Transcript: We need to rethink old age, with Martin Wolf

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘We need to rethink old age, with Martin Wolf’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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You may have noticed that we are living longer. There are more people today who are older than 80 than ever before. Fewer people are dying as infants and in childbirth and to infectious diseases. And that’s true across the world, not just in our richest countries. This is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but we haven’t talked enough about what it all means for us. How will our lives change as more people live into their 80s and 90s and 100s? And how should they change? My colleague Martin Wolf is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on the global economy. He’s the FT’s chief economics commentator, so he’s often writing about things like inflation and how politics and economics affect each other. But he recently wrote two columns reflecting on this broader human phenomenon and considering what life will be like as we live even longer, both for us as individuals and for society. Today, we’re lucky to have Martin joining us from London to talk about it. Martin, hi. Welcome to the show.

Martin Wolf
It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Martin, I’m gonna start by saying that you’re quite admired here at the FT for your own gregariousness and longevity. You’ve been at the Financial Times for 37 years, is that right?

Martin Wolf
Yes. It’s really almost embarrassing. But perhaps, given the topic, appropriate.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, you’ve been writing at least two columns a week. You just released your own podcast series. I’m going to take a risk here and ask if you don’t mind sharing your age.

Martin Wolf
No, I have no problem with that. I’m 77.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is it right to suggest that you’re very much part of this phenomenon we’re about to talk about?

Martin Wolf
It seems so. It wasn’t a plan, but, yes. And strangely enough, not only have I wanted to go on, but the Financial Times has been kind enough to continue to employ me, though every so often I get comments under my column suggesting that it’s long since time for me to retire.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can I ask, before we get into the numbers, I was wondering if you have been seeing anything on a personal level that, was worrying you when it comes to how we’re ageing?

Martin Wolf
Well, strangely, my most personal experiences were with the death of my parents, and they weren’t really that sort of phenomenon. My mother got Alzheimer’s very badly in her very early 70s, and she died when she was 75, which doesn’t seem very old any more. And that basically destroyed my father, who was eight years older than her. So I haven’t experienced extreme old age in a direct, personal way. But of course, I’ve had friends and friends of my parents, one or two who’ve lived to be over 100. So I’ve seen that. And some of that has actually looked rather good.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it really varies so much how people age. I wanted to ask you about the numbers as well. You know, they’re pretty staggering. You wrote in your piece that in the UK, the most common age to die now is 87. In Japan, women are living on average to 88, which is obviously longer than most places. But even around the world, global life expectancy is up. It’s now 76 for women and 71 for men. Why? Why is this happening? What’s letting us live so long?

Martin Wolf
These are extraordinary numbers. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. Across the world in the early 19th century, average life expectancy would have been about 30. So, situation which average life expectancy in the early ‘70s for the whole world population when the population is also increased good sevenfold is staggering. Now, why have we managed to do that? There are obviously two main reasons. A simple one is we are able to produce much more food than ever before. So we’re relatively well nourished. Famines have basically disappeared. But in addition to that, there have been huge improvements in public health. Never underestimate the importance of piped clean water. Quite possibly the most important single invention of the last couple of centuries. And, of course, medicine. Mostly, quite simple medicine. The result of that is that we pretty well ended death by infection. And so basically, people don’t die before they’re 60. And this, pretty obviously, is one of the most wonderful thing that we’ve ever done.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s wonderful. Yes. You know, I had read your column and then I had a pretty simple infection and was on antibiotics right afterwards, and I thought I probably would have died of this. Only, you know, 100 and something years ago.

Martin Wolf
Well, I’ve had a couple of infections in my life which would certainly have killed me before antibiotics. And the same is true for my wife. I mean, you were you were entering life as a lottery in premodern times, and the chances you will get some horrible disease were high, and the chances that it would kill you were also high.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. The other number that really stood out to me is that in 1990 the number of people in the world who lived to be over 100 years old was 95,000. And today it’s more than half a million.

Martin Wolf
And rising.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And rising. Yeah. Martin, before we move on, I want to ask you, you mentioned at the beginning that you’ve seen some ways of ageing that look rather good in your friendships, even, you know, around 100 and over. What is good look like to you?

Martin Wolf
I think good looks like first, remaining healthy and active. Being fit, able to walk, and remaining engaged in the world. Most people in their 90s aren’t working any more. But you can do voluntary work. You can at least read, go out to hear music and so forth. Just be engaged in the world. And if you’re lucky enough to have a family, you can be part of that. And of course, friendships. If you’re lucky, your friends will also live longer, or at least some of them, and you can be part of that too. So health and engagement seem to me, from what I’ve seen, to be the things that really keep people still enjoying life till the end. And then with luck, you get some illness which takes you off reasonably quickly. And I’ve seen that. And that looks pretty good.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds like a good life to me.

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So in your piece, you mentioned four different scenarios for how we could approach old age, which were borrowed from an economist, Andrew Scott. That one that you describe sounds sort of like what he calls Dorian Gray.

Martin Wolf
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But could we talk through them?

Martin Wolf
Yes. Well, let’s talk to that one first. Dorian Gray comes from the famous book by Oscar Wilde, which tells us of the story of a man who doesn’t age. His picture ages, but he doesn’t until suddenly, at the end, the picture is destroyed and he dies. So he lives young and healthily until suddenly he dies. And that seems it’s pretty close to what I just described. And that is, I think, pretty good. Then, he describes Peter Pan, who is immortal and eternally young.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Martin Wolf
And there are people out there who are spending a lot of money to achieve this, though, we have to say that we are very, very, very far from achieving either immortality or eternal youth. Yeah, but that’s a dream. Even less close is his last one, actually, is the Wolverine from the famous X-Men series. And the Wolverine can, of course, regenerate himself. Now, the one that is most frightening to us, he got from Gulliver’s Travels, he called the struldbruggs. I hope I pronounced this right, who have the curse, essentially, of eternal life without eternal youth? So they get older and older and older and older, more decrepit forever. And that, of course, is the nightmare. And if you are unfortunate enough and but many must have experienced this to know somebody who has dementia over sometimes 10, 15 or more years. Yes, that’s very much what it’s like. You watch them disappear. They’re not themselves any more. They don’t remember you. They don’t remember who they are, as far as we can see. They disappear, but they’re still alive. So this is a nightmare. And unfortunately, it is part of what we are seeing. And it’s what of course, we would like to avoid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. So I really agree with you that Dorian Gray sounds wonderful. Even if we look like we’re ageing a little bit, I mean, I think our society likes to look like we’re not ageing at all, and I don’t mind if we look a little older.

Martin Wolf
I’m quite used to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right? As long as we feel youthful, that seems good. So say we’re able to cure some of the most dramatic degenerative diseases. So people live longer, healthy lives. They can move, they can think, maybe until their organs naturally fail. Like, say, that’s around 90 or 100. You wrote another column recently that we’re having far fewer children, that fertility rates are down. How do we accommodate a world in which there are more old people and those old people are ageing like Dorian Grays?

Martin Wolf
Yes. That is obviously the big question. If we live in a world where, let’s say life expectancy is into the mid to late 80s, where we can’t have everyone retire at 60. Particularly we don’t have any young people because the next generation of young people will be half the size of the previous generation. So that’s not sustainable at all. Now, one partial solution is more immigration, which we seem to absolutely loathe. Irrationally. But that’s one part. But the other part, of course, is that we’ll have to work longer and we’ll have to design our work lives around the possibility of working longer. That’s not possible for people doing really hard labour, but by and large, one of the other good things that have happened in our societies is really hard manual labour is rarer than it used to be. So what I think will happen is we will retire later, but we might actually retrain, sort of do a job, retire perhaps in our 50s, retrain, re-educate and do another job, a lovely change, do something else for the next 20 years and maybe then retire, study for something else which is not so demanding, and go back to work. So the idea that work life will be divided, and those are 25 years of education, 35 years of work and then what might be 30, 35 years of retirement will just go out the window. It doesn’t make any sense.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So I love this sort of vision of the future in which we are educated, we have a career, we take a break maybe. A sort of like early retirement. We educate again, we have another career. We take another break. It sounds like a world I would love to live in. And I’m wondering, like, what would it take for that to happen?

Martin Wolf
Well, it’s a good question. So, one answer, which actually, is part of my wife’s work. She was the adviser to former prime minister Boris Johnson on skills policy. And we have in Britain — something I approve of a lot — we have a system of essentially state-funded loans for higher education. So you repay based on what you earn. So it becomes all of income-contingent loans. If you don’t own many much, you don’t pay much. If you do earn a lot, you repay in full. What she proposed and is now British government policy, is this loan scheme will be available to people essentially throughout their working lives. So if you’re in your 40s and you want to retrain and you have a place on a recognised course, you will get funding from the government to do that training, that education. I think that sort of idea is an important part of this. And the other part of it, of course, is employers have to reconsider what a suitable employee is, who a suitable employee is. If there aren’t any young people around, they’re gonna have to look at who is around. They’re going to have to look at people who have maybe taken a long break to look after children, older people who want to change their jobs. Employers are going to have to get rid of their settled frame of reference on who is a suitable employee and who needs to be thrown out on the trash heap, as it were. I hope people will also feel that to continue to be engaged in work is not the worst thing. And 30 years of essentially idleness is not a good thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Martin, I have a cultural question about this for you. I am the youngest in my family, and I was born to parents who are also the youngest in their families. So my father is 80 and his father was born in the 1890s. And, the way that my father is ageing just feels quite different than how his parents aged. Not just in physical health, but, you know, they were incredible people, but they seemed old, and they were also sort of old world. And I look at my father and he doesn’t, he’s cool, he’s full of energy. You know, I look at you and you’re cool and full of energy, and I wonder if you feel that too. Like if you compare your generation to your parents. It feels like culturally, these generations are approaching older age differently. And I wonder why that is. Is it because you experienced the ‘70s? Is it because they lived in a world with a lot more death? I mean, they also lived through two world wars. What do you think?

Martin Wolf
I think this is probably really very much about personal experience. Three of my four grandparents were dead before they were 70. I knew a couple of them, but they were clearly old. It was no doubt they’d had really hard lives and they were very old. But with my parents, I had this terribly bad luck with my mother. We never knew, nobody knows why Alzheimer’s gets you. She was absolutely fine apart from that. But my father was in some ways younger than I am. And I’m very like him. This is gets to life experience. My father grew up in Vienna. He was a playwright, involved in the theatre. He led a very bohemian existence with it. With a remarkable number of girlfriends, as far as I can see. Some of whom I later met because they were very fond of him, and he was utterly engaged and vital until he was 80. He continued to work full-time. He was an astonishingly youthful person. I’m a bit like him, but a pale shadow. And he really was cool, which I’ve never been. And then, of course, this is important, you know, the catastrophe, his life happened, the woman he’d be married to for very close to 50 years and, on whom he was in many ways totally dependent, fell catastrophically ill. And it destroyed him. But of course, the time is better now. We have generally had much better experiences than people who were born in the 19th century had ever known, presuming they survived the disastrous first half of the 20th century. And some people were my father would have seem extraordinarily modern in many ways, though he had very settled views on things. But I think it depends a lot on which class they were in, what sort of education they had, what sort of life experiences they had. I suspect, though, with each passing generation, the proportion that’s been broadly educated, that has travelled a great deal and has a broader experience of the world, that is more used to people who are different from them and changes is more, these generations are more flexible, more adaptable and also in better health than their predecessors. So on average, I’m sure what you describe is correct. But if you look in particular cases, the average doesn’t necessarily describe the full range of human experience.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so as we start to reach the end of this conversation, I want to ask, you know, if we’re living longer and we’re living better lives, what could we be doing now to prepare ourselves for the future like in our 20s and 40s and 50s? As individuals, what could we do?

Martin Wolf
What I tend to say to people is, first time around, try if you’re lucky. All this is luck. You get the best education in the most broadest education you can, then you develop some special skills of some kind. But after that, you can start thinking about what would I really like to do? Should I be changing what I do? How could I arrange that? What facilities are there? I think that’s something that is completely reasonable for people to be thinking about, not assume that the career choice they make at the age of 25 say, is it? That’s it? It’s desirable, I think, if you can, to build on your earlier experiences rather than to scrap them and start again, though some people do that. But I think you should get the skills and if you can, and exploit the opportunities again, if you can, to have a more varied life, because it looks now as though it’s likely to be a very long one, and variety is part of what makes life enjoyable.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true. My last question for you, Martin, is just what about you? How are you thinking about this for yourself?

Martin Wolf
Well, my plan is not to have a plan. So, I never thought for a moment that I would work in the way I’m doing for so long. Every year, I’d ask myself whether I would like to do this for another year. And I discussed it, of course, with successive editors. And so far we have agreed that going on for another year is a good idea, and I have no plan beyond that. My life — as long as I am healthy, mentally and physically — would, I think, broadly continue as it is, but with a different rhythm and pace. If I were moving into my 80s, I do have a plan for when I will stop doing the regular column, but I’m not gonna tell you or anybody else when that is. Well, there are two people who know. The only two people who know, one of them, of course, is my wife and the other, you can imagine.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Martin, well, we are grateful for your wisdom as long as you want to give it to us. And thank you for this. It’s always so broadening and such a joy to speak with you.

Martin Wolf
Great pleasure. The questions you asked me, there’s nobody else to ask questions like that. And the fact that I answer them is quite extraordinary.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend, the culture podcast of the Financial Times. Make sure to subscribe if you don’t already and take a look through the show notes. We have lots of good stuff. We’ve included Martin’s two columns that discuss us living longer and having fewer children. We included a link to his podcast series on Democracy’s Year of Peril. It’s a new series. And also we link to a previous interview that I did with him where he talks about times in his career where he’s changed his mind. All of the links that take you to the FT will get you past the paywall.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.