Hot Topic - What Are the Three Most Important Factors to Ensuring Sustainable and Equitable Aging Societies?

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Nov 02, 2015
by Ana Alania and Heather Jaber
Hot Topic - What Are the Three Most Important Factors to Ensuring Sustainable and Equitable Aging Societies?

Fellows at the session Aging Societies: Advancing Innovation and Equity share their ideas the hot topic of the opening day 

Session co-chair Alexandre Kalache asks: Is society prepared for aging?

“1) Health longevity: To be stronger as we age, it’s not about how long we live but how healthy we are so that we can age-in-place successfully and independently.  2) Workplace policy transformation: To change how we view productivity, e.g., flexible hours, working from home, project-based work to suit changing psychographics of elderly. 3) Care-giving careers transformation: Care careers are not just care-giving. Increasingly, it will be about services to enable older people to age successfully at home. Social + health + lifestyle services.” 

Janice Chia, session co-chair and Founder and Managing Director, Ageing Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore

“The very first is to raise awareness that aging is… the most important societal achievement of the last century. It’s fantastic to age – not to age means dying early. My life expectancy was 43 when I was born in Brazil, today it’s 73. This is a tremendous achievement, but many people in societies don’t recognize that so raising awareness that aging is, first of all, an achievement and it is good for you is very important. The second is that, yeah it is an achievement, but it is also a challenge and most countries are ill-prepared. For instance, if you see how university students today are trained (not only in health but in general) very little consideration is given to aging, and if you don’t prepare the next generations to understand that aging is here to stay, you are not going to find answers. And the last is sustainable policies. To afford things like my country, Brazil, is doing which is to have huge benefits for few and so many people without the basics to survive, and then you end up blaming aging when in fact it is bad policies.” 

Alexandre Kalachesession co-chair and President, International Longevity Centre (ILC); Co-President, ILC Global Alliance, Brazil

“Number one and most important is education, so preparing for whatever is coming and do better than we do. Number two is adjusting our social security systems to aging, mainly in health. And number three is readdressing the income side or public revenue side by kind of broadening the tax-base.” 

Andreas Esche, Director, Shaping Sustainable Economies Program; Member of the Management Committee, Bertelsmann Stiftung, Germany 

“Education, education, education is maybe the single most important way to go for aging societies. What do I mean by that? I think we need to do work on the quantity of education, for example in many countries, less in the Western world and in the developing world, women are still underqualified, which is a shame. The quality of education obviously in terms of the quality of teachers, therefore their payments and their social status [needs to improve]… but thirdly also the content of education and this is the one big under-researched question today about tomorrow: [what are] the new skills we need to teach today for tomorrow? Since tomorrow is not very well known – the future is inherently unpredictable – my suggestion would be we have to educate people, first of all, more to be wide as oppose to narrow, more generalist (especially in the early stages of education) than specialists. … And in addition to that we have to try and see how we can make them creative problem solvers… Because we don’t know what will be the problems of tomorrow except for population aging, which is predictable… With technological changes inherently unpredictable we don’t really know what we need to teach for tomorrow except that we need to teach skills to tackle those problems tomorrow. And the last thing I would say relating to education is that of course education should never stop. That’s why I proposed that we should move to a paradigm of not active aging but the quintuple A story – The Active Aging At All Ages. So just like pension reform must start with babies, giving them skills to be productive in their work by supporting elderly generations… this active aging also needs to start with younger people because throughout their life course, throughout their working careers, as well as their educational careers, they need to upscale their grade and reconnect with the constantly evolving and changing demands of the labor market.” 

Pieter Vanhuysse, Professor of comparative welfare state research at the Department of Political Science and Public Management, University of Southern Denmark


The Salzburg Global session Aging Societies: Advancing Innovation and Equity is part of the multi-year seriesDesigning a Social Compact for the 21st Century. The session is being hosted in partnership with Wirtschaftskammer Österreich and is sponsored by TIAA-CREF Financial Services and Tsao Foundation. More information on the session can be found here: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/540. For more information on Designing a Social Compact for the 21st Century, please visit: socialcompact.salzburgglobal.org