 I'm Dimitri Ducat, managing partner at Known, where I lead the Catalyst Funds from Living Cities. Living Cities is a collaborative of over 19 of the world's leading foundations and financial institutions dedicated to ensuring that all people in U.S. cities are economically secure and building wealth, living abundant, dignified, and connected lives. At Known, my team and I, along with all of our colleagues, are really focused on being a proper new majority financial growth firm that empowers the multi-trade and dollar economy that sustains our way of life. With that, I'd like to welcome Justin Ladner to introduce himself. Dimitri, thank you so much. And thank you to SoCAP for hosting this webinar, and thank you to the audience for joining us today. My name is Justin Ladner. I am a Senior Policy Advisor on AARP's Thought Leadership Team, and to give a little bit of background about myself, my sort of major role at AARP is to oversee what we call our Longevity Economy Research Portfolio. It's basically all the work that we do that investigates the economic activity and the economic contributions of people 15-older, both in the United States and around the world. So today I'm going to talk about a couple of things. The major theme of the presentation is going to be about older adults as consumers and workers. And in order to talk about that, I'm going to bring in a few different areas of our recent work. This is a large-scale report called the Global Longevity Economy Outlook, and that talks a lot about older adults as consumers and how their consumption in individual economies and around the world contributes to economic activity like the production of goods and services, the employment of people, and the labor income that they earn. So I'll start by talking about that, and then I'm going to shift to some additional work that looks at older workers or older adults as workers, basically what kind of contributions they make in the labor force. And all that work is going to be U.S. focused. And then we're going to have a conversation and hopefully get some really interesting questions from the audience. We're really excited. So to kick things off, I want to first talk about older adults as consumers. So a general sort of point here is that the 50-plus population around the world is already a critical consumer group, already accounts for a huge share of consumer spending around the world. And that share is rapidly rising over time. And to illustrate that, I'll first sort of talk about the broad overview. So in 2020, we find that 50-plus households, that is households headed by somebody 50-year-old around the world, they accounted for an actual absolute majority of spending, about 50.3% of global consumer spending around the world. And we project that to rise significantly over the next 30 years, all the way up to almost 60%, 59% in 2050. So first off, I think that share really surprises people, just as an overall kind of message about the contribution of older consumers. But another thing that really is surprising about this finding is that it's not about older consumers spending a very large amount of money in any particular category. It's actually that older consumers represent a huge share of spending across every category. So for example, if I break up total spending around the world into 12 major product categories, which are listed here in this figure, you see that older consumers actually make already account for a huge share of spending in all of those categories, and that these shares are all projected to grow in many cases very rapidly over time. In some cases, the category is something that you might intuitively expect. So for example, consumers 50-plus already account for about 60% of spending in the health product category. That's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that it's going to grow over time. But consumers 50-plus also spend already a clear majority in recreation and culture, in housing, in a diverse variety of categories. Basically, every product that you might imagine selling in older consumer is going to be a big group for that product, both now and in the future. So what is the effect of this spending have on GDP, on the production of goods and services, basically? Well, first off, it's already very significant. So if I think about global GDP in 2020, the spending of consumers 50-plus accounted for over a third of that production of goods and services, 34% in 2020. It's going to grow to nearly 40% in 2050, about 39% of global GDP in 2050. We project will be generated by the spending of older consumers. And once again, this is spread across a wide variety of industries. So if I break down total GDP into GDP by different sectors, I once again find that older consumers are making huge contributions here. And also once again, this is something where certain categories you maybe expect that. So real estate as an example, older consumers already account for over half of GDP in the real estate industry, and that's projected to grow over time. But again, it also extends to other industries that you would not necessarily associate with older consumers. Art, entertainment, recreation is one example. Transportation and storage, it's a rapidly growing area for older consumers and their impact on GDP. So there's basically the broad message here is that we already have the production of goods and services relying very much on older consumers, and that reliance is going to go rapidly over time. So that was just a very, very brief overview of our findings from the global longevity economy outlook report and the effect of older consumers on the global economy. Now I want to turn and talk about workers, because this is another area where older adults have become a already significant and very, very rapidly growing contributor economically. So first, I want to talk about this section. This figure comes from a recent article that we published on the title of the article, it's called Thinking Beyond Prime Working Age. And it's talking about the 55 plus workforce in the United States and its contribution and how that contribution has changed over time. So in this particular figure, we're looking at the share of full-time workers that are 55 and older, and we break that down to in three different categories, 55, 59, 60 to 64 and 65 plus. The full-time workforce is an interesting group to focus on because they tend to have a really high labor force attachment and for that reason, they tend to be really important, sort of over-represented in terms of their importance in the production of goods and services, in terms of their importance in supporting household and paying taxes. A lot of different economic activities are really dominated by the full-time workforce. So focusing here really illustrates how older workers have grown in that capacity over time. If I go back to 1992, which is really not very long ago, just a generation ago, we find that fewer than one in nine workers, fewer than one in nine full-time workers were actually in this category, the 55 plus category. And if I break that down by age group, I find that 65 plus workers were a tiny fraction of the full-time workforce, less than one in 50 full-time workers in 1992 were 65 plus. That has changed dramatically over time. This is really an unprecedented shift historically. We think about the growing representation of 55 plus workers in this full-time workforce. It grew slowly initially between 1992 and 2002, sort of nudged up to 13.3% of the full-time workforce. And then it has exploded since then. It grew to over one in five workers, full-time workers in 2012 and continued to grow despite the pandemic in 2022. In 2022, we have that nearly one in four full-time workers, our 55 plus. And a vast majority of this growth has occurred because workers that are 60 and older. So if I look at the individual groups here, I see that workers that are 60 to 64, their representation in the full-time workforce has more than doubled since 1992. And if I look at the 65 plus, it's more than triple from 1.6% to 5%. So these are huge changes. If I project forward, we see that those changes are expected to continue over time. So this is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have a report that they put out every year, a data set called the Employment Projections Data Set. So this is their latest version. It goes from 2022 to 2032. And what you see here is an evolution of the U.S. labor force and its age distribution over time. So if I go back to 2002, you see that the vast majority of workers were 16 to 54. 86% on those were 16 to 54 in the labor force, only about 14% were 55 plus. Again, that's changed very dramatically over time. It's now nearly a quarter or 55 plus. And this is the overall labor force. And if I look within that 55 plus window, both now and in the future, I see that there's a huge shift in who 55 plus workers are. So in 2002, nearly 80% of workers that were 55 plus were in a very narrow age range. They were 55 to 64. So they were sort of below that traditional retirement age of 65. And that's changed really dramatically between 2002 and 2022. Now almost 30% of workers that are 55 plus are in that category of beyond that traditional retirement age of 65. And if I project forward just in this next decade, between 2022 and 2032, that fraction is going to grow tremendously. In 2032, the BLS projects that nearly are actually slightly over 35% of workers that are 55 and over will be beyond that retirement age of 65. They'll be 65 to 74, or they'll be 75 plus. So this is really, again, a huge change over time. Now, before we go on to our questions and our discussion with Demetrik, I want to talk just very briefly about what this means. It means a lot for policymakers. It means a lot for society at large. And of course it means a lot for businesses. And so we have a set of recommendations, a set of strategies for sort of capturing the economic opportunity offered by the global longevity economy. And here I'm going to focus just very quickly on two of those things. First is just tapping into the global population of older consumers, understanding that they're a huge part of spending already and that that's going to grow very rapidly over time. So if you're thinking about developing a product or service, thinking about older consumers is really a necessary component to your success. Another thing is just to consider aging and longevity a business imperative. This includes that idea of thinking about your consumer base, but also about your workers. Who are you hiring? Where is your talent coming from? Increasingly that's coming from an older population whose behavior in terms of when they want to work, how much they want to work, what age they want to retire, has all changed very, very substantially over time. So thinking about that business imperative and thinking about how those changes fit into your business is going to be critical to success going forward. And with that, I'll conclude this presentation and pass it back to Demetrik. Thank you for that presentation, Justin. Very fascinating. I happen to be one of those workers over 55. So I pay particular attention to the evolution of things over time. I still remember being a kid and thinking that 50 was going to be so old. And now so many of my friends are so quite active well into their 60s, 70s and 80s, but this conversation fascinates me. You share a bit of data with us about things you found in the global longevity economy outlook report. What are some of the things that resonate most strongly for you in terms of helping us really understand the global importance of older consumers? Well, I think one of the biggest things that stands out to me in the report and one of the surprises even for us as we were doing the research and compiling the report was the diversity of impact for older consumers. I think that there is a long running stereotype about what an older consumer is in terms of what they spend money on and kind of what their behavior looks like in general. And we found that that is absolutely not the case. If you look at a place like the United States already, over 56% of consumer spending is coming from 50-plus households. That includes a majority shares in a wide range of product categories including many things that you would tend to associate with younger consumers. And globally that is also true and the rates of change that we're seeing over time are really dramatic. So a huge I think surprise in this report even for us coming from a point of view of already recognizing the importance of older consumers was how diverse that spending is and how impactful it was across a range of product categories in a range of industries. Fascinating. In our work through the Living Cities Funds particularly at down, we paid attention to a lot of shifting graphics. I think forward to 2045 when the ethnic and racial makeup of the US would be completely different than it is today. And for the first time we would have a population that is more than 50% people of color. Similarly, you've shared some things with us about aging populations and the dynamics. What about some of the younger parts of the world? How are business leaders, policy makers and other people dealing with sort of what it means to have younger populations and still consider the longevity economy? I think that's a wonderful question and a great point and another really surprising thing from our report is we looked at, so to kind of provide some background for this report, we looked at 76 economies individually which vary wildly in their current state in terms of where they are on their demographic transition. So we look at a lot of very young economies, we look at a lot of very aged economies. And I think you would imagine that we would have found this basic idea that if you're a young economy the 50 plus population is just not that important right now. And that is actually not at all what we find and there's a few major reasons for that. I'll highlight three things. So first off, we often find that even in an economy that has a very small 50 plus population domestically, oftentimes those households are disproportionately powerful from an economic point of view. So a place like Ghana, for example, really stands out. It's a very young economy, only about 12%, 12.2% of its population is 15 older, yet 50 plus households in Ghana already account for about 40%, nearly 40% of consumer spending. So for such a tiny population, that's a huge share of consumer spending. And it's growing rapidly over time because Ghana is projected to be increasing, to be aging at a fairly rapid rate. Another thing that we find that the sort of second issue for these younger economies is that even if you have a very young economy right now, that economy is almost certainly aging very, very rapidly. There are very few exceptions around the world. The rates of aging that we see in certain parts of the world are completely unprecedented in a historical sense. Southeast Asia is a fantastic example. You have places, I often highlight Malaysia as a really interesting case, because it has this sort of interesting peril to the U.S. So if I think back in about the U.S. population, it's aging over time, if I go back to the 1940 census, about 20% of Americans were 15 older in that 1940 census. And by 2020, in the 2020 census, we had that about 35.6% of Americans were 15 older. So a significant change happening over an 80-year period of time. In Malaysia, almost an identical change, actually a slightly larger change, 20% today versus about 37% in 2050. That same change is happening in 30 years, so less than half the time. So even if you have a very young economy now, it's going to be the case in a short period of time that your population is going to be aged and that consumers that were less powerful just a decade ago are much more powerful in the present. So there's that reason. And then finally, a huge reason for thinking about the longevity economy as a global sort of plan of this global role is the effects that we see through trade. So we see a lot of very young economies engaging in global markets through trade. And for that reason, a lot of their domestic production, a lot of their domestic economy actually relies on foreign consumers in other countries. So even if you are a young economy, it's quite likely that a lot of your economic growth will depend on foreign consumers, many of whom are older. All of which I think surprised us a lot and surprised people that we talked to. We found that really any economy, regardless of current age, benefits from the longevity economy. Wow. I would love to see data that crosses the aging dynamic with birth rates just so they can all be heard. But I think that would be another webinar in the conversation for me. So, Justin, you've shared that older consumers account for quite a significant fraction of spending. What do you share more about how it's distributed and if there are concentrations, we should be paying particular attention to, particularly with older consumers? Yeah. So, you know, kind of as I showed in the presentation, there are a few trends and a few sort of things that you see that you might expect. So if I think about product categories and I think about where older consumers spend money, it's not a surprise, for example, that globally older consumers account for a lot of health spending. That's not super surprising. It's also not surprising that older consumers, their smallest spend category tends to be in both globally and in most economies. We find that their smallest spend category is education, which again is not extremely surprising. You would expect education expenditures to be concentrated among younger adults and even younger adults with children. However, I think the big surprise is that those disparities are nearly as big as you would imagine. So even though older consumers are not a majority spender for education, they still account for a huge fraction of education spending and that fraction is expected to approach a near majority by 2050, I think 45% on the global scale. In the U.S., it's even a bit higher. So there are surprises like that. There's that diversity of spending where it's not just about a few different categories. Really, older consumers are spending spending money increasingly everywhere and this is sort of this concept of changing our attitude about what it means to be an older consumer. I think one great thing to highlight and we actually have an article coming out in about a month that looks at this issue is one way in which older consumers are changing is through parenting. So parenting historically, if I think back 50 years in the United States as an example, you would tend to have childbearing be very concentrated in somebody's late teens and the basic storyline would be you have children in your 20s, they grow up, they move out of your house and by the time you're in your mid to late 40s you're an empty nester and you've got 15 years before you're retiring and that's kind of what your life course looks like up to that point. Now it's much, much more likely actually that you're going to have people in their 30s sometimes in their late 30s or even early 40s having children and that means that as consumers in their 50s and 60s they're doing things like paying for college education buying things that you would never associate with an older consumer like toys or other products for young and growing children and they're going to have other challenges that they're balancing. So paying for college for example while simultaneously paying for retirement. Basically this sort of example just illustrates that older consumers are fundamentally different now and will be fundamentally different in the future than what our conception of them from the past has been. Quite fascinating. I have just celebrated writing my last check for my son in college so in my late 50s I'm so happy now. Congratulations. So many of my friends and I have this chuckle of getting them off payroll. So thank you for sharing that. What does all this really mean for businesses? What can they do to market their good services to consumers across age spectrums which would include me. Yeah well I think a big thing that comes out of this sort of extension of this prior point and I think this would actually apply to every age range is to come up with or to sort of understand that consumers are a constantly evolving group of people. The things that they're interested in, the things that are going to draw their attention in their business are changing really rapidly over time. So not thinking about any consumer group including older consumers as a monolith I think that would be a great piece of advice. Really understanding individuals and constantly revising your expectations. So what maybe was the case 20 years ago for a 65 plus consumer as an example that will no longer be the case today. So you have to constantly engage with your consumer base, constantly try to understand what their needs are. And be flexible, basically be innovative in that area and understanding how they want to interact with you as a business. Wow. You know we think about this notion of longevity and working and some of the things that come up are people working because they want to work or because they need to work. What are some practical steps that you think would just help us understand a bit more about the economic opportunity offered by the longevity economy and how we can engage with the areas more mature citizens in the public. So I think with respect to workers there's a few very important things. I mean one thing that we really worry about with older workers I'll highlight two things actually. One thing is age discrimination in the hiring of older workers so that's a very well known issue is that you have if you're somebody who let's say you're somebody in their late 50s or early 60s you're trying to switch jobs or you're trying to do something like re-skill because your current job has sort of become technically obsolete or something like that. There are a lot of barriers to doing that. Some of them are financial, sometimes re-skilling can be very expensive and a lot of resources for re-skilling can be targeted towards younger people so that's a barrier. Another thing can be just sort of people's again their expectations about what it means to be a worker at that age. So for example if you are if you're a business and you're looking at a worker who's in their early 60s a sort of common misconception might be that that person is going to retire in a year or two because we all think of 65 as being kind of your standard retirement age. Today that's actually quite likely to not be the case. We have so many more people now than any point in past history working well past 65 so again I would sort of encourage businesses and people who are hiring workers to think about what is this person as an individual want to gain out of their work despite their age they might want to work another 10-15 years so that's a big issue. So I think for workers that's one big thing. Another thing for workers is understanding that all of our research says and there's some research that I haven't talked about here that comes out of the multi-generational workforce is that workers of every age actually like to work with age-diverse groups so younger workers appreciate older workers for their experience and the mentorship that provides older workers really appreciate working with younger workers for a reverse mentoring sort of experience because they gain for example technical knowledge in new fields. So this is another issue of age-diversity itself being a key driver of productivity in work groups. Wow. So Justin as we delve more deeply I want to talk more about workforce but before we move on any other thoughts on the economic opportunity based on the data that you shared in your prior remarks. So I mean I think broadly speaking the major message here is this idea of innovating and being flexible and to understand the difference in how people are changing as consumers and how people are changing as workers. Basically I think a very broad way of saying this is that in business you have to think about the population that you're serving and that population is constantly fluxing in terms of its demographics. In this case we're focusing on this idea that the population is shifting to become older both the population at large and the population of people who are working. So being dynamic and being willing to evolve is a key to success. Well you've raised businesses and policy makers and one thing we do know you know delving in again on the workforce issue is that the prime working age population so the age is 25 to 54 often what they completely focus on when thinking about workforce issues. How do you feel about that and what do you think they should be holding? So the prime working age population just in case somebody on the audience doesn't know the definition it's basically people that are 25 to 54. The concept here is that if you're 25 years old you're quite likely to have finished your sort of main education and be entering the workforce and if you're 54 you're probably too young to be considering retirement. So it's this population of people that has this very high labour force attachment and historically it is very true that they have accounted for a big fraction of full-time workers accounted for a big fraction of labour income and all the things that go along with that supporting households, paying taxes, all these different things. So it's certainly true that primaries workers continue to be a hugely important part of the workforce. There's certainly no disputing that. However, again because of demographic change and because of the changing attitudes of older people in terms of their willingness to work longer, either out of want or necessity or for whatever reason that motivates them, they have become a much much bigger fraction of the workforce over time and I think that means from a policymaking point of view from a business point of view we have to think flexibly about what are the policies that we have in place, what are the practices that we have in place and do they work for people of every age. So ideally you would want a system in place where workers of any age in your workforce can attain the resources they need to reskill or to upskill to train to do new things, to evolve as workers to meet whatever personal goals that they have and the goals of your business. Having policies and practices in place that work for every generation and not just one single group. I think that's a big message that comes out of the work that we've done in that area. Thank you for that. We've heard quite a bit of stories about falling labor force participation among older adults some say the great retirement. So some of that lives a little bit in juxtaposition with some of the data we hear about people working later. What do you think the pandemic might have impacted how people are showing up in the workforce, particularly for older workers? I think that there's a lot of trends that came out of the pandemic that are very, very important and also somewhat misunderstood. One of the big ones that you alluded to is this idea that in many news outlets it was called the great resignation. This idea that because of the pandemic a lot of workers that were on the cusp of retirement had to just move into retirement early let's say your early 60s I'm just going to push forward my retirement a little bit or maybe if I was already working past 65 maybe that no longer makes sense for me I'm going to retire. And it is certainly true if I look at the labor force participation of people that are 65 and older it has dropped importantly relative to right before the pandemic to where it is now it's still a couple percentage points below what it was at pre-pandemic. And importantly that has been that's had some huge economic consequences so employers in many cases have realized that that group of workers was hugely important because of their experience because of their skill set being very difficult to replace so that's had big economic effects I think another issue here though is if I think about that trend in a broader context of labor force participation among the 65 plus going back more decades the drop that we see do the pandemic that two percentage point drop by the increase that we see prior to the pandemic so if I look at 65 plus labor force participation going back into the early 90s it was as low as about 10 or 11 percent of all people 65 plus in the United States leading up to the pandemic that increase was into the low 20 percent so it basically doubled in 30 years and then it dropped by a couple percentage points so it's important I think to keep that scale in mind. Another important trend I think that came out of the pandemic at all ages is the labor force participation trends we've seen in the disabled community among people that have disabilities because that has been starkly different than the population of people without disabilities so for example again if I think about workers that are 65 plus that don't have a disability their drop in labor force participation has been significant and sustained it still has not recovered to what it was before the pandemic if I focus instead on the 65 plus population that does have a disability their labor force participation did decline really sharply in the initial phase of the pandemic but it's actually recovered and is now higher than it was before the pandemic a big reason for this and there's been a few articles published that talk about this phenomenon both for all the workers and for the population at large is the expansion of remote work opportunities and I think a really interesting sort of takeaway from that is always being willing to challenge your assumptions about the nature of work so before the pandemic there was just widespread belief that remote work really only made sense for limited skill set for a handful of workers that it couldn't be applied on a large scale to have a productive workforce and then the pandemic happened and employers were forced to evolve so all these technologies that were already in place before the pandemic became more accessible they also became better and as a result we now have a workforce that is much more able to work remotely and employers have largely found that there are many many positions that can be successfully completed remotely and so that's opened up the door to millions of people millions of people with disabilities who previously wanted to work but had that barrier in place that they couldn't access remote work because they just weren't adequate opportunities now that those opportunities exist we see rising labor force participation among that group I think that's an important lesson to take away for how we think about work in general quite fascinating I would love to see some of this data crossed with socioeconomic classes I know that there are some who have asked like are people working more into the later years because they need to have to want to that would be a fascinating conversation I'm sure there is that data in the report but let's talk about that after this I would love to explore it with you that sounds fantastic so what are some of the biggest barriers you think that older workers face in the labor market so it kind of alluding to some points made earlier I think one big barrier is transitioning jobs it's just in general on average a more difficult thing for older workers to do for a variety of reasons so I think one big thing that would benefit both those workers individually and businesses would be helping facilitate those transfers and that goes to that speaks to changing policies that relate to how do we evaluate people who are applying for positions those kinds of things I think are very important another challenge that older workers face in the labor market is that oftentimes they have very diverse needs you might have somebody who is in their early 60s who really does want to retire at 65 or maybe they want to retire early we have to have policies and practices in place that work for that person and also work for a person who is the same age but wants to work another 15 years so understanding that older workers have this diversity of want in terms of what they want to get out of their work and how it fits within their life for example we have workers who are technically retired but enter and exit the labor force at a pretty high rate they might come in during the summer and work a summer job because that is something they like to do maybe they are moving from one location to another seasonally and they sometimes want to work sometimes they don't want to work having an environment in place that actually facilitates that for older workers but also for workers in general would benefit them and also employers particularly in a labor market as tight as it currently is great so when you think about policies and employment practices that benefit older workers what are some of the things we should be holding so that we are not really impacting the rest of the workforce well I think the way that question is framed is actually perfect because one thing that we always talk about is that the innovations and the changes that we advocate for are things that help everybody it's not about I think oftentimes economics is viewed as a zero-sum game that if I help a specific group I have to be taking from another group we actually find that that's completely not the case and the workforce is a really great way to illustrate that point so for example if I think back to we talked about the great resignation a lot of news articles for example in recent years have talked about older people staying in the workforce and not having this negative implication they've actually been blamed for example for rising inflation it's also come up that if somebody stays in the workforce longer they're basically taking a job from a younger worker and in reality that's actually not at all true so for example if you have somebody in your business who's 65 or older and let's say they retire they move on to a new position you're not going to replace that person with somebody who's come right out of college that's just not how that works we have groups of people who have different roles and somebody who's in that role at that age they're doing something that's different from a younger worker who's just gaining experience and learning on the workforce so there's that issue of just the misconception of this idea that we have to be taking from one group to benefit another we really have policies we really advocate for policies that benefit all workers and kind of to that point going back to this idea of the multi-generational workforce we find that workers in age diverse environments are actually actually prefer that environment and are more productive because of it great we do have a few questions moving around there is something okay companies balance the need to keep up with changing market tactics and still targeting this population who still target this population you might engage with those new tactics much less I think the question really is around efficacy of approach and your thoughts there yeah so I think I'm not an expert in marketing obviously but I would say just in general there's this idea of the question mentions balancing a need I would say that it's always important to re-examine what needs are you actually balancing and what are the costs of a particular approach so I think in general obviously any approach to marketing any approach to your business has to be well researched I would just encourage people not to have preconceived notions about what your group of people is so if you're selling a product for example that targets a younger audience because of the nature maybe it's a tech product we think about people that consume tech products as being dominantly younger I would say again that's a dated notion if I actually look at the consumption of tech goods and services the fastest growing groups are all older consumers part of that was the pandemic where older adults decided that they wanted to adopt different types of technology because they wanted to communicate with their loved ones, with their friends in an environment of isolation but basically I think that gets to the heart of the idea of you want to be thinking about all consumers as being very adaptable and older consumers are a really good example so when you're thinking about what type to take what different initiative to take think about challenging your conception of what a particular group is Fantastic, that resonates my mother is in her mid-80s and she facetimes she does Zoom for all her volunteer work text messages, emails that's all the things and she learned most of it from my son so when my younger friends are like oh I can't figure it out I'm like call my mother she'll help me so Justin I want to take time for the audience to pose more questions so can we open up for more Q&A? Absolutely please I would love to hear more questions Great, well while we wait for questions to start coming in one thing that I do know people often wonder is how the data that you're holding shows up in segregation with men versus women or other sort of demographics that you might have explored? I think that's a really really interesting question and actually we have a series of articles that I've not mentioned specifically but I've alluded to some of their findings that get to some of those issues and that actually we're going to expand upon in a report coming out in 2024. So the series is called Revelations Through Data and the basic goal of each article is to use a publicly available data set to highlight something that's maybe surprising about older adults as a population, maybe challenges a sort of stereotype or also draws parallels between older adults and younger people and the fact that they often share the same goals, the same needs, all these things. So, you know, if we look at a lot of those topics, so for example one of the articles is on social isolation, one of them is on, actually two of them are on work I mentioned Prime Working Age, we have one about thinking beyond Prime Working Age, we have another one that's thinking about the pandemic and how it influenced workers with disabilities. If I break down a lot of those trends by something like race or ethnicity or something like gender, you see a few things. First you would see that broadly speaking there are a lot of parallel trends where people of different races and ethnicities and different genders are experiencing the same thing. So, for example, labor force participation among older workers has gone up for every group of people any major racial ethnic category men and women, if I look back to the early 90s to today labor force participation among those who are 65 plus has increased in all those groups. There might be level differences between the groups but the trend is always the same. Similarly, that series has an article that will be published in about a month on parenting. That article on parenting is talking about delayed childbearing and how children that are born today are disproportionately born to older mothers and fathers, mothers and fathers that are 30, 35, 40 and beyond. That is also happening in every single demographic group. It happens that the trends are rising by education category they're rising by racial and ethnic status. Again, there's level differences but everybody's trending in the same direction. One thing that's interesting about these trends is that we see similar experiences across these groups. However, there are also things that kind of come out that highlight the need to kind of adapt policies particularly because some groups are vulnerable. One great example would be that workers in certain groups socioeconomic especially might find it much harder to transfer jobs for example later in life. A really good case is and I'll just highlight this, this is not a demographic category but it's sort of a skills category which I think is often correlated demographically. If I have workers who are coming out of work because they're laid off, let's say that their job was downsized due to technical change, so automation for example, or for some of the reasons their skill sets obsolete, that group can face huge barriers to moving into new work both because of their age because of the age discrimination issues that we've already talked about and also because of their lack of access to resources. So it can be extremely expensive to reskill and extremely difficult if you're an older adult trying to get those new skills. So that can really affect particular skill sets disproportionately and because those skill sets can be concentrated in particular demographic groups we see some very strong impacts there. So that's a big issue that we're improving policies and practices in those areas would really help a particular population of people who are in desperate need of that help. Thank you, Rev. Another question coming in. How can you educate employers about the benefit of hiring older adults? Well, from my end I think a big part of it is just pointing out these trends is sort of just highlighting that what you might have believed to be true in the past is no longer the case and basically that there's this pool of expertise, pool of experience and workers that can benefit your firm. I think a lot of employers have just found that out by themselves out of necessity of these last few years but I think it's important to highlight that and the other thing is to kind of again challenge this idea about what if you're thinking about hiring a worker what does that mean for your business and what are you going to get out of that investment? So I think a really interesting thing to highlight here is this idea of first off sort of conceit, judicial notions about how employees and their employers interact. So you might think that 50 years ago there was this concept that you come out of school or you come out of your training you get hired by an employer and you stay with them for 35 years with your entire work experience. That's really not the case anymore. It's much, much more likely now that for younger workers we see a very, very active job popular. You might come out of the labor force, you might work for a couple years for several different employers and your career is really morphed into a situation where you're actually having many jobs, maybe even many different skill sets. So the actual if I'm an employer and I'm thinking about hiring a younger person I now have to very consistently think this person might be moving on in just a couple of years. So the return of that investment is very different than it might have been in prior generations. And that actually motivates one reason why older workers are an interesting group to look at. Because if you're thinking about hiring somebody in their 60s, first off they're much more likely now than it was in the past to work longer. And you actually might get more years of labor out of that group than you would out of a younger person who might have different goals in terms of how long they want to stay in the job. Again, it's important not to apply any type of stereotype to somebody of any age. It's just important to think in a constructive objective way about what workers might want and to ask those questions and to explore those opportunities. Fantastic. So we've spoken from the perspective of looking at this population what are your thoughts on what we should be sharing with this population about how to think about being in the workforce participating in the economy in a powerful effective way. You know, I think one thing that's interesting to me first off, I think that there are sometimes stereotypes that exist for people even about themselves that are negative that reduce their ability to live the life that they want to live. So that is one thing is having a message of empowerment for older people, like knowing that you can succeed if you want to change careers if you want to do whatever objectives you have in your life that there are resources that you can avail yourself of that will help you achieve those goals. I think that message is really important but I think another message that's really important is that groups in general and older workers and older adults in general have kind of mirrored this. It's dynamic and very adaptable at an individual level. So a great example would be the increasing labor force participation of the 65 plus population since the 90s. I mean, I'm talking now 30 years later about policies and practices that should be in place to help that group of people and they've done this all by themselves. They've doubled their labor force participation without really having any kind of outside force helping them achieve that goal. I think that's one of the things that existed three decades ago. So even in the face of all those obstacles we have this group showing this dynamism and this ability to overcome barriers and so I think that's an important thing is that it's not necessarily about basically individual action always leads policy change and practice change. Recognizing the value of that group and how they've changed and how they can contribute, I think that's a key starting to understand how you can benefit as an employer, as a policy maker, as a society at large. Great. Another question has come in. Is there any data about the risk of AI human resource bots shifting out older adults? I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, one huge issue here is the big unknown is what AI what will the role of AI be in changing what a worker does of any age. And I think one thing that doesn't get talked about enough in terms of AI conversations is that the presence of AI in terms of a machine doing something that a human used to do that's a that dates back to the dawn of the industrial revolution and even before. So before the steam shovel people used regular shovels to dig holes and when the steam shovel came along that replaced workers and it changed what workers do. So I think there is this idea that it's worth mentioning that AI as we talk about it now is an evolution of a trend that's existed for a very, very long time and labor has evolved to meet the nature of that trend. Now I do think that what's happening in AI right now is very new in that it's a real leap forward in what can be automated and what types of skills can be automated. So we think about automation historically as being kind of routine something that a machine can do just because it's something that's repetitive and something that can be automated. Now we think about AI as being potentially able to replace very non-routine labor and that's a very new thing so in terms of affecting the workers that might get affected. I think generally speaking what I would say we actually have a paper that working on it now it's still in a draft form but it's thinking about the future of work and looking at projections for the growth of employment opportunities in different occupations and what we generally find is that those projections which account for things like skills ops, obsolescence and other things they don't tend on average they don't really say that older workers are any more threatened by something like automation relative to their younger counterparts. There are definitely occupations out there that we expect to decline because of their risk of automation. A good example would be telephone operators that's already an extremely rare job now it used to be very very common but it should it will very likely disappear sometime within the next 10 to 20 years but older workers don't tend to be over concentrated in that set relative to the younger counterparts there are certain skill sets where older workers are very prominent and that skill set doesn't have a great outlook but there are also similar skill sets where younger workers are the dominant group and their outlook is poor. Great, thank you so much for that Justin. We are coming up on time and I just want to thank you for sharing so much about the longevity economy we've learned quite a bit around the elements of the global workforce, the global economy and what that means for various countries around the world whether they are more mature economies or those with younger populations to understand how businesses and policy makers should be thinking about the economy and the participants who are older workers and adults and you've helped us remember that skills really matter and that we should be holding on to the evolution of skills without fear of science or technology as we move to a close we'd like to thank you for your time and invite you to share a few closing remarks. Thank you so much, Mitrik. It's been a joy to have this conversation with you and again thank you to everybody for attending thank you to SOCAP for putting this webinar on I really enjoy having these kinds of conversations I think they're really important and they help us move forward in important areas. I want to close very quickly by just highlighting some resources for the audience so I've done this with some QR codes here so I talked about the global longevity economy outlook today that was all the work that related to older consumers around the world so if you want to read that report the QR code on the left will provide that resource for you that will direct you straight to that this is a very long it's a long report it's 80, 90 pages long covers a lot of information one thing that we find people often enjoy is just digging into that data themselves as I mentioned there are 76 individual economies covered we also have global estimates for things like consumer spending for GDP impact employment impact, labor income impact it's a lot of data and a lot of time people want to look at it in whatever at their own pace or they want to look at a particular region there's a great website if you go to the explore the data QR code we have a lot of table of visualization tools that allow you to look at things like trends over time for a specific economy for a particular outcome there's a lot of very interesting stuff there so I encourage you to look at that website if you want to sort of dig into the data in a deeper maybe more specific way other longevity economy reports that I think are really relevant to the conversation we had today we have two that talk about workers in some interesting ways so one of them is the economic impact of age discrimination that report is basically about how age discrimination that older workers face in the labor market could be things like a lack of opportunity to be rehired early retirement either implicitly or explicitly the economic costs of that tend to be very broad not just for the individuals who are actually experiencing that discrimination but for their families and for society at large and even for the employers that are engaging in that so that's a really interesting report another really interesting report is this one on the right here the economic impact of supporting working family caregivers I think this is a really interesting report on our end both because it tackles caregiving and its relationship to work in a way that I think is very novel and doesn't get enough attention and also it covers all caregivers and I think one really interesting issue with caregiving is that it increasingly covers a very very broad age spectrum so working family caregivers might be young parents raising children it might be middle aged parents who are simultaneously raising their children and caring for an older loved one like a mother and father for example and it also increasingly includes workers who are older who maybe are working and also caring for their spouse or their loved one or another family member so it's a very interesting paper and it covers caregivers of every age and the economic benefits that are achieved by supporting that population finally I mentioned the series revelations through data there are two articles in it four have been published actually one was published just yesterday six will be published ultimately we have two additional ones coming in January but the two articles that I think most relate to today's conversation are published through our code here on the left and just yesterday we published COVID-19 and Leopold's patient among people with disabilities it's a very interesting article and that is on the right so for those are additional resources that you can look to and yeah of course you can always go to ARP's website in general we have a lot of other really interesting work to examine thank you very much Justin it's been a pleasure