The world is seeing populations growing older now — the elderly should increase their labour supply instead of retiring earlier: Ronald D. Lee
Ronald D. Lee is Director of the Center on Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he outlines work, health and wealth in a world that is maturing:
Q. What is the core of your research?
I am interested in the web of connections among people of different ages — these include economic connections which are mostly outside the market, such as in the family or public sector, and how those get affected by changes in population age.
Parents rearing children, supporting their elderly parents or helping friends look after relations also involves working people who are paid, public pensions, social services, healthcare, education, etc. These are flows of income across ages outside the market — around half of GDP is redistributed in these ways.
Q. What is the field of evolutionary biodemography?
A.
This means different things for different species — my focus on humans here is how altruistic social behaviour and sharing of resources across age groups evolved through natural selection among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, how this is consistent with individual interest and how this shaped other aspects of our lives, like how long we live once we’re done reproducing after, say, 50 years, etc. I study these behaviours and how they influence fertility, the age of economic maturity, etc.
Q. Older groups are growing globally — but is this happening uniformly?
A.
Different regions are growing older at different speeds — this depends mostly on when fertility declines and how far. Europe and East Asia are ageing the fastest — they had earlier fertility declines which were very rapid in East Asia. This will happen much later in this century in sub-Saharan Africa while
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