperative”. Barring a disaster, there are going to be far more very old people: in 1990, there were only 95,000 people over 100 years old in the world. Today, there are over half a million, and rising."
