 Welcome to the Longevity Challenge, rewiring economies for longer lives. I'm Juliet Mann. I'm a news anchor for CGTN Europe, which is China's international channel. I was reading a news article the other day, which was talking about how we can prepare to become millionaire retirees. It was a bit of a quiz, so you had to put in your age, type in your salary, put in your pension's contribution, hit enter. And I'm not on track. I'm not on track to become a millionaire retiree. Apparently, I shouldn't even consider retiring before the age of 77. I said, you know what, I'm going to need a lot of help in navigating this longer life, because we're all living longer. Which means that we're all going to be working for longer. The World Health Organisation expects the number of over 60s to double by 2050 to 2.1 billion people. And in Europe and in North America, there's substantial growth amongst older adults. By 2050, one in four of us will be over 65. And that's going to have big financial implications for individuals, sure. But also for society. The global ageing population means there's going to be more people in retirement and already the retirement systems that we have, they just can't cope. And the headlines, they scream panic, don't they? We hear about a silver tsunami, don't we? Or a demographic time bomb. But actually, there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity for a bit of retirement rewiring. And that's what this session is going to be about today. This session is going to throw the spotlight on how to build financial resilience for consumers, for the workforce, for investors and for leaders. And we've got a fantastic panel here. So let me introduce you to our panel. We've got Graham Piss from Mercer. It's a consultancy which works very closely with WEF in the longevity space. I'm going to talk to him about redesigning retirement and the pension's outlook. We've got Gog Sunjoo. You're from Skills Future in Singapore. That's really innovative and exciting things happening around ageing societies. So I'm looking forward to speaking to you. Linda Gratton, an organisational psychologist from the London Business School. I should say Professor Gratton, shouldn't I? You also co-wrote the seminal book, A Hundred Year Life, and another one, Around the Future of Work. So she's going to help explain a different way of looking at longevity. And here we have Christian Keller, who is the chief economist at Barclays. He's going to talk us through the numbers, really, and explain this demographic transformation that's taking place. So look, I think let's start off by a little bit of context, a little bit of a scene setting, everyone. I'll start with you, Christian, because there are so many uncertainties in 2023. We're still recovering from the pandemic. There are conflicts from Ukraine to Sudan. We have a refugee crisis. We have a cost of living crisis. We have this crazy high inflation. But there is one sure certainty, and that's that we're all going to live decades longer. So give us an overview of what that's going to mean for global growth in the near term. First of all, I think it's a very valid point you make. We earn a time where we look a lot of the crisis that hit us, and everything is unprecedented, unpredictable, and so we stumbled from crisis to crisis, and we sometimes lose sight of things that are actually quite predictable. I mean, climate change is one, but we need more predictable in terms of knowing what we're going to see in the next decade is really demographics. It's something that we like to talk about, but then whenever something happens, we say, well, we can push it off. We are actually at the moment at a pretty critical juncture. Our calculations are, for example, that the Chinese population actually next year may start already falling in absolute terms. We now, if you go to Europe, Germany, for example, there's now actually around this time now a kink where there are less and less people entering the labour market. We have obviously a lot going on in France, where we see protests against increasing working lives. It's something that is never relevant immediately in the short term because demographics does work over decades, but it's very dangerous to always pushing it off because there's always some crisis. I think, actually, at this point, if you look at a lot of the statistics, and we're not bore you with all the numbers, but we are actually at a critical juncture, China, Europe, where right now some of the ratios, the typical ratios, we look at dependency ratios, age above 65 over working age population. I would actually say we look at dependency ratios. We should also include people younger than 15 because it's very interesting. At the same time, we're getting older, but there are also fewer children. A lot of these ratios change then a lot. They all have a kink around this time. The next decade is quite important. On the short term on growth, I think other factors probably play a bigger role than necessarily what exactly the population growth is. I would say we also already see some of the consequences. The fact that we have massive social unrest in France over increasing the retirement age by two years shows you what Europe in a way has to look at as it needs to prepare its populations for their ageing and maybe some of the generous pension schemes cannot be sustained. I know that a lot of analysts are looking at China and wonder whether they need to start correcting their forecast for some of the earnings forecast for companies because the population is now in a very dramatic way, by the way. I don't think this is always recognized in a very dramatic way China's demographic is going to change because like the rest of the world, this is embarrassing. Sorry. Like the rest of the world, they had a population boom really in the early 60s until the end of the 70s when they started one child policy. So then they dramatically changed and now you have all these people retiring which is a large group but you have no one coming. So they are doing something now that the rest of the world experienced but in a very drastic way. So one more point. So longer term growth will be affected because if you have less population growth automatically your global GDP numbers will be less. GDP per capita can still be good. And second, and stop with this, is we have amassed a lot of debt. So, you know, over the last 40 years population stopped growing as quickly. But at the same time of the last 40 years we amassed a lot of debt and that means that now a much smaller coming generation does not only have to pay for the elderly but also deal with this debt burden that was amassed over the last 40 years. And that's true. There are fewer people in the workforce paying per retiree. I wonder that looking at this demographic transformation that's taking place there are going to be some positives, there are going to be some negative impacts on the global workforce. Linda, what do you think? About what? The positive and negative impacts on the global workforce. Okay. Well, you know, I was sort of fortunate in many ways because when I wrote The Hundred Year Life I wrote it as a psychologist but with an economist and it's that combination that brought all the insight. So, here we are. That book has been very important in Japan which is until recently, you know, the world's oldest population and the world's most shrinking population but as you quite rightly say, although Japan now has a whole centre for The Hundred Year Life it's actually China that is the next country up because these are demographic changes which will affect every single country. What does that mean? Well, I was fortunate because I talk about work and how it means to work but my colleague Andrew Scott, an economist, worked out how long you would have to work if you had the sort of savings that most of us have and that figure is 72 years and so actually one of the things I decided to do was to work till 72 and I'll tell you how that goes in a couple of years' time. But then what happens is once you say, well, I'm going to work till 72, how do you feel about that? And of course in Singapore that's exactly what you're now talking to your citizens about. Everyone says, well, I can't possibly have the traditional full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement because you can't retire at 60 and live to 90. Apart from the financial aspect of it, how does it feel just from a social relationship aspect? I think we began to talk about something that's become quite important actually, the idea that you need a multi-stage life, you need a life where you move in and out of different types of work at different stages, much more individualised. The three-stage life is very much around age cohorts. If you knew somebody's age, you knew what stage of life they were at but this is more individualised and that means from a psychological perspective people need more insight and that's the work that you're doing in Singapore and we're doing in the UK actually to give people insight from about their 50s on about what sort of life would you like, what would it look like, what would you want to do, how much do you save, how much do you want to give back to the community and so on. Let me just say a couple of points about that. What we've found and I'm a member of a research group in the UK who are looking at this in detail is that A, the over 50s did not come back to work after the pandemic and that's incredibly worrying for all of us because once they don't come back at 50, they don't work. So we know now why they didn't come back, they didn't come back and this has worked from the Phoenix Institute of which I'm a member. Three reasons. Number one, they were ill and that says something about the health system and I know you and I have just spoken about that in Singapore which is very much more focused on health than is on illness. Number two, they're looking after somebody, they're caring for somebody which actually in some cases is a grandchild, it's not always an aged parent. Number three, and this is particularly so in the UK, they don't like their job. So this really also plays into the whole issue that we've been focusing on, the WEF, which is good work. One more thing to say though about that group. Let's say you did, let's say at 50 you wanted to find a new job. So you applied for a job, you know, pretty well qualified. What then happens in that process? Well what we know happens is that you are discriminated against. We have absolute data on this, that in fact I have said publicly before I'll say it again that aged discrimination is worse in my view and I speak as a woman than gender discrimination. Horrible stereotypes about what 50-year-olds are like and what 60-year-olds are like and what 70-year-olds are like. So the point I would like to make in this panel today is this is a multi-stakeholder issue. Governments have to move, individuals have to move but importantly corporations have to move and there are not enough of you. In fact there are very few of you who are actively trying to retain and to bring in the over 50s. So my plea to you is if we want to get over this enormous crisis which we've described you have got to start employing, actively employing people over the age of 50. I want to talk about the corporate side of things in a moment but you were bringing in to you so I want to talk to you because there are different approaches out there from country to country, from region to region. So tell us about what is happening in Singapore and the measures that are being put in place to address the ageing population. Yes, we are very cognisant of the ageing populations and we are taking really important steps. So I just highlight three key points and then we can always discuss later. One is we are redefining healthcare not to treat people when they are sick but now we are moving into healthier SG, healthier Singapore means we have to take care of our health a weight, height of time and that means we have not just have long lifespans but long and healthy lifespans. I think that about the total wellness. So focusing a lot on shifting from sick care to healthcare, real healthcare and well-being. That's number one, redefining healthcare. Number two is about redefining lifelong learning. So we invest in our people in giving everybody $500 skiffish credit from 25 and above. So as long as you are alive, you have the credits. From time to time we see the consumption, we may top up again. I think that allowed people to take charge of how they want to see learning, how they want to readjust the kind of job role they are in into something else. So the kind of adjacency how they move across. So the lifelong learning will allow them to move in tender of their life, sages, internal career. I think the third part of readjustment I would say is about redesigning workplaces to help people stay longer. So we have some success story among Singapore companies like our Sets Kitchen, which is the catering kitchens in the Changi Airport. They redesigned the whole workplace so that they are 70-year-old can continue to stay in the job. Instead of asking them to carry heavy cricks of potato, there's a robot that follows them. So the robots will carry the potato to the right place and then unload it and they can continue to do the work. So it's part of automation to help the older generation to stay in the work. So I think I can just briefly talk about these three points first so we can discuss further later on. That's interesting then. So the companies are adapting their workforces to accommodate the older population. But I wonder if it's sort of feeling as they go or whether it's something that's now becoming more ingrained in the way they do business. Graham, let's bring you in. Are companies listening? Have retirement systems and setups and pensions changed in line with this demographic transformation? Not yet, is what I would say. So if we went back a few decades, we had in the developed world at least a predominance of defined benefit pension plans and what I mean by that is that people were promised a given a set amount of retirement income usually linked to salary that gave them an adequate retirement income after a full career. Gradually due to more tight funding regulations which created more cash volatility for sponsoring employers and also accounting standards that required those assets and liabilities to be marked to market at regular intervals that caused tremendous volatility and financing of those plans and has pushed virtually all companies in the private sector towards what we call defined contribution plans which is where you pay a set amount of contribution into a pension plan each year and then the individual typically is responsible for managing that and choosing how it's invested and ultimately the benefits that will be provided are just what that pot of money provides when you need to take it. So you've moved away from this an insurance of an adequate retirement income into something where your retirement income is just going to depend upon how much you've saved up and the financial conditions at the point at which you retire so there's a lot more volatility in that. Much more recently we've seen some of the more progressive companies starting to think about introducing minimum standards so looking at, we've seen the talking about living wage and looking at how much you actually need to earn in order to be able to live to provide a basic level of income to live adequately or you could set that at a different level to maybe allow you more freedoms the ability to eat out, the ability to go on holidays for example so companies will look at the different levels of income needed and try to target a living wage. Some companies are now looking at living pensions as being a target. That I think at the moment at least is proving challenging because the one thing that everybody underestimates is the cost of providing an adequate retirement income and if you think about what we've just discussed here if you're going to work for 35 years say or 40 years and be in retirement for 35 or 40 years and you earn on your investments you keep up, manage to keep your investments up with real salary growth you know if you're paying in for the same amount of time as you were going to be taking money out actually if you pay 5% of your salary into a pension you can expect to get a retirement pension of 5% of your final salary which is probably a lot lower than what people will think they're going to get from that money and that's a ticking time bomb what we've talked about time bombs before that I think is yet to be addressed and we've seen it happen in some of the countries that moved to define contribution plans earliest like the US when the financial crisis hit just as companies actually needed higher turnover we found that a lot of people couldn't afford to go into retirement because they had way less than they'd had two years before in 2009 the value of their savings was way less than it had been in 2007 and the cost of purchasing a retirement income had also gone up for a given amount of money so you had this double whammy of the falling amount of retirement accumulated savings to lower rates of interest and that's only got worse over the last 20 years so what we see at the moment is actually you have a whole generation of people in defined contribution plans that will not be able to enjoy the same level of retirement income that the current retirees are enjoying in developed countries and that they're not enjoying them but also because they are going to be living longer and working longer and there's a resistance isn't there in many places to having to work longer even though because we're living longer it might be living healthier lives with companies and governments focusing more on wellbeing that might make us feel we need to work but if we see what's happening in France I mean a great example they want to nudge up the retirement age from 62 to 64 and the workforce aren't having any of it I mean one comment I mean the value of annuities it's amazing and even for financial educated people to realise if I want it from the age of 60 so until let's assume 30 more years a certain monthly income I would recommend everyone put it in an exercise but you do annuity the amount of money you need to have saved up by then is just amazingly high and I think it's something probably very early on in schools which will teach children even if you don't have to be an actuary something I looked up because on the question on France one has to just realise life expectancy this is a global number this is a number that includes developing countries life expectancy according to UN at the 1950 was 46 years average 2022, 71 so now over the times when it was 70 years we increased it from 46 to 71 and at the same time the retirement ages almost barely moved and now we are fighting over two years look I don't want to get into the nitty gritty and whether the way Macron did it this is not the subject here but the fact is in particular in Europe and in particular in older societies that includes probably Japan there needs to be a social dialogue if we continue by governments just trying each year to do something about lifting the age or so and then the entire working population unionised fighting against that won't work I think that really needs to be an engagement where one rethinks how one thinks about this maybe work patterns need to change lifelong learning maybe also that people they maybe cannot be expected to do the same job when they get older even if they are healthy but maybe we need to think of that career's peak but then there's nothing dishonour about it we can't continue to working but no longer in that top job this comes right back to what Linda was saying about this change of mindset that's needed not just from the individual point of view but all the way up from corporations to governments and to move away from this three stage life talk us through that a little bit more so really the whole way that we thought about our lives was based on the predictability of those three stages that you would be in education you would be at work and you would retire and I think from a psychological perspective what was interesting about that is that everybody went through the stage at the same time imagine everybody walking together and at the age of 20 you look around and say what's everyone doing I'm going to do the next thing and at the age of 60 or 62 you look around and say what's everybody doing you don't need to be a social pioneer you didn't have to build anything yourself you didn't have to read a book about managing your career you just did what everybody else did and I think the real challenge with this three stage the multi stage life which is really the only way to live a long life there isn't any other way is that it requires both flexibility on the part of companies in terms of flexible working practices and insights and skill development on the part of government a conversation I absolutely agree with you about the conversation and that's one of the things that Arbe did in Japan is he actually created a council on the 100 year life which had representatives from all of the major ministries and the heads of the universities and so on and we spent two years talking about what would we do how would we come and they made a whole set of recommendations by the way which were very specific so government needs to be involved but then people need to be involved and let me just say something about that one of the experiments we recently ran with the institute is that we took people aside over a period of time using workshops talking about the fact that annuities and this and that and everything you know and have multi stage life and at the end of it the researchers asked and you know what most people said actually you're an economist so you probably don't know what humans think what do you think the humans thought they said we're not going to do anything different they didn't do what you and I would thought which is great now now we're going to have a multi stage life we're not going to do anything different and I think that's the sort of that's one of the fundamentals so you've got two actors here in this stakeholder neither of whom want to move companies are doing really honestly very little every now and again I think I'm going to write a Harvard business review article about what we're doing for the over 50s I can't get enough case studies literally to make an article this is the thing isn't it and individuals are going oh I don't think I have to think about that but as you say and the data and you know this from Marsa poverty I mean this is the truth of it there will be mass poverty of the over 60s unless we do something Singapore of course is an astonishing country I'm sorry I referred to it as a company because it does things so well like a multi well run multi national but you know the focus on skills is very very smart because you know if you want to employ somebody over the age of 50 they've got to be skilled and government has to play a role in that and Singapore does an astonishing and has done for years actually on upskilling their citizens Julia I can just jump in here to just unpack a little of what Linda say about in Singapore so yes we look at every citizens must realise everybody's fullest potential and that's the reason why we invest heavily in the front end of education but continue to invest in everybody throughout life stages so in early this year we just talk about national career health if everybody must have a career health then we can manage we know what skills we have we know what career we have gone through we can make adjustment in terms of our life stages what kind of job we are going to what kind of skills you need and then you can get into the kind of work and it's fully supported by the government and the data insights will allow you to say this is an important skills do I want these skills because I need this job do I have these skills so we are trying to use data use technology to do personalised service at the same time is trying to push for more let everybody access career coaching because career coaching is very important you don't do it when you are out of job you need it to plan your life plan your career throughout the life stages so those companies will have career coaches fantastic like myself volunteer career coach of public service it's fantastic to talk to people about how to plan their life and then what kind of how they want to pivot how much time they want to do in paid work so it's quite important for us to have this kind of system and framework in place so you are talking about prioritising education and upskilling at all stages of life so this mentorship piece is also really important so Graham we are talking here about how important it is to adapt and rewrite the system all of this makes sense on paper so how do you then get that everyone mobilise to do something about it rather than just talk about the problem I think at the end of the day whether you talk about government or whether you talk about private corporations it's all about the business case so companies are going to do this they are going to invest in keeping workers productive for longer if they can see a return on it and maybe for exactly the reasons that Kristin has just outlined about the fact that in so many countries we are going to see far fewer people entering the workforce in the next few years maybe that will provide the drive for companies to actually invest much more heavily and really make a difference in actually keeping people for longer and making sure that the jobs can be adapted to suit what people aged over 50 are looking for so many people are leaving the workforce because they actually don't feel that they can cope well in the environment that they find themselves in there have been some pilot schemes though maybe you can talk us through some of these but some companies that are not sitting still that are changing the factory floor most companies are sitting still I mean honestly it was interesting I talked to a very very smart CHRO this morning who said to me it's very obvious Linda that in the last 15 years we will have a major skill shortage in Europe and I said have you thought about the over 50s he said no which companies are focusing on the over 50s have you got some examples in Singapore I could give you examples and they are the same old examples BMW have changed their factory so that it can accommodate people over the age of 50 quite a lot of retailers are beginning to work with the over 50s because clearly when everyone ages your consumers age and consumers would like if you walk into a B&Q store which is one of the stores in Europe which sells DIY stuff you'd like to potentially to have somebody of your own age giving you advice so retail has been pretty good actually manufacturing has been pretty good professional service firms have done very little I think although they are saying they are I really am being honest here because I'm a academic so it's easy for me to say what I see really and what I observe is frankly we're just not doing enough we're not doing enough and we need to do what Singapore governments need to do what Singapore has done and companies need to completely re-evaluate their whole talent pipeline and ask themselves are we discriminating against people over the age of 50 it may be actually by the way that governments move on this governments might decide that that discrimination against age is as bad as discrimination against gender in which case there'll be a whole slew of regulations which companies will have to start thinking about I'm not sure if it will get to that but I wouldn't be surprised so there's a lot to be done at the beginning of this conversation and there are many places around the world aren't there Christine, where the pension systems the retirement schemes are just not sustainable China they haven't announced anything official but there are some considerations because their retirement age is 60 and they're thinking of incrementally of phasing it up having people work for a shorter time but then teaching and mentoring some of the younger members of the workforce in terms of what you would like to see in company reports in terms of the numbers and the statistics what is going to make a difference what should governments do first of all what's important to realise is the type of pension system that you run doesn't make a difference in Europe I know when happened after the global financial crisis they pointed to the USC they have defined contributions and now all their savings are worse and less isn't it so much better our system which is a pay as you go where you basically pay out pension from the contributions that you collect at the same time so pensioners in Europe may have the illusion that somehow they pay a contribution that's being saved no it's paid immediately out they're going to feel the pressure too the government can promise to pay that pension but they need to squeeze it from those who are working by raising contributions meaning they don't get away from dealing with that demographic situation and in China is a bit like this having a very low pension age they're going to be a lot of people entering and at the same time there's no one coming or very few people coming into the labour force so what you need to do then is change the parameters make people work longer that's what one attempt is in Europe reduce pensions no one like that or increase contributions but you know there's only so many parameters you can work with and it's simple arithmetic and you know it will have to be done and the longer you wait the more you think it will be so my first recommendation exactly do it as early as you do it the less you have to do but unfortunately because people don't feel it yet there were many bumper years in the recent decades where Europe had actually particular countries like Germany had an overflow actually access in the pension and they would just spend it and just have new benefits they would give out which every politician loved instead of saving it and creating a little bit of a saving cushion to deal with the demographic changes coming out I think now they're starting but unfortunately too late Do you think that your global economic outlook might change if there were some big strides made from government from industry from academia to come up with a gear shift a joined up framework here I think the immediate change would take place really through labour markets you mentioned it you know right now a lot of people economists are stunned about and which has a big impact on inflation by the way because the wages are driven up by not enough supply and there are many people who could be working and they're not working and we need to find out why if they enter the labour force you have more labour working probably on average at less wages which sounds bad but it's actually not a bad thing because if more people working the wage bill overall goes up but you don't have the inflation pressure that will have an impact on the outlook that will be really short on you One of the reasons that Linda mentioned was why was because some people might be caring for others younger or older which makes me think about health care systems they need to shake up too Interestingly enough one of the recommendations that the Arbeil report on the 100 year life came up with was childcare and you'd think well what's childcare got to do with the 100 year life well it was to do it was actually to take caring responsibilities because in Japan they wanted to get women into the workforce which they pretty much done actually but you're right actually it's a complex set of issues can I just mention one other point which we haven't talked about yet and it's really fundamental which is one of the reasons why it's difficult to say that the pension age should be 67 or 68 is that as people age the variance within the age cohort increases so a 60 year old the variance within 60 year olds is very very wide and as they age it gets wider and wider and wider and that's why it's so difficult to make one judgment about a 67 year old because you could be a 67 year old running a marathon or you could be a 67 year old who's struggling to stand up and that's why it's so hard for a government to say it should all be 67 and so pensions and this is the complexity of pensions really has to somehow acknowledge that there will be within any society a number of 67 year olds who actually can't work and the other issue is if you've done manual work let's say you've been a truck driver until the age of 50 this is not a job for a 60 or a 70 year old truck driver it's already an unhealthy job by the way but it's not a job for a 70 year old so we have to re-skill people out of manual work in their 50s so that they can move into work that's not manual but be also acknowledge massive cohort age cohort diversity there's not one size fits all that's certainly what I'm getting here so I just wonder in terms of what you'd like to see in terms of policy makers in terms of what policy makers can do to address all of these changes that are happening in society in the workforce and in the make up of the population in Singapore we already implemented the re-employment scheme whereby when individual reach what's called the pseudo retirement age company are obliged to issue contracts on the annual basis and the job can be redesigned to something else you need not go back to the same jobs so that allowed the flexibility on both end the employees and the employer to decide what is the best deal for both I think this should continue definitely for sure in terms of the ageism so called the ageism I would think that perhaps sometime this ageism concept is a kind of convenient excuse because it will take a lot more efforts for line manager and HR human resource manager to rethink how to take advantage of this demographic premium I quite premium it's not a tsunami that demographic premium because they are experienced they have a deep knowledge but how do we take advantage of this demographic premium and to rethink how can I design work to take advantage it can be I don't need you to drive the trucks but can I get you to train someone else do something because you have the in depth knowledge so I think that part of capability currently is not spoken a lot and not thought through I think we should perhaps in the next book you should promote that to help company and line manager to rethink I don't always need a young warm body but the task the kind of task the kind of activities may be warrant for someone someone with experience and age because you can't earn it without going through that new experience so I think that the redesigning job require a lot more deeper thinking to make it happen just an example of that you have to be pretty able to have lived through an inflatory environment some of us in this room have that's a really important skill right now to understand what happens when you're living in inflation so Graeme we're training bonds and they're all training just for the last 10-15 years and they have never exactly that so there's something to be said here about not seeing the ageing population as a burden but as an opportunity what do you think Graeme I absolutely agree as I say it's all about trying to keep people productive for longer that will produce a greater amount of income for the economies that we're representing here and what we need to also do is realise that we can't carry on with this idea of a fixed retirement age and a retirement income from that point to expect to have enough for everybody at that point onwards that we have to recognise the diversity we have to recognise that there will be some people forced to retire much earlier due to ill health or due to the nature of their job or a combination of them both that will need support earlier and there will be some people who can actually afford to provide for themselves for much longer and save up and may need a lot less assistance from pension funds or the state so an ageing population isn't bad for the economy it doesn't have to be complicated it doesn't have to be and I really do think the rhetoric around it has to change I think whenever we deteriorating worsening demographics just because a population gets old and at the same time this jubilant great demographics just because population growth is high we have many examples where actually high population growth does not lead to high per capita GDP growth actually individuals get better year by year and so I think there is a bit of a simplistic narrative around how we view populations which are young or older and I think that is already would be a good beginning to start talking about it differently I want to go around the panel taking in all of the things we have said here and just think if you could go back in time and give advice to your 20 year old self what would it be in terms of preparing maybe yourself for retirement or maybe becoming a campaigner or maybe trying to set some steps in motion now I know you said you think that people at school should learn more about new ideas and about personal funds what would you tell your 20 year old self Christian? The simplest math of compound interest and new ideas maybe a bit far but have an idea of those concepts the power of time I think that's important and aging is about time what compounding does I think that's one and second when I hear about the differences the variance of how people I mean a lot of this is determined at young age so I will not giving it health advice here but I will tell my children to be careful that health is not something to think about only in your 20s and you can do a lot but a lot of the things that people suffer later are probably often have to do if they are not genetics how they live at the younger age and I think there is a growing actually I think do think there is a growing realisation of that already among the younger so become financially literate but also focus on that well-being before it's maintenance or other repair work that's going on Linda how about you? I would like Christian I would talk about time and I think when you're young it's very hard to imagine that you have a whole life ahead of you and that you can actually move time around you know you don't have to do everything all at once and the idea that you could actually take bits of what you want to do and be and move them forward or even move them back so what I certainly do with my MBA students is help them think about their whole timeline and obviously try and find work that they love because if you love what you do then you're more likely to carry on wanting to learn because being a lifelong learner is just such an important part of having a good life and what did you think if you're thinking too that people in government and organisations are trying to deal with the now and changing things for the future isn't necessarily top of the list I think it's quite important that we talk about from young at 20 we know about financial literacy, invest for our future our well-being literacy and I think there's one more thing that today not everyone of us are aware of is the skills literacy is what do we have when we go around participating in activities it can be school sports, it can be something competition, it can be things that we like to do but what is that accumulated skills literacy so it's like you just imagine we have a legal bricks we keep accumulating legal bricks but today we need to make it more evident and more aware of this skill literacy so that we can always re-assemble ourselves for different parts of life and real literacy is an important thing I like that, seeing ourselves a LEGO minifigur where we can take off a little bit and add another skill set I'm going to flip this around a little bit for you instead of saying what you look back at and tell your 20-year-old self what would you tell people around the room and maybe people a little bit older I'm talking to myself we built the over 50s what advice would you give them in terms of becoming more prepared for how the workforce is going to change? I think taking the perspective then at 50s probably a mixture of everything you've just discussed around looking after your health when we look people leave the workforce not because they've saved up for retirement usually the vast majority of people leave due to ill health or because they're forced out or because they hit a mandatory retirement age even if that's becoming less common these days it's still an issue and so these are things you can't control so the thing is to work out how much have you actually got in savings how is it invested what dependence do you have that you're going to need to look after how can you make sure that you keep yourself healthy but how can you make sure you've got adequate protection to get you through periods of long-term sickness or disability do you have insurance can you still get insurance life insurance for any outstanding debts that you might still have for example from a property how much do you need to be able to live there's a minimum in retirement so how much would you actually need to save up for to be able to have the minimum you need what do you need to be able to do to do that are you adequately protected against inflation hopefully the last couple of years I've actually raised that problem in people's minds because when you're talking about the next 30 or 40 years a lot of the people who've retired the last 10 years who bought an annuity with no pension increases whatsoever are now realising what that actually means in terms of actual buying power and that can be a real problem when you're no longer able to work or able to work enough to save up much more so I think it's really about doing a full health check looking at what you've got what protections you've got maybe getting rid of the protections you don't need anymore and using those funds for things that you really do need so very much a lot of that's on the individual so personal health checks to get your own finances in order but Ninja you also think that companies need to take on more responsibility and rewire their systems and the way they work and that's something that we're already seeing governments doing and maybe there are other organisations and countries that can learn from Singapore's example and taking all of those things together an ageing economy an ageing population might end up being a good thing for the global economy it's the next new growth it's the next new growth it's the next new growth I'd like to say thank you to our audience thank you to everybody who's taken part and thank you very much to our panels so much to talk about I think these conversations are going to disappear into the corridors of power and we'll be continuing this very much longer Christian, Graham, Linda and Sengu thank you very much thank you