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Living Longer Means Rethinking How You Work Right Now · Merryn Talks Money

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  Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
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  Speaker 2: Hello, it's Maren Sums. That were Pierre. We have got
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  Speaker 2: a great episode for you this week. We're talking about aging,
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  Speaker 2: one of the opportunities and challenges of longer lives in
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  Speaker 2: the twenty first century. Economists and author Andrew Scott is
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  Speaker 2: with us to talk about his book The Longevity Imperative,
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  Speaker 2: building a better society for healthier, longer lives. So we
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  Speaker 2: sort of stick around for that bit, but first, as always,
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  Speaker 2: senior reporter and author of the Money Distolveed newsletter, John
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  Speaker 2: Steppeck is with me.
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  Speaker 3: John, ma'am.
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  Speaker 2: You know we're going to talk about other aging stuff now,
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: about older people and how things are going to work
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  Speaker 2: with him financially, because this week has been all about
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  Speaker 2: the state pension and Richie Stunac's unbelievably ridiculous and stupid
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  Speaker 2: nonsense about putting in place what he calls a triple
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  Speaker 2: plus lock on the Who don't know all that, I
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  Speaker 2: suspect everybody does. The UK pension, which is not not tiny,
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  Speaker 2: comes with what we call a triple lock, whereby it
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  Speaker 2: goes up every year by the higher of a completely
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  Speaker 2: random number two and a half percent average wages or
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  Speaker 2: inflation right, and richards Nik is suggesting adding to that
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  Speaker 2: what he calls a plus, which is that the personal allowance,
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  Speaker 2: your income tax personal allowance will never be lower than
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  Speaker 2: the state pension, so you will therefore never be taxed
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  Speaker 2: on your state pension, unless, of course, you are already
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  Speaker 2: taxed on your state pension because you don't have an
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  Speaker 2: income tax allowance because you earn over one hundred thousand
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  Speaker 2: pounds or one hundred and twenty five, where it's completely
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  Speaker 2: tapered away that allowance. See, I'm already irritated. I've worked
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  Speaker 2: myself up into a frenzy of fury, and I haven't
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  Speaker 2: even let you speak yet, John, Why is this a
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  Speaker 2: completely absurd idea? Not politically, by the way, because it's
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  Speaker 2: an excellent political idea giving money away to pension It
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  Speaker 2: gets you votes lovely. Why they bother at this point,
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  Speaker 2: I don't know. But why is it a an appalling
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  Speaker 2: financial idea?
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  Speaker 3: I mean to be clear that this is a personal
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  Speaker 3: allow One of the reasons a bad idea is because
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  Speaker 3: this personal allowance is only for pensioners. So like my
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  Speaker 3: personal allowance won't be going up and the other will yours.
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  Speaker 3: It's only for the people getting the state pension. So
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  Speaker 3: for a start, you mightage to get rid of one
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  Speaker 3: of the few pieces of tax simplification that we've actually
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  Speaker 3: seen over the last fourteen or so years, which was
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  Speaker 3: the kind of harmonization of the personal allowance. So that's
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  Speaker 3: one reason is bad. The other reason is bad is
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  Speaker 3: because we we already can't afford this, and you're adding.
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  Speaker 3: And not only is it you know, it's more expense
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  Speaker 3: for related to the state pension, but it's also because
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  Speaker 3: of all of these lockings that we're doing, a it's
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  Speaker 3: always going to rise in real terms, so it's always
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  Speaker 3: going to be bigger than our basically can't inflate this
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  Speaker 3: debt away. And on top of that, it's also uncertain,
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  Speaker 3: so you can have a rough idea of what liability
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  Speaker 3: you're committing to, but if inflation spikes, as it has
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  Speaker 3: done obviously in the last kind of couple of years,
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  Speaker 3: then that liability rockets. So this is just it is.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, it's so cynical in terms of being a
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  Speaker 3: purely political move, and a lot of it seems to
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  Speaker 3: be in response actually to well the last budget. So
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  Speaker 3: Jeremy Hunt, National insurance contributions for employees, and obviously National
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  Speaker 3: Insurance is a tax that isn't paid by pensioners because
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  Speaker 3: it's a tax on people who work, or so people
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  Speaker 3: of working age. And the reaction from me, I cannot
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  Speaker 3: imagine that this is the majority of pensioners. But the
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  Speaker 3: reaction from a kind of mouthy pro pensioner lobby group
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  Speaker 3: was to be like, oh my god, you're terrible, this
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  Speaker 3: is awful. How dare you know? You're given a tax
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  Speaker 3: cut to other people. But this was not a.
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  Speaker 2: Tax rise for pension. It was an everything stays the
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  Speaker 2: same for pensions, but working people while they're really paying
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  Speaker 2: a lot of times. Now, let's try and ease it
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  Speaker 2: up a little. And along the way, I mean, you
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  Speaker 2: and I had this conversation, we kind of hope that
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  Speaker 2: what it was was a glide path to getting rid
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  Speaker 2: of NI altogether, because it's both dishonest and ridiculous and
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  Speaker 2: complicated and having effectively having two income taxes inside a
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  Speaker 2: tax system where we do not hypothecate which good thing,
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  Speaker 2: by the way, is absurd, absurd, So getting rid of
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  Speaker 2: NI good thing. Pension is complaining about getting rid of
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  Speaker 2: NI bad thing.
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  Speaker 3: Fah yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: And also I think we're I feigned, I'm not completely
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  Speaker 3: politically naive, but we are. We've gone well beyond the
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  Speaker 3: point for many years now where politicians just seemply react
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  Speaker 3: on a headline to headline basis. I mean, the other
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  Speaker 3: reason that sus souikes pulling this out of the heart
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  Speaker 3: is because she was I mean, I don't even know
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  Speaker 3: why he was on Loose Women. Frankly, for anyone who
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  Speaker 3: doesn't know, this is some tea.
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  Speaker 2: John John's absolutely desperate to get on it. So question time,
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  Speaker 2: he must be on loose Women, right John, That's what
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  Speaker 2: That's what the audience is.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, that's that's true. That's a good point. Maybe
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  Speaker 3: that is why they go on. But a Janet Street Porters,
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  Speaker 3: who I'm sure everyone remembers a kind of like music journalist,
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  Speaker 3: went back in the day. So I said to him,
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  Speaker 3: you know, why do you hate pensioners? And you know,
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  Speaker 3: I mean my immediate thought, and the thought of anyone
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  Speaker 3: who actually knows anything about the financial system, would have been,
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  Speaker 3: what on earth are you talking about the one group
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  Speaker 3: of people who are in no position to complain after
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  Speaker 3: fourteen years of Tory misrule, if you want to put
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  Speaker 3: it that way, pensioners. They've they've done so much better
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  Speaker 3: than and aggregate than any other section of the population.
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  Speaker 3: So I can sort of see why he must have
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  Speaker 3: been panicking because he was thinking, oh my god, it's like,
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  Speaker 3: you know, I used to forego one budget without throwing
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  Speaker 3: them a freebie, and suddenly you know, I'm the that
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  Speaker 3: lords them. So you know, but I think this kind
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  Speaker 3: of like kne Jet policy. Is it posted tourning around
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  Speaker 3: and presenting some facts to people, you know, instage Just
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  Speaker 3: Piney can see, well, okay, we're going to make sure
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  Speaker 3: you never have to pay tax on this and that.
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  Speaker 3: What's the next thing that's gonna what?
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  Speaker 2: Just don't ever now, Just be just to be fair,
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  Speaker 2: John and I aren't that far off being pensioned as ourselves.
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  Speaker 2: You know, this will come one day and then you'll
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  Speaker 2: hear a full on turnaround from us, full on turnaround.
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  Speaker 2: We'll be wanting those tax breaks up. So we want
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  Speaker 2: that state pension to be linked to everything under the sun,
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  Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. None of those things are going
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  Speaker 2: to happen. And it's very likely that once we get
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  Speaker 2: a new labor government and that they have that wonderful
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  Speaker 2: six months when they can actually do stuff if they
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  Speaker 2: are brave enough. If they are brave enough, it may
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  Speaker 2: be that they do look at the state pension, possibly
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  Speaker 2: in the pension system as a whole, and say, hang
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  Speaker 2: on a dick, we really need to make some changes here.
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  Speaker 2: This is so expensive. You know, the state pension is
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  Speaker 2: already of a five percent of GDP eleven point three
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  Speaker 2: percent of state spending. I've got that number in frontally
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  Speaker 2: because both John and I have written about it this week,
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  Speaker 2: because that's how cross it makes it. So you can
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  Speaker 2: find a column from that on me and money, just
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  Speaker 2: not from John. But change is coming, right, I mean,
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  Speaker 2: either we see the triple lock dumped somehow, we see
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  Speaker 2: the triple lock abandoned, one element taken out right, or
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  Speaker 2: we see big changes to the way tax relief on
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  Speaker 2: pensions works. Or I was thinking about this the other day,
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  Speaker 2: and I was thinking, and I mentioned this in the column.
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  Speaker 2: I'm waiting for some pushback on it. Entirely possible. What
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  Speaker 2: would happen if the state pension was abolished altogether? And
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  Speaker 2: if I know, I know, I know. But let's say
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  Speaker 2: that auto enrollment picks up, so there's a higher levels
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  Speaker 2: of obligatory personal and state employer contributions. Right, maybe it
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  Speaker 2: stops being maybe it stops in voluntary. Maybe everybody has
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  Speaker 2: to enroll, right, Maybe that happens. And at the same time,
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  Speaker 2: we do have a very effective pension credit system where
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  Speaker 2: if you if you come into your late sixties with
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  Speaker 2: no income of any kind whatsoever, you get put in
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  Speaker 2: the pension credit system. You get two hundred and one
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  Speaker 2: pounds a week, you get housing benefit, and you get
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  Speaker 2: all the other smaller payments that you get it in
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  Speaker 2: your later years that one way or another would hold
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  Speaker 2: body and sould together. So if you've got both those
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  Speaker 2: systems running concurrently, do you need a state pension system? Now,
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  Speaker 2: don't get me wrong, I want a state pension system,
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  Speaker 2: But do you need it?
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  Speaker 3: I mean, I think this is a really good question.
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  Speaker 3: It's a really tricky one. But I think that first
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  Speaker 3: if you and I can talk about this in terms
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  Speaker 3: that politicians would never dare but effectively, what your first
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  Speaker 3: acknowledging is that a state the state pensions are benefit
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  Speaker 3: rather than something that's sitting in a port with your
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  Speaker 3: name on it. And then you're saying, well, actually, look,
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  Speaker 3: if it's a benefit, then maybe that means that not
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  Speaker 3: everyone needs to get it. And I thought the other
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  Speaker 3: interesting thing that you pointed out in your piece, and
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  Speaker 3: this actually maybe where sort of frozen tax thresholds come
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  Speaker 3: into play effectively. If you if you say you've got
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  Speaker 3: a pension that's somehow you know, paigey, you know, like
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  Speaker 3: in the region one hundred and thirty pounds a year,
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  Speaker 3: your entire state pension is getting clawed back anyway. So
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  Speaker 3: there is a way, there is a point at which
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  Speaker 3: if you kind of you, if you actually had the
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  Speaker 3: goal to freeze the income tax threshold for the next
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  Speaker 3: thirty years, say, and suddenly the number of people who
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  Speaker 3: are you know, paying who are getting the personal allowance
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  Speaker 3: claw back climbs to the same numbers, say as are
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  Speaker 3: paying forty percent income tax today. It suddenly becomes a
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  Speaker 3: kind of mainstream thing rather than a very rich thing.
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  Speaker 3: Then actually you could essentially remove this the pension by
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  Speaker 3: the bike door.
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  Speaker 2: Not a recommendation, by the way, not a recommendation, right, John.
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  Speaker 3: No, No, no, And I think even that would be
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  Speaker 3: hard to get a.
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  Speaker 2: We with I suspect that'll be that'll be some means
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  Speaker 2: with some kind of means testing coming under a labor
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  Speaker 2: government would be my guess. I'm it's hard to imagine
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  Speaker 2: how they'll be able to get away with the whole
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  Speaker 2: idea of continuing to pay eleven to twelve pounds to
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  Speaker 2: the wealthy, the riches, the one percent, the five percent,
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  Speaker 2: whatever it is. So watch out for some means testing
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  Speaker 2: either way. Keevan Aisle State Pensions and do read John's
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  Speaker 2: column on it. Do read my column on it. Welcome
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  Speaker 2: to Meren Talks Money, the podcast in which people who
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: know the markets explain the markets. I'm Meren Sum's web.
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  Speaker 2: Here's my conversation with author Andrew J. Scott as we
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  Speaker 2: talk about his book The Longevity Imperative, building a better
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  Speaker 2: society for healthier, longer lives and, by the way, hopefully
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  Speaker 2: also richer lives. Andrew, Hello, thank you so much for
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  Speaker 2: joining us today.
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  Speaker 4: Very kind, pleasure to be here, Maren, always good to talk.
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  Speaker 2: Excellent. Now you and I are both very, very very young,
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  Speaker 2: so a lot of the things we're going to talk
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  Speaker 2: about today we don't have to worry about quite yet.
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  Speaker 2: So really, where we're thinking about our listeners who may
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  Speaker 2: be older than us.
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  Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, Aging is a process, and everyone's getting older.
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  Speaker 2: Aging is a process, not an event. That's one of
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  Speaker 2: your catchphrases, right.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I'm interesting this topic of longevity,
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  Speaker 4: which I think is really about all of life rather
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  Speaker 4: than just the end of life.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, all right, then we're talking about us too. I
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  Speaker 2: mean that the basis of the book is that we
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  Speaker 2: are all living longer. A lot of us are living longer,
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  Speaker 2: and we're living longer in a healthier way. So the
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: stat that really jumps out is this one about how
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  Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety there are only ninety five thousand people
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  Speaker 2: who are over one hundred years old. Now it's around
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  Speaker 2: half a million and rising fast, and that's a huge change.
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  Speaker 2: And then, of course we have the main driver behind
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  Speaker 2: increasing lifespans, which is not so much that people are
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  Speaker 2: living longer once they've passed sixty, is that they're not
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  Speaker 2: dying younger. So can we talk about that a bit first,
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  Speaker 2: in that I absolutely understand that these numbers, the average
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  Speaker 2: numbers a rising because people don't die in their first
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  Speaker 2: year or their second year or under five anymore. We've
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  Speaker 2: pretty much nailed that. But is it really true that
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  Speaker 2: if you are just separate out that people live longer.
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  Speaker 4: Yes, it is. I mean, you're certainly right that you know,
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  Speaker 4: the fantastic improvements, particularly the rich countries in reducing from mortality,
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  Speaker 4: have had a huge impact, but it isn't just life
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  Speaker 4: expectancy at birth. Basically, however old you are, we've seen
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  Speaker 4: an increase in the number of years you can expect
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  Speaker 4: to live ahead of you. It's certainly true that the
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  Speaker 4: biggest increases have come at birth, but what we're finding
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  Speaker 4: now is that, for instance, in Japan, Japanese women had
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  Speaker 4: the highest life expectancy. A newborn girl in Japan has
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  Speaker 4: I think in ninety seven percent chance are making it
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  Speaker 4: to sixty. So what we're seeing now is nearly all
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  Speaker 4: the life expectency gains are happening from the age of
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  Speaker 4: seventy and above, so life expensive growth is slowing down.
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  Speaker 4: But now it's almost entirely about your chances are going
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  Speaker 4: beyond seventy into eighty and ninety. So that's the shift
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  Speaker 4: that's happened. We've seen improvements at all ages, but now
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  Speaker 4: the increases are coming more and more at the older ages.
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  Speaker 2: And what about the numbers that we've seen over the
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  Speaker 2: last couple of years that suggested in some countries life
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  Speaker 2: expectancy is actually falling, And I'm interested. You mentioned in
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  Speaker 2: Japan right, where it's well into the late eighties. Now
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  Speaker 2: the average woman can expect to live in Japan, right,
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  Speaker 2: But there's been a big change in diet and a
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  Speaker 2: big change in environment in Japan over the last forty
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  Speaker 2: or so years. So how confident are we that someone
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  Speaker 2: born into modern Japan might have the same life chances
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  Speaker 2: in terms of health as someone born into Japan fifty sixty,
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  Speaker 2: seventy years ago.
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  Speaker 3: What as an.
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  Speaker 4: ECONOMISTYE is always told that the rules of forecasting is
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: the first one, never give a number, The second is
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: if you give a number, never give a date fat
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: and the thirties never give numbers or dates. So forecasting
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: is very difficult, particularly into the future. But now I
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  Speaker 4: think we can be recently confident. I mean, I think
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  Speaker 4: what's stunning is over the last one hundred and fifty years,
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  Speaker 4: the best practice life expectancy, the country of the highest
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  Speaker 4: life expectancy has increased two or three years every decay.
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  Speaker 4: And I think that's likely to slow down, possibly to
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  Speaker 4: one or two, but I think it's still very likely.
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  Speaker 4: And one of the problems we've got is life expectancy. Intuitively,
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  Speaker 4: it seems a simple concept, but it's actually quite complicated.
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  Speaker 4: And when I first started in this area, statisticians that
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: I don't like life expectancy as a concept, and I thought,
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: why not. It's a great thing, but I can see
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: the challenges in particular the numbers you're referring to about declines.
• 14:36
  Speaker 4: First of all, they're very much during COVID for most countries,
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  Speaker 4: which is understandable. Secondly, they tend to be focused on
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  Speaker 4: the US. We saw a small foreign in life expectancy
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: outside of COVID, but that's totally due to this phenomena
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  Speaker 4: of deaths of despair. It's midlife mortality. Your chance of
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: living longer at sixty five continues to increase. And the
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: big confusion in all of this is the blind numbers
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: that you tend to read, which the government promotes. It's
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: not really life expectancy. It's gonna sound a bit morbid.
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  Speaker 4: It's the average age of death. It basically assumes that
• 15:10
  Speaker 4: you live your entire life in that particular year. So
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: if you're a newborn, you use the survival rate of
• 15:15
  Speaker 4: a sixty year old today rather than the survival rate
• 15:18
  Speaker 4: you're likely to face in sixty years time. So those
• 15:22
  Speaker 4: tend to be very much an underestimate of life expectancy.
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  Speaker 4: That's why when you have a global pandemic, you see
• 15:29
  Speaker 4: a fall in life expectancy, But as the pandemic goes away,
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: you see a return to growth. So I don't want
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: to trivialize and say it's going to be automatic, but
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  Speaker 4: the vast majority of countries will continue to see gains
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  Speaker 4: in life expectancy. I suppect those at the top will
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  Speaker 4: see a slow down because, as I said earlier, sort
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: of the scope to improve life expensive if you'm going
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  Speaker 4: from nought to sixty is pretty minimal now. So all
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  Speaker 4: the gains are going to come later on. And yes,
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: we have to worry about antibiotics resistance, Yes we have
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: to worry about a whole host of things, but it's
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: a pretty entrenched trend that I think, if you look
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  Speaker 4: at some of the innovations that are coming along in
• 16:04
  Speaker 4: terms of medicine, is likely to continue.
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  Speaker 2: Okes But there's this one to challenge I would make
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  Speaker 2: to that, which is that this is the first generation
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  Speaker 2: in which you could look at developed countries and say
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  Speaker 2: that going on half of the population is obese.
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  Speaker 4: And no, I agree, But I think if you look
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  Speaker 4: at inequality. That's a really big challenge. One of the
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  Speaker 4: status of us in the book is eighty percent of
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  Speaker 4: how we age is down to behavior in the environment,
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: which means that aging is incredibly malleable. So of course
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  Speaker 4: what happens the average may be different to what happens
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  Speaker 4: in terms of those at the top end. But I
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  Speaker 4: still think we'll see more and more people living into
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  Speaker 4: older and older ages, and some of that may not
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  Speaker 4: be a good thing, because we do have a health
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  Speaker 4: system that tends to keep people alive rather than keep
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: people healthy.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, well, I'm going to ask you the question now
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: that I should ask you, because otherwise people all write
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: in and say why didn't you ask him? And you say,
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: aging is very malleable. What are the things that we
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: should all do outside taking powers of drugs to keep
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: ourselves as younger as possible. I know the answer, but
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: you know I'm asking you anyway. I'm hoping. I'm hoping
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: there'll be something new like sit on the sofa and
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: watch as much Telly as possible.
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, no, that's exactly well, I'm sure those things are
• 17:09
  Speaker 4: very good. This is where it gets very complicated, isn't it?
• 17:11
  Speaker 4: Because everyone sort of wants the big haha moment. But yeah,
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: it's all sort of pretty obvious stuff at the moment.
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff coming along
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: in terms of drugs and biology, but it's all the
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: stuff that everyone tells you and that you know, which is,
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: don't eat too much, exercise a lot, keep moving, don't
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: drink too much alcohols and toxin smoking is bad for you.
• 17:32
  Speaker 4: Sleep is particularly important, A sense of purpose, a sense
• 17:35
  Speaker 4: of engagement, friendships, and all the stuff that we know
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: makes a good life. I think all this change is
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: a couple of things. The first is this is, as
• 17:43
  Speaker 4: Peter Astio says in his book Outlive, there's some sort
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: of breakthroughs in terms of what type of exercise to
• 17:49
  Speaker 4: do and how to do this sort of the diet,
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: the fasting stuff is very sort of trendy at the moment,
• 17:54
  Speaker 4: the high intensity draining, et cetera. So there's some sort
• 17:57
  Speaker 4: of innovations. But my own attitude and that is that
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: that's about optimizing as opposed to just mainly doing the
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: right thing eighty percent of the time. And then the
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: other thing that's really changed is your incentive to do it,
• 18:08
  Speaker 4: because at the heart of my book is a statistic
• 18:10
  Speaker 4: that just says, you know, you are now the majority
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: of the young are now likely to become the older. Again,
• 18:15
  Speaker 4: going back to the ons, they estimate the fifty center
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: children born today will live into their nineties. And you
• 18:21
  Speaker 4: know you are now likely to get old. But we
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: fear getting old. So what do you do now to
• 18:25
  Speaker 4: age well? Because you can start to age better at eighty,
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: it's a whole lot better to start when you're in thirty,
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: forty to fifty or sixty.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: And on the drug front, you mentioned way give you
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: ezempic briefly earlier. But that seems to me to be,
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: from what we understand so far, to be an antholute
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: game changer in allowing people to age well. In that
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: if it really can deal with a large part of
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: the obesity problem, and if the benefits to the heart
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: that we keep hearing about or turn out to be correct,
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: then that's something of a game change. It to people
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: who have not yet aged well, and I'll say, oh,
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: I don't know, fifty six or whatever thing it feels
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: damn he said, I should, you know, take more exercise diet,
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: except twenty years ago I did. GLP one is a
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: drug that I've taken it.
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: But I think what's really interesting about them is there
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: a signpost where we're going to be going in terms
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: of treating health. In the book, I stress that we
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: don't really have a health system at the moment. We
• 19:18
  Speaker 4: have a system that treats disease. And I use that
• 19:21
  Speaker 4: great quote by wh Jordan that health is something that
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: medicine knows nothing about. And I was saying that to
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: a cardiologist the other day and they said, no, no, health
• 19:29
  Speaker 4: is just an incomplete diagnosis. Something will happen and then
• 19:32
  Speaker 4: we can do something about it. But we don't really
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: know how to maintain health. But because we focus on disease,
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: that's a really big problem with what's happening is we
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: live our longer lives because we're now vulnerable to aging
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: related diseases. And it's a bit of a dismal litany,
• 19:48
  Speaker 4: but cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, all of these,
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: the biggest risk factor is aging. The older, we get
• 19:55
  Speaker 4: them more like we are to get them. So if
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: you sort of tackle one of those diseases, say cancer,
• 20:00
  Speaker 4: you've still got the risk of all the other ones.
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: So your health is still impaired. Your life expectancy is
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: still curtailed. But if we can sort of go upstream
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: and focus on the aging process itself and age better,
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: whatever that means in terms of biological aging, then you
• 20:16
  Speaker 4: have a huge benefit downstream on multiple diseases, which is
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: a huge benefit because then sure you're going to live longer,
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: but crucially going to be healthier for longer because you
• 20:27
  Speaker 4: push back all these multi morbidities. Mate. That's where the
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: gop one drugs are very interesting, because what they're saying
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: is I'm not going to tackle a disease, I'm going
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: to tackle a biomarker, in this case obesity. And obesity
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: you can have an argument whether it's a disease or not,
• 20:41
  Speaker 4: but I'd rather avoid that one. It's clearly an indicator
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: of bad future health. And so if you can tackle
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: that biomarker, you're going to have a benefit on multiple diseases.
• 20:51
  Speaker 4: And if you look at some of the sort of
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: evidence coming through, it looks like it's good for cardiovasca,
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: it could be good for kidney disease, it looks like
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: it's good for diabetes, and that's where it's a real ganger,
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: because that's a step towards preventative health, where I'm maintaining
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: my health for longer and pushing back getting diseases, and
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: that's really what we need to do.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk a little bit about how you see it.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: The health service transforming from what we might call a
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: misery service into a health service. Would how would that work?
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: What would for example, the NHS do if it were
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: to change the way it approaches things. What would it
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: look like in your mind?
• 21:35
  Speaker 4: So clearly you still need something of an NHS which
• 21:37
  Speaker 4: looks at diseases and intervenes, but you can see it
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: on its knees at the moment, and how many resources
• 21:43
  Speaker 4: we throw at it, it's not going to deal with
• 21:45
  Speaker 4: a growing number of older people who are getting age
• 21:47
  Speaker 4: related diseases. So we need to stop the number of
• 21:50
  Speaker 4: older people who are getting aging related diseases, and that's
• 21:53
  Speaker 4: by getting to age more healthily. And that's a shift
• 21:55
  Speaker 4: from intervention to prevention. So it could be things like GLP,
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: but I think there's a whole host of shifts that
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: need to occur. So let's start first of all with
• 22:04
  Speaker 4: public health, which of course is not everyone's favorite, but
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: one of the reasons we're living longer lives in the
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: twentieth century is public health made huge improvements in reducing
• 22:13
  Speaker 4: infant mortality by raising awareness of what needs to be
• 22:15
  Speaker 4: done with young children it was successful, and reducing them
• 22:18
  Speaker 4: hound to be a drink and how we smoke, all
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: of which have had a benefit. And I think, you know,
• 22:23
  Speaker 4: helping raise awareness, making it easier for people to do exercise,
• 22:27
  Speaker 4: to eat healthily, for the environment to be cleaner, etc.
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: It will be important and those social changes are in
• 22:33
  Speaker 4: part inspired by public health. Then there's the health system
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: itself which has to move towards prevention, and I think
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: there there's going to be a shift out of hospitals,
• 22:42
  Speaker 4: probably to something like the community. I think it's really
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: interesting during COVID that we managed to do a four
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: scale mobilization of preventative health outside in the main the
• 22:53
  Speaker 4: GP and the NHS through using community spaces. So there
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: may be things like vaccination. Clearly, if you look at
• 23:00
  Speaker 4: the trouble we've got is that there's loads of diseases
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: can get us. So in the book, I talk about
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: how we can use huge advances in genetic screening, extraordinary
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: developments in big data in AI, and say Andrew looking
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: at your family history and your genetics. We think you're
• 23:14
  Speaker 4: going to be particularly vulnerable to these diseases. We are
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: going to concentrate on screening you for those. And you know,
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: this is where I think the big revolution has to
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: come from. I'm a little bit nervous about AI in general,
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: but I think big data in healthcare and has huge
• 23:28
  Speaker 4: potential to identify what are most at risk at and
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: then design interventions around it.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you can say to people, this is what
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: you're at risk of, and therefore this is how you
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: should behave. But I'm not to hop on about obesity,
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: but it's the classic one right where you can look
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: at people who abes and we can say to them,
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: this is what this puts you at risk at of,
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: and this is how you should behave. But that doesn't work.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: And this is why I'm interested in what you mean
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: when you say turning it into a preventative service rather
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: than a treatment service, because we have a long history
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: of knowing that people don't change their behavior when they're
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: given an alert about something that affects them specifically.
• 24:05
  Speaker 4: I agree, So I do think there is scope for
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: education and for people to have agency. It's interesting how
• 24:12
  Speaker 4: at least. Some of my readings of the work around
• 24:14
  Speaker 4: these GLP one drugs, like wegov is as people whose weaight,
• 24:17
  Speaker 4: they start to get a sense of agency and feel
• 24:19
  Speaker 4: they can carry that over into other areas of what
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: they do, which I think is interesting. So I don't
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: want to totally rule out the ability to change your behavior,
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: but I think you're right in general, it's going to
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: be easier to have it through a drug. And so
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: you know, is vaccinations prevention or is it intervention? But
• 24:34
  Speaker 4: I think we will see more and more vaccinations which
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: can be useful in bringing down obesity, blood pressure, etc.
• 24:41
  Speaker 4: So there will definitely be treatments. I think also we
• 24:44
  Speaker 4: may well see a ship and I think this would
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: be controversial, but I'm an economist. I think incentives are
• 24:49
  Speaker 4: very important, and so there may even be some monetary
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: incentives to change your behavior. If you deliver on these things,
• 24:56
  Speaker 4: then we'll give you some money or resources, because after all,
• 25:00
  Speaker 4: the NHS will be a net saver. And I do
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: think that's one of the really big shifts that's got
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: to occur. So I think we need to really embed
• 25:08
  Speaker 4: it within government a target for healthy life expectancy. I
• 25:11
  Speaker 4: for instance, think the state pension age should be indexed
• 25:14
  Speaker 4: on some concept of healthy life expectancy. You cannot expect
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: people to work for longer if their health is not sustainable,
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: and I think we then have an incentive to invest
• 25:22
  Speaker 4: in health outcomes rather than treating disease outcomes, and I
• 25:26
  Speaker 4: think you need to then also embed that in the
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: NHS to ensure that you get better outcomes. I also
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: think we probably with an aging population, have to recognize
• 25:35
  Speaker 4: that as we have more people aged fifty to let's
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: say seventy, the health of those individuals is going to
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: be crucial for the economy. Because one of my hobby
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: horses is to try and stress the governments that you
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: can increase the state pension age. But in the UK
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: only about a quarter of people are working at the
• 25:51
  Speaker 4: current state pension age, so you're not really going to
• 25:54
  Speaker 4: have a big effect. They aged round fifty, about eighty
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: percent of Brits are working. By sixty five before the
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: state pension age is down to about twenty five thirty percent.
• 26:05
  Speaker 4: So how do you stop that really big decline? And
• 26:08
  Speaker 4: I think part of that is around preventative health, and
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: I think at the moment we tend to assume the
• 26:13
  Speaker 4: money we spend in the health system is just a cost.
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: And it's nice to have better health, but it's just
• 26:18
  Speaker 4: a cost. But increasing it with aging populations we're going
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: to see actually, it's going to be crucial for economic growth.
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: There's not much productivity growth in the UK at the
• 26:26
  Speaker 4: moment or many other rich countries. So most of GDP
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: growth is employment growth, and most employment growth is workers
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: aged over fifty. And the more we can keep workers
• 26:35
  Speaker 4: aged over fifty working, the better it is for GDP.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: I want to go back briefly to what you said
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: about it incentives mattering. You for John and I say
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: all the time on this podcast, incentives matter, for God's say,
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: why can't people realize that incentives matter? Give people the
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: right incentives, they'll do you want, Give them the wrong ones,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: they definitely won't. There have been some trials around health
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: and incentive payments, haven't they, and they have work exactly.
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: I think, you know, it's hard to change thinking, and
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: of course, wouldn't it be great if people didn't need
• 27:00
  Speaker 4: a financial incentive to change their behavior. I also think,
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: you know, if you think about the incentives to how
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: we do change in the NHS, you know there's a
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: couple of problems, and some of these are even more
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: acute in America. There's that up to in Sinclair quote
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: that it's very difficult to get someone to change their
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: mind when their livehood depends upon them not shifting their
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: mind and not changing what they do. But I also
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: think another challenge is that when you rise to the
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: top of a profession with an existing skill set, it's
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: very hard to then say, right, I'm going to give
• 27:29
  Speaker 4: up on that because the way the future is something different.
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: And so when we have an nhsy's geared around intervention,
• 27:35
  Speaker 4: it will take a very big mindset to shift towards prevention,
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: which is why I suspect we have to do something
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: outside of the NHS, which will lead to all sorts
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: of financing issues, because how is the treasure you're going
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: to finance prevention and intervention at the same time. But
• 27:50
  Speaker 4: the economic return on investment for prevention is quite considerable.
• 27:54
  Speaker 4: The other thing we haven't really discussed myriory is that
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: us as individuals we go along and say, hey, I
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: not very well do something about it, But when it
• 28:01
  Speaker 4: comes to prevention, we are going to have to be
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: a lot more active ourself.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the challenge. Right, Let's move on to how
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: on earth we pay how do we finance a world
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: when everyone's on a path to eighty five, ninety, possibly
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: one hundred. Now, we have a system globally where you
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: are educated for maybe eighteen years, maybe twenty two years,
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: maybe twenty five years, maybe twenty eight years, whatever it is.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Increasingly more and more years you're educated for, and then
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: you work for thirty or thirty five years, get your
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: state pension and the pentin that you build up inside
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: your your work environment, et cetera, all to enrollment we
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: have today lovely, and then you hit hopefully sixty maybe
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: sixty five, and you retire. Now, I know that you
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: and academics and economists like you think that the best
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: thing for us to do is to change the way
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: we do that, to not have these kind of solid
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: blocks of time dedicated to education, work, retirement. But that's
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: a difficult thing to persuade people, because when they've been
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: working for thirty thirty five years, quite like to stop.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: So come the age when they and get their hands
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: on their bension.
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: Yes, please, no, completely, there's a whole bunch of issues
• 29:13
  Speaker 4: you raised there let's begin by you know, it's just
• 29:16
  Speaker 4: a simple matter of arithmetic. If we're living for longer,
• 29:20
  Speaker 4: we need more resources. We have to produce more resources
• 29:23
  Speaker 4: ever our lifetime. And it may be AI is going
• 29:26
  Speaker 4: to come charging to the rescue and give us all
• 29:28
  Speaker 4: those resources so we don't have to you know, the
• 29:30
  Speaker 4: problem solved, But if it doesn't, we have to be
• 29:33
  Speaker 4: more productive over our lifetime. So it's very hard to
• 29:36
  Speaker 4: move away from the notion that we'll have to work
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: for longer. And that's just an adding up constraint. Now,
• 29:42
  Speaker 4: that doesn't mean that everyone has to work for as
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: long as they feasibly can. I think we're going to
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: see a great deal of variety in hytergeneity because of course,
• 29:50
  Speaker 4: not everyone can have the same life expectancy. Not everyone
• 29:53
  Speaker 4: can find it so easy to work. So we really
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: have already I think seen retirement as a com concept
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: change phenomenally. It's no longer there's a single age where
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: everyone comes to a hard stop at work. It's a
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: continual process. Some people work for a long time, some
• 30:11
  Speaker 4: people stop working before the current retirement age. Some people
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: are working part time beforehand or part time afterwards. Some
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: people unretired so I think we're seeing a great deal
• 30:21
  Speaker 4: of flexibility and variety. But you're quite right. My challenge
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: is with governments who just set out to raise the
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: state pension age, because I don't think that solves the
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: problem at all. It solves a government problem, which is, oh,
• 30:34
  Speaker 4: i'll pay less in pensions, but it does nothing to
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: keep us productive for longer. And so my concept of
• 30:40
  Speaker 4: the evergreen society is how do we stay healthy and
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: productive for longer. Now, some of that is about preventative
• 30:48
  Speaker 4: health and just what we've talked about. There also be
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: a need for lifelong learning and education. As you said,
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: we're getting more and more education. I don't think it
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: necessary has to be about going back to college. It
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: could be something you learn on YouTube. You just got
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: to keep updating your skills. But there's another challenge, which
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: is can you keep working in your job? So you
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: know it's a convest The way I look at this
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: is it's sort of you know you're going to want
• 31:10
  Speaker 4: to carry on working if the gains are staying in
• 31:12
  Speaker 4: work ex seed the costs of gain to work, and
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: for many people, if you're ill and work is very
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: physically challenging or very boring, you don't want to carry
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: on working and totally you know, I get that, but
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: of course there's an adding up constraints. So how do
• 31:27
  Speaker 4: we create what I call age friendly jobs, which are
• 31:30
  Speaker 4: jobs that older people are able to do. Now I'm
• 31:33
  Speaker 4: a university professor, that's pretty easy for me, and I've
• 31:37
  Speaker 4: done some work on this and the number of age
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: friendly jobs, jobs which are more flexible, provide moral autonomy
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: and less physically demanding. Actually that's the work trend. More
• 31:45
  Speaker 4: and more jobs are getting like that. But if you're
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: working as a construction worker, if you're working in a
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: very physical activity, that's not an option. So I do
• 31:53
  Speaker 4: think we've got to think about how we support people
• 31:56
  Speaker 4: in shifting careers when they get to a point where
• 31:59
  Speaker 4: they can no longer what they used to do. And
• 32:02
  Speaker 4: we do this all sorts of ages when we have
• 32:05
  Speaker 4: active labor market policies. And you know, if you're a
• 32:09
  Speaker 4: construction worker, you may not be able to carry on
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: working in something physically, but there should be all sorts
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: of skills that you have depending upon the person to
• 32:17
  Speaker 4: shift into something you can carry on doing.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: What like what like what I'm sorry to challenge you,
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: but like what I keep Hearing this idea that people
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: will what end a career working in Tesco's, which they
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: loathed anyway, and somehow move on to some other sound
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: part time, don't believe it, and I don't understand how
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: you facilitate a world in which there is attractive work
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: for people to do after they've spent thirty years doing
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: unattractive work. If that attractive work existed, they've done it
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: in the first place.
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: Well, well, let me just begin by saying I'm a
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: no fan of just raising the state pension age. I
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: think it should be indexed on not even average healthy
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: life expectancy, but something lower down the distribution, because to
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: get people who are in poor health and tired to
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: carry on working is a terrible thing. So I absolutely
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: agree with that. I also think there are ways that
• 33:07
  Speaker 4: we can support people, and I think, give me give
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: an example. My father and law as America, used to
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: be a truck driver and then they try only went
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: to move and worked for a charity helping older people.
• 33:19
  Speaker 4: And he's got great personal skills. It's not something that
• 33:22
  Speaker 4: he requires a huge physical strength for, and so I
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: think that's perfectly possible to do. I'm not saying you
• 33:28
  Speaker 4: have to punish people to do it. I'm not saying
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: that you have to push people into bad jobs, but
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: I think there are skills that people doing physical and
• 33:36
  Speaker 4: manual jobs have got. They perhaps used to enjoy the
• 33:40
  Speaker 4: camaraderie of physical work but no longer do. But they
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: want to do something where they use their other skills.
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: And I don't think that's about learning how to be
• 33:46
  Speaker 4: a full stack developer in terms of software code. I
• 33:49
  Speaker 4: completely agree on that. One of the problems with lifelong
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: learning is that the people who did it later in
• 33:54
  Speaker 4: life tend to be the people who did it earlier
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: in life. But I think there's other ways you can
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: learn skills, including shifting from being a construction worker to
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: perhaps helping out in a care home, which I think
• 34:04
  Speaker 4: are perfectly feasible. And I think that, you know, I
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: don't know for some people, I held hope that was
• 34:08
  Speaker 4: a rewarding shift, But I agree with you. We can't
• 34:11
  Speaker 4: have bad jobs. We don't want people condemned to do
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: bad jobs.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: It just always seems to me that when we talk
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: about this kind of thing, we're really talking about the
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: likes of you and me.
• 34:19
  Speaker 4: Well, this is why I sort of call it, you know,
• 34:22
  Speaker 4: the sort of Sam Beckett theey of retirement, which is,
• 34:25
  Speaker 4: you know, I can't go on, I must go on,
• 34:27
  Speaker 4: a type of approach which is just dismal. So the point,
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: you know, this book, The Longevity impairt says we underestimate
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: the capacity of old people. We underest the capacity of
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: eighty years. And that's a problem because we're living longer
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: and we have to rise to the challenge to support
• 34:43
  Speaker 4: those lives, to make sure that they're healthy, productive, and
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: engaged for all. And we sort of did that at
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: early years, so there's no reason we shouldn't be able
• 34:50
  Speaker 4: to do it at older years. But it does require
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: a big rethink, and a big rethink it involves a
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: lot more than just saying, hey, I'm just going to
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: whack up the state pension age, because that does nothing
• 34:59
  Speaker 4: to keep people healthy, productive, and engage for longer. That's
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: just a route to misery. So in some ways I
• 35:04
  Speaker 4: completely agree, Mary, and I think your challenge is a
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: good one, which is raising the state pension age easy
• 35:09
  Speaker 4: for those people already working beyond the state pension age,
• 35:12
  Speaker 4: but it's futile because the large majority of people can't
• 35:15
  Speaker 4: and they need support and help. But we have education,
• 35:19
  Speaker 4: health policies, and active market policies a younger age. Why
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: don't we do it at older age because we underestimate
• 35:24
  Speaker 4: the capacity of older people.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: We could just leave old people alone or older people
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: alone and work on the fertility rate. Yeah.
• 35:31
  Speaker 4: So, well, a couple of issues. So first of all,
• 35:33
  Speaker 4: I think this is a big change when I talk about, oh,
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: you know, it's going to be individuals. It can be
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: government policies, it can be firms, social customs. And I'm
• 35:42
  Speaker 4: certainly not trying to direct what people do. I think
• 35:44
  Speaker 4: you need to give people support so they got choices now.
• 35:47
  Speaker 4: In terms of raising the fertility rate, I just don't
• 35:50
  Speaker 4: think it's going to happen. I think it was hungry
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: where if you have more than four kids, a woman
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: doesn't pay income tax, which is a pretty big financial incentive.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Doesn't seem to I've done it for that, I've definitely.
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: In general, it doesn't seem to have much of a response.
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: My big thing is not that we've got to make
• 36:08
  Speaker 4: people work for longer, or you know, or anything of
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: that form. The question is we got all these extra years,
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: what do we do with them, and what do we
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: do before then to support that longer life. And the
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: simple story is, we've created a society where, you know,
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: in the past, only a minority of people live to
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: be ninety. So we haven't built the institutions to support
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: a longer life, which is why we say, oh, my goodness,
• 36:31
  Speaker 4: look at this aging society. Probably I'm always struck by
• 36:35
  Speaker 4: the reference to aging society. I don't know anyone goes, yeah, brilliant,
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: We've got an aging society. In some ways, it's one
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. Fewer infants
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: lost in early life, fewer parents snatched away in midlife,
• 36:47
  Speaker 4: more grandparents meeting their grandchildren. But we refer to it
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: as an aging society. And when it comes to AI
• 36:53
  Speaker 4: and climate change, we talk in engaged way about how
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: we adapt and adjust to make the most of this
• 36:58
  Speaker 4: longer life. When it comes to age, anxiety would just say, oh,
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: these old people, they can't work, they're real, they need
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: a pension and they're a burden. That's a crazy situation
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: when the majority of us can expect to become old.
• 37:10
  Speaker 4: So how do we change? How are we aged?
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: Is there any are there any lessons we can learn
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: from Japan who seem to be managing this aging economy
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: very well. There was a little ahead of the rest
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: of us on everything.
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's something in that. So first of all,
• 37:22
  Speaker 4: I always I trustingction between changes in the age structure
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: and then changes and how long we live. And Japan
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: has got a really aggressive, similar to China, change in
• 37:32
  Speaker 4: his age structure in a way that the UK and
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: US don't. I mean, we are seeing a change in
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: our age structure, but our fertility rate has fallen by
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: less and more slowly, so we haven't got the same
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: really dramatic change in age structure that Japan and China
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: have got with their declining population, and we use immigration more.
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: But yeah, I think China Japan is a good example.
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: I think they've done well at instigating a sort of
• 37:57
  Speaker 4: these age friendly jobs where there's options to work part
• 38:00
  Speaker 4: time and flexibly as you get older, which I think
• 38:02
  Speaker 4: is a really good thing. You know, going back to
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: our conversation about retirement, I think a point I want
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: to try and make is that in the twentieth century,
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: when we created that three stage life that you refer to, education,
• 38:13
  Speaker 4: work and retirement, as we lived longer, we took more
• 38:15
  Speaker 4: and more leisure after retirement. I think as we live
• 38:19
  Speaker 4: longer now, we're going to take more and more leisure
• 38:23
  Speaker 4: this side of retirement through part time work and possibly
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: even career breaks. But that's another topic. But Japan has
• 38:30
  Speaker 4: done very well I think creating those flexible age for
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: any jobs. It's also done a pretty good job on
• 38:37
  Speaker 4: diet and health, but inequality in particular, I think is important.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: Let's then talk about how we can make some of
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: the things you're discussing, how it can translate into actual
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: policy that can really help.
• 38:50
  Speaker 4: I want to step back a little bit here, because
• 38:53
  Speaker 4: what my book says is that this is a really
• 38:55
  Speaker 4: profound moment for humanity. Actually, and I'm always wearing a
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: business called profess to talk about living through a time
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: of unparallel change, because in general, I think that's nonsense.
• 39:05
  Speaker 4: But when the first time ever in human history, the
• 39:07
  Speaker 4: young can expect to live into their tenth decade, when
• 39:10
  Speaker 4: global life expectancy is now over seventy global life expectancy,
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: that's a fundamental shift. We can now all expect to
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: become old, and that is going to require some pretty
• 39:22
  Speaker 4: deep seated changes that won't come through immediately. But just
• 39:26
  Speaker 4: as the twentieth century saw us invent teenagers. We saw
• 39:29
  Speaker 4: us invent retirement and pensioners. It invented the midlife crisis,
• 39:33
  Speaker 4: invented the weekend. That's a whole mixture of government practice,
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: social norms, all of which occurred over several decades that
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: I think is a process that we will see as
• 39:43
  Speaker 4: we adapt to these longer lifes. So some of it
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: it's going to take a long while. And I hope
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: I sort of type define myself as a patient optimist,
• 39:52
  Speaker 4: although the world is testing me sorely on the optimism
• 39:54
  Speaker 4: these days. But you know, these changes do happen. But
• 39:58
  Speaker 4: what can we do in the very very short term,
• 40:01
  Speaker 4: And you know, I've already sort of touched on what
• 40:02
  Speaker 4: I think the main ones urgently shifting to a system
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: of preventative health. It's the only way to save our
• 40:07
  Speaker 4: health systems, the only way to safeguard our economy. And
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: there are plenty of very simple, relatively cheap things we
• 40:14
  Speaker 4: can do to keep us healthy for longer. And not
• 40:18
  Speaker 4: only is that incredibly valuable because health is our most
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: important ast the thing we value the most, it's also
• 40:24
  Speaker 4: crucial for the economy. When you have a rise the
• 40:26
  Speaker 4: fastest growing population is those aged over fifty. So absolutely
• 40:30
  Speaker 4: a focus on preventive health. Some of that I think
• 40:32
  Speaker 4: we'll have to be done outside the NHS. That's about incentives.
• 40:35
  Speaker 4: I think it's about a target for healthy life expectancy,
• 40:38
  Speaker 4: because that's the key part of the Longevity Imperative book
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: is we've got a system that's done really well in
• 40:44
  Speaker 4: credding us to live for longer. We've slowed down the
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: dying process. We haven't slowed down the aging process, and
• 40:50
  Speaker 4: that is what we have to focus on because right now,
• 40:53
  Speaker 4: these long lives, the gap at the end of life
• 40:56
  Speaker 4: between when we're healthier not is getting wider. We're getting
• 40:59
  Speaker 4: more years and good health, but more years in bad health,
• 41:02
  Speaker 4: and that has to be a number one priority. And
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: nowhere is that a target right now. So a healthy
• 41:07
  Speaker 4: life expendence is a target. How do you then increase
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: the incentives to do that? I would say make the
• 41:11
  Speaker 4: state pension ager function of healthy life expectancy. So then
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: the Treasury have an incentive to say, you know what,
• 41:16
  Speaker 4: I'm not just going to give you a big check
• 41:18
  Speaker 4: to spend on the NHS. I want you to deliver
• 41:21
  Speaker 4: outcomes that actually boost the economy by keeping people in
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: work and keeping them healthy. And that's not about pushing
• 41:27
  Speaker 4: them beyond sixty five. I think that's an unfair bargain
• 41:29
  Speaker 4: to ask of people. If you haven't got the skills,
• 41:32
  Speaker 4: you haven't got the health and the opportunities, you should
• 41:34
  Speaker 4: not be forced to work beyond that. So we've got
• 41:36
  Speaker 4: to make sure we get those age fifty to sixty
• 41:39
  Speaker 4: six sixty seven, which is the current state pensione age healthy,
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: fit and engage. That seems a very fair political bargain.
• 41:45
  Speaker 4: So that would be some of the very concrete things
• 41:47
  Speaker 4: that I would do.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Okay, And for the individual looking at their finances, how
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: do you look at your finances over a career like
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: this or a life like this?
• 41:57
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so of course that's at managing industry will just
• 41:59
  Speaker 4: tell you to save more, which I don't actually think
• 42:01
  Speaker 4: is the right.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: So always save more, save more, exactly.
• 42:06
  Speaker 4: So you know, it's not an easy problem is they're
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: trying to work out your finances because you need to
• 42:12
  Speaker 4: know how long you could likely to live for, which
• 42:13
  Speaker 4: is really uncertain and increasing. You've got to be able
• 42:17
  Speaker 4: to guess how long you can work for. And one
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: of the things I always warn people about is always
• 42:21
  Speaker 4: I'm fine, and if I can make it to retirement age.
• 42:24
  Speaker 4: But you know, let me go back to that scary statistic.
• 42:27
  Speaker 4: Eighty percent of people are working at fifty, only about
• 42:29
  Speaker 4: thirty percent by sixty five, and most of those are
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: not voluntary exits from the labor market. It's they get ill,
• 42:37
  Speaker 4: they have to care for someone as ill, they deem
• 42:40
  Speaker 4: not have the skills, updated skills, or there's just pure
• 42:43
  Speaker 4: agism in the workplace. So you've got to know how
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: long you live for, how long you can work for,
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: how much money you need and you retire, and what
• 42:49
  Speaker 4: the rate of return is in your earnings. There's no
• 42:51
  Speaker 4: simple solution to that. I think saving more possibly is
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: the answer, but it all depends. As you said. You know,
• 42:58
  Speaker 4: some people like the university professors, very happy to carry
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: on working for longer. I suspect you may be in
• 43:02
  Speaker 4: that situation as well, Marin, in which case, if you're
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: going to work for longer, you can actually save less
• 43:06
  Speaker 4: because if you keep your years of retirement fixed as
• 43:09
  Speaker 4: they were before life expectancy increased, you've got a longer
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: time to earn the money, so you can save less.
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: If you want to retire for longer, you've got to
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: save more. But I think we're going to see a
• 43:19
  Speaker 4: great deal of heterogeneity in how people respond to it.
• 43:23
  Speaker 4: But the key in all of this, I think is
• 43:25
  Speaker 4: it's not just a financial issue. It's very hard to
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: avoid the conclusion that basically also have to invest in
• 43:32
  Speaker 4: your human capital, because if you've got the health, if
• 43:35
  Speaker 4: you've got the skills and the purpose, if your financial
• 43:38
  Speaker 4: plans go awry, you can still earn some money to
• 43:41
  Speaker 4: bring them back on track again. And I think that's
• 43:44
  Speaker 4: the really, really big change. The other thing I think
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: we'll see as a new financial system, we need much
• 43:49
  Speaker 4: more personalized finance. That three stage life where everyone had
• 43:54
  Speaker 4: the same retirement age and the same needs doesn't work
• 43:57
  Speaker 4: over this longer life where people will have very different aims,
• 44:00
  Speaker 4: very different preferences, very different circumstances. I think we also
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: need to see a much more joint thinking about health
• 44:07
  Speaker 4: and wealth. I think we'll see more and more life
• 44:09
  Speaker 4: insurance companies saying, hey, I make money if you could
• 44:12
  Speaker 4: live longer. How can I make that happen? Or there's
• 44:14
  Speaker 4: all these new treatments coming along, our start to try
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: and integrate those together. And then the other really big issue,
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: which I think is not dealt with at the moment
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: is the way I call living insurance. We saw life
• 44:27
  Speaker 4: insurance develop in the eighteenth nineteenth century, which was you know,
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: if you die early, your family is protected. The problem
• 44:34
  Speaker 4: we got now is not just increases an average life expectancy,
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: but actually most people live longer than the average. The
• 44:45
  Speaker 4: mode is above the average. You've only got about I
• 44:48
  Speaker 4: think a three percent chance of dying at the average
• 44:50
  Speaker 4: life expectancy. So you have a very high chance of
• 44:53
  Speaker 4: living beyond your average life expectancy. And one thing is
• 44:57
  Speaker 4: can you save enough to live to eighty eight eighty nine?
• 45:00
  Speaker 4: But how do you save enough if you're going to
• 45:01
  Speaker 4: be living to one hundred and one hundred and five
• 45:03
  Speaker 4: And I don't think you can save that much. And
• 45:06
  Speaker 4: so we need, whether it's annuities or ton teens, we
• 45:09
  Speaker 4: need new instruments that can help us ensure against that variation.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: Well, I was going to say that just sounds like
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: a late life annuity, which is something that is beginning
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: to get popular, where people they buy an annuity when
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: they hit a certain age and rather than buying it
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: directly at sixty five or retirement ages, just doing the
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: old days. Now you you know, you live off your
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: pot for a while, and then when you hit a
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: certain age and you're not entirely shure was going how
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: long you might live after that, you buy an annuity to
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: keep yourself safe after that. I'm I'm not sure Tom
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: teams are going to take take off again.
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: No, I think they're more part of max finance professors
• 45:39
  Speaker 4: and novelist than people. But they are there, are lovely,
• 45:43
  Speaker 4: They've got some advantages in them. So perhaps some sort
• 45:45
  Speaker 4: of a hybrid between a tontine and a newity might work.
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, there's a column in that. All right, Andrew, last
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: question here you are. Let's say we're getting getting towards
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: the end. Yeah, we're quite old, and we're thinking to ourselves.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: I'm worried about inflation over the ten years, Whor I'm
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: worried about all sorts of things over the cooming ten years.
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: You have political difficulties, etc. And I want to buy
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: one asset, one acid only that I think will protect
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: me very well over those ten years. And I've only
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: got two choices. I've got gold or I've got bitcoin.
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: What am I going to buy?
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: Well, I'll go for gold because I don't know if
• 46:19
  Speaker 4: it depends on next Tuesday or Thursday in ten years
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: time whether bitcoins are going to be high or low
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: in price. It's just too volatile. So I'd go for
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: gold because gold is this sort of sort of tangible
• 46:28
  Speaker 4: commodity that we all think is valuable even though we
• 46:31
  Speaker 4: don't really know why it is, whereas bitcoin and this
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: an intangible commodity that I've got no idea what it's about.
• 46:38
  Speaker 4: So I would go for gold personally.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, brilliant, thank you very much. You do know and
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry to have to tell you this that this
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: will get you attacked on Twitter. John, What do you
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: think about what Andrews says? I know that obviously you're ready, young,
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: sin aneimous, remotely relevant to you.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: But I know that you eat well, you.
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: Exercise, You've got good friendships, good relationships and nice community
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: structuring excise. So you're probably going to live and tell
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: you all what five.
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: You have to a lot of ten years for being
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: born in Glasgow.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you do, although you have left Glasgow, which may
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: be helpful to you in that sense.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: Obviously, I think this is a really interesting topic and
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: the I think the one thing the conversation kind of
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: very made very clear is that this affects everything, and
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: an awful lot of the you know, the recommendations involve
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: almost like restructure so many aspects of basically basically a
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: public sector because one thing I don't know. I was
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: talking about wearables to my wife the other day, as
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: you know, like you know, watches that can monitors your
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: your health, and she has worked in the NHS in
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: the past, and one of the points was that integrating
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: the kind of data and the kind of warnings and
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: the things that your Apple watch will give you with
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: the actual service you can expect from the NHS is
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: extremely difficult because you know, either people kind of getting
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: a wee warning from our Apple watch that maybe they
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: should go and get an EK you know, an electro
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: cardiograph because their heart had done something a bit funny
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: in the night or whatever. But then you get the
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: doctors getting frankly pissed off that people are kind of
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: coming and requesting you know, these e cages even though
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: actually a lot of time when you did one on them,
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: you actually did find something. So I think there's a
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: there's like an infrastructure issue here more than a tech
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: issue at this point for health.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, or is there a doctor's getting pissed off at
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: persive perfectly reasonable requests issue.
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I mean. It's yeah, if you've got
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: an NHS, So if you've got a health system that's
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: set up on the basis that there is a limited
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: amount of paie to go around, then everyone that works
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: in it is a gatekeeper. And unfortunately that's the nature
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: of a ration health service. I'm not saying that, you know,
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: the US alternative is necessarily better, but you'll be doing
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: that you look at how how we structure there's and
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: also about the can over the kind of mentality I
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: think of the health service as well.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: Well. I think that's the key bit, isn't it.
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: I'm one of the things that Andrew talks about a
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: lot is about how we call it a health service, but.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Of course it's not a health service at all.
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: It's a misery service, and illness service and disease treatment
• 49:42
  Speaker 2: service is absolutely not a health service.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: And we need to find a way to make.
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: What we call our health service do something about preventative health,
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: about getting people to look after themselves better before they
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: turn up at the NHS. But this is this is
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: where I you know, where do come and slightly come
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: into conflict with Andrew on this and on the event
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: that we talked about during the conversation. We talked about
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: this idea that people should spread their working life out
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: more thinly, that they should take more sobaut are girls
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: and more breaks, that they should change career more often,
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: all this kind.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: Of thing, And these are all things that some people
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: will do.
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: Some people will do, but an awful lot of people
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: either won't or can't. And we know, for example, you know,
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: you and I have talked quite a lot about the
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: weight loss drugs and the impact that they have and
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: how brilliant we think they are, notwithstanding side effects that
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: may appear over the itst couple of decades. But you know,
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: if diets worked, if this whole idea that you could
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: eat less and move more exactly, if that worked and
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: it was relatively straightforward.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Everyone would do it. Everyone would do it.
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: If that has worked, only one diet book would be required.
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: But there are hundreds of thousands of diet bogs and
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: millions bought every week, so we know it doesn't work.
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: So we know that a preventative health service may only
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: work for a very small percentage of people. Everyone else
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: needs drugs, And it's the same. It's the same with work, right,
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: this idea that you can work in one thing for
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: twenty years and another lifting for ten years, another thing
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: for thirty or five years, whatever it is, and you
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: can spread yourself.
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: Then and you can relearn, etc.
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: And we were talking I'm not sure doing the recording,
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: but after recording at about the way that people do
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: change careers in older age. And Andrew was talking about
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: someone he knew he'd worked in construction initially and later
• 51:28
  Speaker 2: gone on to care homework. And I was talking about
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: this with some people later, and someone.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: Said, you know, who would want to do that?
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: Who would want to spend thirty years working construction and
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: then instead of just relaxing.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: And resting for twenty years, go and work any care home.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: Why would that work for anybody?
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: It works for intellectuals, It works for people whose job
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: is sitting in front of a computer writing fund stuff,
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: and then they can maybe write a different kind of
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: fun stuff later.
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: But does it really work for the majority of the population.
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: All the stuff sounds great, sounds very desirable, and then
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: you think, I just don't see how we get from.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: Here to that.
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean I guess. Still, the problem is
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: you can't I don't think you can really make prescriptive
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: for this because, as you say, I mean, career changes
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: sound attractive, but they're they're very expensive to do, you know.
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: I mean the main reason for the kind the pay
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: gap between the sexes is because women go and have
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: children and then that kind of breaks up their career
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: and then recovering from that never happens. So the idea
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: that you can go away and retrain for a year
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: as a lawyer or something like that, I mean, I
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: know that hams in the States a lot more, but again,
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: you have to generally have the money behind you already,
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: and it is a you know, a sacrifice, So it
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: is something that most people really can't afford, even if
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: they were motivated to do it.
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: And I suspect a lot of the ideas that you
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: moved to lower status work, right. So you and you know,
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: you've worked in a reallyatively high status job, maybe you've
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: been in management or whatever it is, doing the main
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: part of your career. Your earnings peak out at you
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: normally in your mid forties, don't they, And then maybe
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: you're retired from that career and then you go in
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: to do something.
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: Less challenging. Let's intellectually challenging.
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: I suppose maybe you work in a shop, or you
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: work on reception somewhere, whatever it is, you pick up
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: a lower status job in a part time way in
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: your late las. No, that's fine, But what if you
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: were already working in one of those jobs. What if
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: your actual job had being one of those jobs? Which,
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: to be ver is most people right you work in
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: a low status job for thirty years and then you're
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: expected to work in another low status job. Or do
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: we change the idea about what status at work is.
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: It's just it's more socially complicated, more culturally complicated than
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: I think the academic world likes to think krama being unkind.
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: So I think one thing that we forget because we
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: can think about life as being cyclical, and obviously it
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: is cyclical in lots of ways, but we forget this
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: is genuinely new. That haven't been this number of people
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: getting old, living long enough to have a state pension
• 54:06
  Speaker 3: or what we would consider to be a retirement. And
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: it's happened very quickly. It's like literally in the last
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: one hundred years. So I think none of us are
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: used to it. We're already seeing changes. There's a lot
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: more acknowledgment of the fact that if and I mean
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: this does largely relate to men, because there's been men
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: that have been retiring from those kinds of jobs. But
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: you get to sixty five, you go into the golf course,
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: you die by the time you're seventy because of a
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: mixture boredom, loss of state, is drinking too much, and
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: also that kind of stubborn sense that you've worked for
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: forty years, you're never ever picking up, you know, a tool,
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: or doing or having a boss ever again. And I
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: think that the psychology has moved on from that. I
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: think people acknowledge now that actually, whenever you retire, you
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: still have to do stuff. You still have to have
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: a routine. I guess what I'm saying is, I think
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: we're all kind of grappling our way towards actually just
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: how you live better in retirement. And probably the thing
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: that the state should focus on is making sure that
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: we're as healthy as possible within that or that we
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: have the ability to use the already existing technology that
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: could help us to live longer, and just make sure
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: that we've got access to it. In a in a
• 55:29
  Speaker 3: pleasant way, as opposed to having a basically shout at
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: someone in a GP surgery until they give you what
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: you want.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: Huh. That sometimes works, mind.
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: You, Oh no, it usually does work. But it's a
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: shame that if you don't have someone advocating for you,
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: or somebody to shout on your behalf, then you are
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: in deep trouble. Is the many, many scandalous reports that
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: have come out in the last couple of weeks alone
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: have demonstrated and I'm not going to delve into that,
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: but it's not being happy reading now.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: What's the best thing we can do really is keep
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: hoping for a massive productivity revolution that takes away a
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: lot of the problems that we're discussing.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: But there is one other thing I wanted to.
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: Pick up for we end is that we talk briefly
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: when when Andrew and I are talking, we talk about
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: what the individual can do to effectively ensure against their
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: long life. Right, but a very rare occasion of ensuring
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: against something brilliant, right, and he talks about he talks
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: bad to some kind of living insurance and as I
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: said to him on the thing, what we're really talking
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: about is just a deferred annuity, and these haven't been
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: around much in the UK that you can get them
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: in various places. And this is where you simply buy
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: an annuity, but you buy one that doesn't start for
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: quite a long time, so you have your pensions freedom.
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: You can use the majority of your pension money in
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: whichever way you would like, but you pre buy an
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: annuity that kicks in at an age that you want
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: to be insured from. So say eighty five or possibly
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: even ninety whatever it is. You say to yourself, Christ,
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: I lived in ninety I'm really going to be a
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: bit worried. So I buy this annuity that kicks in
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: at ninety, eighty five, eighty seven, whatever it is, so
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: that you know that should you live longer than expected,
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: there's going to be a regular income coming in or
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: sely that takes away from your part when you start
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: your retirement.
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: But that's insurance for you.
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: So that's something that I think we should maybe look
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: at a little further. You and I this whole deferred
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: annuity industry.
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: Is it growing, Who does it, how does it work?
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: What does it cost? Interesting?
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: Stuff that's fascinating. Actually, see I told.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: You it was interesting stuff.
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: Are you making any changes to your lifestyle or your
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: finances as a result of listening to Andrew speaking.
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: I see, do you know weird enough? I started exercising
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: a lot more this year, so it was priorly Andrews speaking.
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: But getting to that age where you do start to
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: free up at this stuff and start doing things you
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: should have started doing maybe twenty five years ago, but
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: it's never too late.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: So as you can start in your eighties.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've got a dolt just so I got
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: out of the house and I'm sure that happened.
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: And it's a weep part.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Thank girl.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: Well, kind of an irritating one, to be honest, but
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: you know, thanks for listening to this week's Marin Junks Money.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: We'll be back next week.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: In the meantime, If you like us, show, rate, review,
• 58:13
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• 58:16
  Speaker 2: your questions or your comments to Merin Money at Bloomberg
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: dot net.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: We will address them, we promise. This episode asserted by me.
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: Merrin Zumset Web is produced by Samasadi.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: Additional editing by Moses and special thanks to Andrew J.
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: Scott and to John Steppick and just to remind you
• 58:31
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• 58:33
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