Page 95 - The Drucker Lectures

76 [ The Drucker Lectures

1960–1961. Next year, the number of 17-year-olds will be 20
percent lower than it is today, and it will continue to decline for
about five years.
The most rapidly growing age group in our population today
is older people, people over 65—in part because so many reach
that age, in part because those that reach it keep on living. You
may wonder why we have age 65 as retirement age. You know
the Good Lord did not pronounce it. We invented it in 1919
when the first large retirement fund was instituted. The railroad
brotherhoods didn’t much want to pay pensions, and so they
asked their actuaries, “What is the age which we should set so
that we won’t really have ever to pay a pension?” And the actuar-
ies came back and said 65, and that’s how we got it.
It was purely arbitrary. And today, almost everybody who
survives childhood will reach age 65—that is, about 17 out of
every 20 pensioners will. Most of them will be in reasonable
shape not just because our health has improved but because de-
mands have changed. Let me say in this whole room there isn’t
a single person who couldn’t keep on doing whatever he or she
is now doing, if, for instance, at age 65 you had a stiff knee with
some arthritis in it from an old skiing injury. It wouldn’t bother
you in the least. But grandfather who had to go out and weed
the potato patch couldn’t have done it. It isn’t only that we are
so much healthier; today’s jobs are so much less demanding. Oc-
casionally, I suspect that jobs are not just physically but mentally
less demanding as well, and so this is a great change.
In all developed countries of the free world, the support of old
people will increasingly be the first charge on economy and so-
ciety. This is the new population structure. The implications are
enormous. They change our whole social and economic situation.
Another implication of the changes in population structure
is that we will face an increasing shortage of traditional labor in
this country. We will barely have enough labor for manual and