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period of socially mandated fecklessness—what Leon Kass, the chair of the
President's Council on Bioethics, has decried as the coming culture of
"protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license." In Japan, ever in
the demographic forefront, as many as one out of three young adults is either
unemployed or working part-time, and many are living rent-free with their
parents. Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Tokyo Gakugei University, has
sarcastically dubbed them parasaito shinguru, or "parasite singles." Adult
offspring who live with their parents are common in aging Europe, too. In
2003 a report from the British Prudential financial-services group awarded
the 6.8 million British in this category the mocking name of "kippers"—"kids
in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings."

To Kass, the main cause of this stasis is "the successful pursuit of longer
life and better health." Kass's fulminations easily lend themselves to
ridicule. Nonetheless, he is in many ways correct. According to Yuji Genda,
an economist at Tokyo University, the drifty lives of parasite singles are
indeed a by-product of increased longevity, mainly because longer-lived
seniors are holding on to their jobs. Japan, with the world's oldest
population, has the highest percentage of working senior citizens of any
developed nation: one out of three men over sixty-five is still on the job.
Everyone in the nation, Genda says, is "tacitly aware" that the old are
"blocking the door."

In a world of 200-year-olds "the rate of rise in income and status perhaps
for the first hundred years of life will be almost negligible," the crusty
maverick economist Kenneth Boulding argued in a prescient article from 1965.
"It is the propensity of the old, rich, and powerful to die that gives the
young, poor, and powerless hope." (Boulding died in 1993, opening up a
position for another crusty maverick economist.)

Kass believes that "human beings, once they have attained the burdensome
knowledge of good and bad, should not have access to the tree of life."
Accordingly, he has proposed a straightforward way to prevent the problems of
youth in a society dominated by the old: "resist the siren song of the
conquest of aging and death." Senior citizens, in other words, should let
nature take its course once humankind's biblical seventy-year lifespan is up.
Unfortunately, this solution is self-canceling, since everyone who agrees
with it is eventually eliminated. Opponents, meanwhile, live on and on. Kass,
who is sixty-six, has another four years to make his case.

Increased longevity may add to marital strains. The historian Lawrence Stone
was among the first to note that divorce was rare in previous centuries
partly because people died so young that bad unions were often dissolved by
early funerals. As people lived longer, Stone argued, divorce became "a
functional substitute for death." Indeed, marriages dissolved at about the
same rate in 1860 as in 1960, except that in the nineteenth century the
dissolution was more often due to the death of a partner, and in the
twentieth century to divorce. The corollary that children were as likely to
live in households without both biological parents in 1860 as in 1960 is also
true. Longer lifespans are far from the only reason for today's higher
divorce rates, but the evidence seems clear that they play a role. The
prospect of spending another twenty years sitting across the breakfast table
from a spouse whose charm has faded must have already driven millions to
divorce lawyers. Adding an extra decade or two can only exacerbate the
strain.

Worse, child-rearing, a primary marital activity, will be even more difficult
than it is now. For the past three decades, according to Ben J. Wattenberg, a
senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, birth rates around the
world have fallen sharply as women have taken advantage of increased
opportunities for education and work outside the home. "More education, more
work, lower fertility," he says. The title of Wattenberg's latest book,
published in October, sums up his view of tomorrow's demographic prospects:
Fewer. In his analysis, women's continuing movement outside the home will
lead to a devastating population crash—the mirror image of the population
boom that shaped so much of the past century. Increased longevity will only
add to the downward pressure on birth rates, by making childbearing even more
difficult. During their twenties, as Goldstein's quasi-adults, men and women
will be unmarried and relatively poor. In their thirties and forties they
will finally grow old enough to begin meaningful careers—the worst time to
have children. Waiting still longer will mean entering the maelstrom of
reproductive technology, which seems likely to remain expensive, alienating,
and prone to complications. Thus the parental paradox: increased longevity
means less time for pregnancy and child-rearing, not more.

Even when women manage to fit pregnancy into their careers, they will spend a
smaller fraction of their lives raising children than ever before. In the mid
nineteenth century white women in the United States had a life expectancy of
about forty years and typically bore five or six children. (I specify
Caucasians because records were not kept for African-Americans.) These women
literally spent more than half their lives caring for offspring. Today U.S.
white women have a life expectancy of nearly eighty and bear an average of
1.9 children—below replacement level. If a woman spaces two births close
together, she may spend only a quarter of her days in the company of
offspring under the age of eighteen. Children will become ever briefer
parentheses in long, crowded adult existences. It seems inevitable that the
bonds between generations will fray.

Purely from a financial standpoint, parenthood has always been a terrible
deal. Mom and Dad fed, clothed, housed, and educated the kids, but received
little in the way of tangible return. Ever since humankind began acquiring
property, wealth has flowed from older generations to younger ones. Even in
those societies where children herded cattle and tilled the land for their
aged progenitors, the older generation consumed so little and died off so
quickly that the net movement of assets and services was always downward. "Of
all the misconceptions that should be banished from discussions of aging," F.
Landis MacKellar, an economist at the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis, in Austria, wrote in the journal Population and Development
Review in 2001, "the most persistent and egregious is that in some simpler
and more virtuous age children supported their parents."

This ancient pattern changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when
government pension and social-security schemes spread across Europe and into
the Americas. Within the family parents still gave much more than they
received, according to MacKellar, but under the new state plans the children
in effect banded together outside the family and collectively reimbursed the
parents. In the United States workers pay less to Social Security than they
eventually receive; retirees are subsidized by the contributions of younger
workOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that in
2000 the overall dependency ratio in the United States was 21.7 retirees for
every 100 workers, meaning (roughly speaking) that everyone older than
sixty-five had five younger workers contributing to his pension. By 2050 the
dependency ratio will have almost doubled, to 38 per 100; that is, each
retiree will be supported by slightly more than two current workers. If
old-age benefits stay the same, in other words, the burden on younger
workers, usually in the form of taxes, will more than double.

This may be an underestimate. The OECD analysis did not assume any dramatic
increase in longevity, or the creation of any entitlement program to pay for
longevity care. If both occur, as gerontological optimists predict, the
number of old will skyrocket, as will the cost of maintaining them. To adjust
to these "very bad fiscal effects," says the OECD economist Pablo Antolin,
one of the report's co-authors, societies have only two choices: "raising the
retirement age or cutting the benefits." He continues, "This is arithmetic—it
can't be avoided." The recent passage of a huge new prescription-drug program
by an administration and Congress dominated by the "party of small
government" suggests that benefits will not be cut. Raising the age of
retirement might be more feasible politically, but it would lead to a host of
new problems—see today's Japan.

In the classic job pattern, salaries rise steadily with seniority. Companies
underpay younger workers and overpay older workers as a means of rewarding
employees who stay at their jobs. But as people have become more likely to
shift firms and careers, the pay increases have become powerful disincentives
for companies to retain employees in their fifties and sixties. Employers
already worried about the affordability of older workers are not likely to
welcome calls to raise the retirement age; the last thing they need is to
keep middle managers around for another twenty or thirty years. "There will
presumablold person to get out."

In Lee's view, the financial downsizing need not be inhumane. One model is
the university, which shifted older professors to emeritus status, reducing
their workload in exchange for reduced pay. Or, rather, the university could
be a model: age-discrimination litigation and professors' unwillingness to
give up their perks, Lee says, have largely torpedoed the system. "It's hard
to reduce someone's salary when they are older," he says. "For the person,
it's viewed as a kind of disgrace. As a culture we need to get rid of that
idea."

The Pentagon has released few statistics about the hundreds or thousands of
insurgents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, but one can be almost certain
that they are disproportionately young. Young people have ever been in the
forefront of political movements of all stripes. University students
protested Vietnam, took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, filled Tiananmen
Square, served as the political vanguard for the Taliban. "When we are
forty," the young writer Filippo Marinetti promised in the 1909 Futurist
Manifesto, "other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the
wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!"

The same holds true in business and science. Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak
founded Apple in their twenties; Albert Einstein dreamed up special
relativity at about the same age. For better and worse, young people in
developed nations will have less chance to shake things up in tomorrow's
world. Poorer countries, where the old have less access to longevity
treatments, will provide more opportunity, political and financial. As a
result, according to Fred C. Iklé, an analyst with the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, "it is not fanciful to imagine a new cleavage
opening up in the world order." On one side would be the "'bioengineered'
nations," societies dominated by the "becalmed temperament" of old people. On
the other side would be the legions of youth—"the protagonists," as the
political theorist Samuel Huntington has described them, "of protest,
instability, reform, and revolution."

Because poorer countries would be less likely to be dominated by a
gerontocracy, tomorrow's divide between old and young would mirror the
contemporary division between rich northern nations and their poorer southern
neighbors. But the consequences might be different—unpredictably so. One
assumes, for instance, that the dictators who hold sway in Africa and the
Middle East would not hesitate to avail themselves of longevity treatments,
even if few others in their societies could afford them. Autocratic figures
like Arafat, Franco, Perón, and Stalin often leave the scene only when they
die. If the human lifespan lengthens greatly, the dictator in Gabriel García
Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, who is "an indefinite age somewhere
between 107 and 232 years," may no longer be regarded as a product of magical
realism.

Bioengineered nations, top-heavy with the old, will need to replenish their
labor forces. Here immigration is the economist's traditional solution. In
abstract terms, the idea of importing young workers from poor regions of the
world seems like a win-win solution: the young get jobs, the old get cheap
service. In practice, though, host nations have found that the foreigners in
their midst are stubbornly … foreign. European nations are wondering whether
they really should have let in so many Muslims. In the United States,
traditionally hospitable to migrants, bilingual education is under attack and
the southern border is increasingly locked down. Japan, preoccupied by
Nihonjinron (theories of "Japaneseness"), has always viewed immigrants with
suspicion if not hostility. Facing potential demographic calamity, the
Japanese government has spent millions trying to develop a novel substitute
for immigrants: robots smart and deft enough to take care of the aged.

According to Ronald Lee, the Berkeley demographer, rises in life expectancy
have in the past stimulated economic growth. Because they arose mainly from
reductions in infant and child mortality, these rises produced more healthy
young workers, which in turn led to more-productive societies. Believing they
would live a long time, those young workers saved more for retirement than
their forebears, increasing society's stock of capital—another engine of
growth. But these positive effects are offset when increases in longevity
come from old people's neglecting to die. Older workers are usually less
productive than younger ones, earning less and consuming more. Worse, the
soaring expenses of entitlement programs for the old are likely, Lee
believes, "to squeeze out government expenditures on the next generation,"
such as education and childhood public-health programs. "I think there's
evidence that something like this is already happening among the industrial
countries," he says. The combination will force a slowdown in economic
growth: the economic pie won't grow as fast. But there's a bright side, at
least potentially. If the fall in birth rates is sufficiently vertiginous,
the number of people sharing that relatively smaller pie may shrink fast
enough to let everyone have a bigger piece. One effect of the
longevity-induced "birth dearth" that Wattenburg fears, in other words, may
be higher per capita incomes.

For the past thirty years the United States has financed its budget deficits
by persuading foreigners to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. In the nature of things,
most of these foreigners have lived in other wealthy nations, especially
Japan and China. Unfortunately for the United States, those other countries
are marching toward longevity crises of their own. They, too, will have fewer
young, productive workers. They, too, will be paying for longevity treatments
for the old. They, too, will be facing a grinding economic slowdown. For all
these reasons they may be less willing to finance our government. If so,
Uncle Sam will have to raise interest rates to attract investors, which will
further depress growth—a vicious circle.

Longevity-induced slowdowns could make young nations more attractive as
investment targets, especially for the cash-strapped pension-and-insurance
plans in aging countries. The youthful and ambitious may well follow the
money to where the action is. If Mexicans and Guatemalans have fewer rich old
people blocking their paths, the river of migration may begin to flow in the
other direction. In a reverse brain drain, the Chinese coast guard might
discover half-starved American postgraduates stuffed into the holds of
smugglers' ships. Highways out of Tijuana or Nogales might bear road signs
telling drivers to watch out for norteamericano families running across the
blacktop, the children's Hello Kitty backpacks silhouetted against a yellow
warning background.

Given that today nobody knows precisely how to engineer major increases in
the human lifespan, contemplating these issues may seem premature. Yet so
many scientists believe that some of the new research will pay off, and that
lifespans will stretch like taffy, that it would be shortsighted not to
consider the consequences. And the potential changes are so enormous and hard
to grasp that they can't be understood and planned for at the last minute.
"By definition," says Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge geneticist, "you live
with longevity for a very long time."