London Business School's Professor Andrew Scott's new book, The Longevity Imperative, Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives, continues to attract significant attention and praise around the world.
The book has now been selected for the long list of this year's FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year. This news follows the FT's Chief Economics Commentator, Martin Wolf, selecting Professor Scott's book as one of 18 'Best Summer Books 2024: Economics'. The book has garnered attention from world-leading print and broadcast media, including articles and broadcast profiles in the FT, The Times, The Guardian, the BBC, MarketWatch and Dubai Eye.
In the book, which was released by publishers Basic Books at the beginning of the year, Professor Scott noted that for the first time ever, large numbers of the young and middle-aged can expect to live long enough to become old.
At the book's launch by LBS's Wheeler Institute in the spring of 2024, Professor Scott said that he wanted to “elevate longevity” and adjust our collective thinking towards a deeper consideration about the longer lives we are likely to lead and how longevity needs to be afforded the same gravitas as AI and climate change.
“It is absolutely a key individual and collective priority,” he said. “We hear a lot about AI and climate change and how we need to adapt to the future that those two forces will forge; we don’t however hear much about adapting to the priorities associated with the longer lives that many of us now lead. I want to impress upon you that longevity is just as important as the other two global issues of climate change and AI.”
He said that he is keen to “push aside” what he termed “the ageing society narrative”. “This is the familiar narrative where there are more old people and that is seen as a bad thing. It misplaces the emphasis on what we really need to discuss about how we need to lead better lives.”
Drawing on his academic and analytical training, Professor Scott said that he is compelled to investigate longevity because it touches on every aspect of human life. “I like to get grips with systems and the body of evidence that examines what is going on across the spectrum of human endeavour.”
“So many books have been written about longevity and the real challenge is to bring it all together in one discussion in a thematic way so that it will elevate it up there alongside the other big issues of our time.”
He further noted that there is a prevailing gloom about our ageing world, with protests in France last year over the rise in the state pension age. In Germany, the government is pushing through a major liberalisation of its immigration system because employers are urgent for staff. However, Professor Scott believes people, governments and societies can be too gloomy about ageing. What matters, he says, is not how long people live, but how well they age, “and that is something which can be change”.
“There is nothing more personal than life and death and the thing about this trend toward longer lives is that it has so completely transformed society it is about each and every one of our lives,” said Scott. “The familiar narrative is that older people are a burden, don’t work, get ill and become our dependents. We underestimate the capacity of older people and of our own later years.”
Economics as a discipline doesn’t help overly much to lift the mood, Scott maintains, referring to the “normal doom and gloom of economics”. “[The familiar story goes that] there are more old people. Old people don’t work. They get ill. They need a pension. This is a remarkably unhappy way of turning one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century into a 21st-century problem. We had fewer children dying. We had fewer parents snatched away in mid-life. More grandparents meeting grandchildren. And yet economists are now saying this is a big problem”.
One particularly odd facet of economics is that there is a focus on a chronological concept of age. But, maintains Scott, there are two other key concepts of age. “One is prospective age, which is how many years you’ve got to go. And if you think in simple economic terms, someone who is 50 with a life expectancy of 70 is very different from someone who is 50 with a life expectancy of 90. You have more incentive to invest in your future. Then, the other concept of age is biological age, which is just your health and how you’re ageing, and that’s very malleable. We can influence how we age, and we can see that in a variety of ways. We’ve all got friends who look good for their age. We all know if we eat better and exercise more, we age better. Then, there are huge social inequalities, which show us that ageing is something that society can influence. So, if you look at it from that longevity point of view, not in terms of time passed, but in terms of time to go, and the malleability of age, we can make the most of these longer lives and seize an advantage, but we have to focus on changing how we age. Whereas the ageing society story just looks at changes in the age structure, which is why it is kind of miserable.”
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be the book that offers the “most compelling and enjoyable insight” into business issues. The shortlisted titles will each receive £10,000. The 10 judges reserve the right to add further books to the longlist ahead of the announcement of the shortlist on September 17. The winner of the award will be announced on December 9. Read more about the award at www.ft.com/bookaward.
