 All right. Welcome to an HK session. I'm Kenji Kono, moderator for today. And today's topic is the prosperity in the age of longevity. Now in the midst of the remarkable period in history of mankind, as you see on the screen behind you, the world life expectancy. Now the global population is living much, much longer than ever before we experienced in history. Now if this trend continues, some experts predict that the children who were born in 2007 are likely to live up to 100 or even more, you believe or not. So this demographic change or the growing aging population is making a great impact on our lives in the many areas, such as work, health, and lifestyle. But at the same time, we are already having a heavy challenges, such as pension crisis, exploiting health care costs. But they are just some example of them. Now the question today is, what happens if living to 100 becomes a norm? And are we ready for it? To discuss this, we have the great panel here today. Let me introduce first Professor Linda Gratton to my immediate right. And Professor Gratton is a Professor of Management Practice London Business School. And she is the author of that famous bestseller, 100 Year Life, Living and Working in the Age of Longevity. Next to her is Mr. Yasuhiro Sato. He's the president and group CEO of Mizuho Financial Group, which is the largest financial group in Japan. And he was also the key member of the Japanese Government Advisory Committee on Aging. And next to him is Mr. William Modono, his correct pronunciation. OK. Of course, he's the minister of finance of Canada. But he was also the executive chair of the Canada's largest human resources firm. And he has co-authored the book titled Real Retirement. And last but not least is Dr. David Agus. He's a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California. And Dr. Agus is a world leading cancer specialist. Actually, he was a doctor for Steve Jobs. And he has published a lot of books. But his most recent bestseller is the Lucky Years, How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health. Now, let me start off with you, Dr. Agus. We see this life expectancy is getting longer. And it doesn't seem like it's going to be changed very soon. Now, as your medical expert, how far do you think this goes on? And what factors have led us to this current longer life expectancy? So what's interesting, that curve you showed a few minutes ago showing it going like this. Most of the gains are we got rid of death in the first few years, so people dying in a very young age, children. And so we're now starting to make gains at the other end. I think that's what gets us all excited. The human body wasn't engineered to live until age 200. The human body wasn't engineered until 100. And yet, we're going to be able to live there. So we're going to have to make new medical advances to allow us to live longer. In the 1950s, an amazing experiment was done by this woman named Wanda Ruth Lunsford. It was the only experiment she ever did. And she was kicked out of science. She took an old rat and a young rat. She put him to sleep, and she tied their skin together. And after about a day, their blood supplies joined. And then she looked four weeks later, the gray hairs had turned brown again, the heartbeat stronger, and the old rat. There were new neurons in the brain, and the muscles were bigger. She claimed she reversed aging. Well, they called her Dracula and Frankenstein, and they kicked her out of science. Well, last year, three labs at Harvard at Stanford, University of California, San Francisco, repeated Wanda's experiment, and it worked. And what they showed in journals, Medical Nature and Science, is that their stem cells, in each of us, they go to sleep at age 25. And there are now proteins that can turn them back on. And so the notion of being able to re-wake in those stem cells to re-analyze those organs that are engineered to kind of go in 80s, 90s, or 100, really makes it possible that we can live until about 120. 120. Wow. That sounds very interesting. Who are you going to sign up? Is that? You're right. Trusting. Professor Gratton, in your book, One Hundred Year Life, you mentioned that the three-staged life, starting with education, work, and retirement, this lifestyle is not going to be working any more in the future. Is that what you've said? Why is that? Well, imagine you live to 100, or even 120. We haven't done the economics for that. I wrote, I'm a psychologist. When we did it for 100, it was scary enough. I wrote the book, I'm a psychologist. I wrote it with an economist. And the first thing we did was to work out, in terms of your saving rates and how much you want to retire on and so on, how long do you have to work. I don't know how long you think you're going to have to work if you live to 100. But you basically have to work until you're in your 80s. So if you think about full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement, the three-stage life is obviously completely ridiculous. And you need to think about a multi-stage life. A multi-stage life where education becomes a lifelong event, a life where the work isn't just about full-time work. It's also maybe about exploring. It's maybe about building your own business. It's maybe about building a portfolio. And retirement becomes maybe a word you don't even hear anymore. Yes? All right. So if we think it's the end of a three-stage life, I think that individuals are beginning to realize that corporations aren't, and governments aren't either. So there's a huge amount of catching up. We actually believe that there will be a fundamental transformation in life. And our generation and our children will have to achieve that. They'll have to think about relationships, the 80-year-old marriage. All of this has got to be thought through. So we're in a time of just extraordinary excitement, but also, as you will say, in terms of inequality, of course, major challenges. OK. Mr. Sato, you are the business leader from Japan. And Japan is sort of like a front runner of the so-called super-aged nation. And I believe that people over 65 years all make up 27% of the whole population. What kind of issues do you think Japan is facing, or will be facing, with this aging population? Yeah, OK. I think this kind of longevity of society is not the sort of hypothetical problems for Japan. It's now reality. And I think in 2000 years, the centenarians in Japan were just about 10,000 about that. But in 2015, it's going to be 60,000. And there was the statistics, within 2050, it's going to be 600,000 or 700,000. So having said that, I think this longevity of society is the real current issues for the Japanese society. And I'd like to touch upon the four major issues facing this society. One is that lack of the working population. In some extent, it's related to the lower risk ratio. But this is crazy. In the year 2000 years, the working population was just about 77 million people. But it's going to be 50 million in 2050. We will lose the 30% of the working population. And somebody said that technology will help it. This is true, but this is not true. In terms of the quantitative approach of the working population, the answer is yes. But the qualitative approach, this is a huge amount of the mismatch of the working population. That's one first issue. The second one is that social security system. Now I think in Japan, total social security expenses in 2014 was just about US $1 trillion. But within 2050, it's going to be $1.53. So huge increase, which create the significant uncertainty in the society. That's the second part. And third one is that wealth disparity. I mean, inequality. We have many of the elderly people who is in the very poor position. Because they have been saving money, but they live more than their expectation. So having said that, they are losing the enough room of the saving. So this creates another issue, which is the wealth disparity, health disparity. It's also very significant issues. This is kind of the negative circle. We're starting from wealth disparity and to go into the bad health condition and may not be able to receive the appropriate treatment. Then create another low productivity. Then bother wealth disparity. This is kind of the negative circle via a significant issue. The last one is a so-called silver democracy in Japan. It's familiar with that? Silver democracy. Which is Japanese English, isn't it? So which means that the elder people has right to vote. The number of the elderly is going to be increased. The government has to take care of the elderly people. So which means that they are going to take an action to have support policy to other than the elderly people, other than the younger generation. It creates the significant and deep risk for the future. So that's kind of four big issues now we are facing. I think the Japanese government understand that. And Mr. Abe, Prime Minister, is now taking action to take care of that. But this is not the Japanese issue. This is the issue for every country, whatever the political system is. Thank you. That's a great summary of what's happening in the front-runner of the super-aged nation. And Canada, I believe, is going to be super-aged nation by 2030, according to one of our web reports. Now, I wonder what kind of impact or challenges you expect to see in Canada, especially in the area of government you work for, like in the pension and the social cost here? Well, I guess just first of all to agree with your starting point. Last year in Canada, we hit an important tipping point where we had more Canadians over the age of 65 than we had under the age of 15. So that was the first time for us that that had happened. We in Canada are facing the same sort of retirement challenges as other industrialized countries. We have a decline in workplace pension plans that's been significant. We have aging population and obviously low interest rates make it very difficult for people to save. So from a government standpoint, we look at this and say there's both issues during people's working lives that we need to think about along the lines of what Professor Gratton was talking about and issues about how we deal with people's anxiety around what's going to happen as they get older. So from our perspective, we're thinking about it in those two separate areas. In terms of in people's working lives, we're thinking very much about how do we train and retrain people? How do we get information to Canadians about what their opportunities are in work? And how do we think about the world of education and training in new ways? So recognizing that the pattern of having an education just until you're 20 or 21 or 22 and then leaving that aside is not gonna be long-term effective for people who have long working careers. We're thinking about how we can work collaboratively in our environment with our provinces to come up with new ways to train Canadians so they can be prepared for their second and third and fourth career iteration. We're also then thinking about how the government can lessen anxiety around retirement. So we've been in government for a year and a bit and we've already made some fairly significant changes. We took our Canada pension plan which has been very successful in alleviating poverty over the last generation and we got to an agreement with our provinces to significantly enhance that plan. So we're doing that in a way that's gonna be fully funded which means it'll take 40 years to get there but that means for the youngest of Canadians that was entering the workforce now they have the likelihood instead of having 25% coverage of 33% coverage at the end of a 40 year trajectory. We've also then increased what we call the guaranteed income supplement for the most impoverished of Canadian seniors to deal with immediate challenges for that group which is really along the lines of what you were saying in terms of the reality from an electoral standpoint of dealing with the elderly who are concerned about their situation. So for us it will be thinking about how we can enhance people's effectiveness during the course of their life and then as a government recognizing those workplace pension plans that have been eroded thinking about how we can create a support system underneath and that will be an ongoing challenge on both fronts. Probably the former front being frankly more challenging than the latter thinking about how we can help people to stay employed in work that they get energized by during the course of their career which is increasingly challenging as we see technological change create issues for people. Yeah, the supporting system could be very difficult to deal with now the financial matters and you think that Professor Gratton the people have to delay the retirement and work into the 70s, 80s so that somehow mitigate the financial burden of the country. Yes, I mean there's just no way around it actually and it's great that I can say it because I'm a professor in Europe, you're a politician so you're not going to be able to say that but it's just the truth. I mean you just work it out economically and people will have to work a great deal longer. How are they going to do that? Well I think in the past we've looked very much at tangible assets, our money as being our major that the thing that's most important to us and of course what money does is that it helps you to retire but it doesn't help you to work longer and to work longer right the way through your life you need to be building intangible assets and we put these down we would have three groups of intangible assets. The first is productivity which is made up of having skills that are valuable at the time you need them having the relationships that help you to develop that and also building your reputation. The second we call vitality which is obviously health but also the way you manage your work-life balance and how you build friendships and then the third which is something that I don't think that people have needed really up to now but you've said it very clearly is what we would call transformational assets which is the asset that helps you to change and I speak as a psychologist and we actually know quite a lot about personal transformation yet. Now when we know that people change for two reasons really. One is they understand themselves and what they need to do which is why giving people some idea of the future is really important and the second is that they have diverse networks because actually it's very hard for you to change if you spend all your time with people just like you. It's actually when you spend time with people who are different that you say I could be that person and that's why this diversity is going to be really crucial and I think we've built a way of measuring that. You can go to our website www.100glife.com It's for free, 10,000 people have done it and actually we've been able therefore to look at how people are building, maintaining or indeed depleting their asset base and what you find by the way just as a measure of interest is very little difference between age groups. This idea of older people not being interested in work or not being interested in learning not being interested in vitality we have no evidence of that and that she just and then I'll finish I do think age stereotyping is something that has to go if we want to encourage people to work into their 80s. We have ridiculous ideas about what it is to be 50 I'm 60, 62, what it means to be 62 we've just got to let go of we have to be aggnostic. Yeah, you said that education has to be lifetime and he's saying that the retraining training system in Canada is working but do you think that is that something that you can get to get the transformed even when you get old? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think you know this very well there's incredible data now that shows that our ideas about the aging brain were wrong the brain is able to do all sorts of things and by the way the technology that's destroying people's jobs right now is also providing incredible opportunities for people to learn and I think that one of the areas that's most interesting with regard to supporting people through a long life is the innovations that's happening in learning technologies in virtual learning and so on and so I think it's perfectly reasonable that every person here should be learning right the way through their life. Get a load of this. Every year you delay retirement you reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by 3%. So if you retire in 85 instead of 65 that's a 60% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer's so you don't use it, you lose it and when we're talking lifespans eight, nine, 10 decades you got to use it. But you know what's interesting about your point which I love that categorization is that we're all banking for retirement and we all know how to look in our bank account. I've got $20,000, I have $30,000 but nobody's banking health for retirement. How do you get a 30 year old to change a behavior today that will make them live better when they're 70 or 80? How do you get someone to start to practice prevention? You get sick no matter what your age or how much you save, your retirement ain't fun. And so the challenge is to get people to start early and where the exercise, taking the baby aspirin, the statin all the things that we know make you live longer and better. And by the way, also help society and government lower costs. You know, if everybody would take a baby aspirin over the age of 40, in 20 years, 900,000 more people in the United States would be alive. We would save over $500 billion in healthcare costs. Yet we're not doing it. We all have a right to do what we want but at some point we have to do the right thing. So what are the right things other than taking baby aspirin? Well, number one is tobacco. Tobacco? Tobacco, I mean tobacco is an enormous percentage of cost, debility, and by the way, it's not the smoker only who pays, it's the rest of society because in most of the countries we subsidize people who are elderly on their healthcare. So tobacco is a major one. It's movement over time is critical. Is diet, is keeping lean body mass, is keeping the brain going. It's having fun, enjoying life. It's having a spouse. People with a spouse live longer. But if we're talking all of these things and we have- Women don't. It's true. No, I agree. We have technology now that can literally use the immune system to take care of cancer. We can delay heart disease and stroke by decades by the medicines we have now. And so the challenge is that's a dramatic different change. We're not gonna be treating like we have been 40, 50, 60 year olds but we're gonna be treating 80, 90 year olds. How do we change society in that regard? And I'm a believer that we need to think forward. The medical revolution has happened. We're all going to benefit. If we act now and practice prevention but at the same time, we need you guys to figure out the rest of it. We can really help part. Can I ask one question to him? I've touched upon the health disparity. Even if the technology will help the longer life but the question is that who can have the benefit from this new technology? This is a big social issue I think the if the only the rich can have this kind of treatment that's create another Wales disparity. It's a great question. So you know there's a pill a day that if you take it reduces not the incidence but the death rate of cancer by 30% heart disease by 22% and stroke by 17%. This pill is 2,433 years old. Hippocrates said you take the bark of the willow tree and chew it, pain and fever go away. It's called a baby aspirin. So for three US dollars a year you can reduce the death rate of cancer by 30% and it's a staggering number. Then you take the Lipitor like statins they will delay heart attack and stroke and some with a normal cholesterol by over a decade and without health insurance they're $9 for a 90 day supply. So they're not expensive and the beauty of these new technologies that are happening now is they're democratizing health. So I think it's the other way around. I think in today's world it used to be that Angelina Jolie went out there like a hero and she said I have the mutant gene for breast cancer and at the time it was $6,000 to sequence a gene. So basically you had to pay a ransom to look at your own DNA. Well the Supreme Court in the United States said you can no longer patent a gene. So now that predatory practice that monopolistic practice is gone and now it's $100 to look at your own gene and that number is falling year by year. So I think these technologies that are happening now are going to be democratized and I think that's what's gonna actually equalize health over time. That's important. But talking about the technology I think you mentioned in your book Lucky Years that because we are lucky because of unprecedented access to the information such as big data, right? No question. I mean big data is changing everything. I mean we talked about that delaying retirement. There's a study in Europe the largest study ever done in Europe where they showed how close you live to an airport and the closer you live to an airport the higher the rate of brain decline as you get older. Implying that our brain needs quiet at night when we sleep. So if you live in a city, if you live near an airport I have a 150 pound dog that snores and I can't get her out of the bedroom. So I wear those orange foam earplugs at night and that thinking forward is not only saving my health but it's helping society in the long run. The care of somebody with Alzheimer's is hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and so me wearing those foam earplugs makes some major impact there and at the same time this is the era of big data is that we all have the opportunity of being part of the cure of letting our data be used to help others and we're going to find discovery by discovery which is found last year that if you had ovarian cancer you want a beta blocker which is an inexpensive blood for blood I mean drug for blood pressure you live four and a half years longer. We would have never found that from biology but we found it from big data and we're gonna get question by question answer with this big data if we do it right. But who can keep control? Who manage that big data? I mean a lot of private information. Well your business, the financial institutions 20 years you're not gonna manage the data, don't worry. 20 years ago you guys said listen let's all do data standards and what do you know? Now I came with a credit card buy something in Japan and have it shipped to my house we all talk the same language. So first in our field we need those data standards we need that same language and then we need groups, non-profits who can guard privacy who can protect it so that this data you're not afraid of people using it and they take away your identifier so I don't know it's you and at the same time use it for good and not for bad. You don't want your health data to say you know listen I know you broke your leg here's a pair of pants that's larger we don't want that but we wanna know better ways to treat and prevent disease and so we need to form new non-profits to do it because it's probably not the role of government and it's clearly not the role of for-profits. I see. Well it's gonna well provide the new financial services in Japan starting from this spring which is the to gathering the health care health data from individual and to put in our company and to research it and if the health condition is well we can provide the better interest rate to him or whatever. This is sort of the intangible asset of individual the key point of this service is I love that by the way. Why don't you use that service? Is that voluntary the person would like to willingly to provide the his own health data that's a key of the privacy issues to use the big data. It's incentivizing me that's a remarkable incentive companies incentivizing employees and saying you know listen if you smoke you're allowed to smoke in your company but we're gonna charge you three times the health insurance cost because that's what it costs us and do the non-smokers wanna subsidize the smokers and when you put it like that you know it's interesting companies did that and they got upset then they said listen we'll give a discount to the non-smokers so the same economics and nobody was upset. I think this issue of consequences is really important actually because I run a one week program at London Business School for my students which is about the future and this sort of stuff and we use the diagnostic of intangible assets and one of the things I say to them look you could be my age and be a billionaire but you may not have what I've got which is one of my important assets which is a lifetime friend. I've had a friend that we just recently celebrated 50 years of friendship and that's an asset and you've got to do it now you can't at the age of 70 so I want a lifelong friend you actually have to start investing when you're young I think this is really important for governments as well to help people realise it's not just about health early investments or about savings it's actually about friendships what's very interesting about the intangible assets that we describe is going through every single one of them productivity, vitality, transformation is what psychologists would call social capital you know the friendships, the communities people will not live long lives on their own they live them with other people and we need to be much clearer I think the role that communities and neighbourhoods play which of course in Japan you're very sensitive to in helping people live long productive lives is there anything that... I don't know if we're going to be able to legislate friendships but it's a new potential idea but what we can do I mean there's many things we can do of course to help anybody can't redo a can so yeah there you go we've got a great spokesperson for that for sure you know reducing anxiety is a big part of what what government can do and you know the the challenge is that the anxiety is likely to get greater the World Economic Forum and Mercer put out a study showing that there's a 70 trillion dollar deficit in retirement funding right now which is likely to go to $400 trillion in 2050 and that sort of those numbers give obviously societies and individuals pause so from our standpoint we do need to think about how we can alleviate that anxiety which will allow people to pursue the things that they want to pursue during the course of their lives for us as we think about retirement notwithstanding the you know my agreement that it's we're going to have to rethink how we do it we need to acknowledge that some people won't be able to work until the 85 so we need to create the underpin the underpinning as a government of how people can can feel secure at the end of their career so so for us what the way we're thinking about this is is ensuring that we we provide the support for people especially in jobs that are challenging that that you know people might not be able to work as long so people who are in often lower income situation or or in middle income situation the idea of trying to find ways to augment their retirement income while creating incentives for those that perhaps are going to be more able to transition to new careers or different different jobs means you know you you deal with the fact that you have some people who won't be able to work longer and also encourage others to work longer and that's that's the path we're trying to go on we're we're likely to see later retirement in fact in candidates it's now moved from 61 a decade ago to about 64 now just because the booming the aging of the baby boomers and that's that's a trend that's going to continue for those people that want to continue to work our job is to encourage that to create an underpinning so that people have some sense of security if they're not able to stay in the workforce and to help to find ways to get them to stay in the workforce as much as possible because after we take the baby aspirin and put the things in our ears we still do need to have that that something that engages us every day and that that's important and you know one of the ways that we help people stay in the workforce is we change work and that's really what corporations need to do so you know if I said to anyone in this audience you're going to work nonstop just as you do now to the age of 80 all of us would say I could possibly do that but if you say you're going to work you're going to work till 80 but you know you'll be taking gap years like your 20 year old is or you'll be taking time off to do things or there'll be times when you only work three days a week then suddenly all seems possible and I think that we've got to and this is a real plea to corporations corporations have really got to think hard about the way they start to work and their expectations of how people work Mr. Sato is there anything that the business sector can do to secure the job for the elderly? Well sure I'd like to introduce the project specific product we are now working on that which is called the health care point project I myself and also government are involved in that the system of this health care point project is that to gather the health condition from the people living in that society or even in the company then we have known the current status of the health condition once the employee or the people living there will have the more exercise or more health care to create the good number on the health condition then company or even the local government will provide the monetary incentive to them so give them the sort of the monetary paper or whatever to be able to use that paper and that area only so there are a couple of benefits from this project one of course they create a better condition of the individuals or even employees create more productivity for the company and second to be able to reduce the significant amount of the health care expenses third to use this kind of monetary paper to be able to stimulate the economy in that region so nothing worse this is a very limited project now but now Japanese companies step into this project which is one of the good solution a very concrete idea to be able to overcome it what do you think of it? I think it's a brilliant idea because I think one of the challenges we all face is that we know we shouldn't have that you know great big lovely piece of chocolate cake and we know we should be saving but humans actually are human it's better than I our brains really... I'm not against chocolate cake you don't look at them you're eating a lot of it but you know cognitively we're really all cognitively wired to want to get everything right now so the idea of thinking long term is not something which humans find easy so we have to find all sorts of ways of nudging us I think this is a great idea one of the ways that we nudge our students on our program is we ask them very concretely to imagine their 80 year old self sitting right next to them and say what would your 80 year old self say now to the decisions that you are now making now we know that that increases people's savings rates marginally but actually showing people the consequences at every stage of their life of the behaviors that they're doing I think is absolutely crucial we do it one step further we have a virtual reality thing we're working on now we can get kids and show them what it's like to be 80 years old so first of all they learn empathy but then they also learn to protect their joints and not to do the things that are going to cause a problem so they can't walk when they're 70 or 80 but to imagine it and so I mean it's a key thing how do you get a 20 year old to change your behavior that affects them when they're 80 but that's the challenge in health there's that time lag and that time lag is a killer and that's not just a health challenge I mean that's a savings challenge you realize that now you're 80 you don't have any skills because you didn't put time aside to learn anything so the more that we can be agnostic and realize that we have to at every stage develop ourselves then I think we're in a much better shape that is the other side we all have the right to do what we want we can smoke, we can sit all day we can drink sodas all day but does society or companies have the obligation for paying for the health care ramifications of what we do that's the question we need to put out there now let me ask about the inequality issue that Mr. Sato mentioned Professor Gratton do you think that the difference in income level affecting the life expectancy? the data is very clear on that even for example in the UK right now in the UK rich people live 12 years longer than poor people and actually I think the difficulty there is that if it was rich people got paid more which of course they do we could use taxation as a way of distributing money but of course we can't, there's no mechanism to distribute years, I mean nobody can take my years from it and give it to somebody else is there a step function, is there a minimum income you need to get that? yeah there is, there is a step function so yes I mean that's the reality right now and of course from a government perspective and we've been talking to the UK government the worst possible outcome that you alluded to earlier is that you push the retirement rate up and people who are going to die 10 years earlier means that they never retire so this is, you know you face a real sort of philosophical challenge here that actually you push retirement age up which you really have to do but actually because longevity isn't given to everyone then there's a possibility that people will live and never retire no there is a very it's very clear that there's an issue around inequality in that sense as well so trying to find a way to engage people to stay working of course is great for labour force productivity we need that, with declining workforces we're very challenged economically but doing it in a way that inappropriately or really hurts people who are at the lower end of the income scale is another cause for what we're seeing in our societies right now a sense of concern that the benefits of growth aren't going to all cohorts of society so that's one of the things that we're thinking about as we think about our retirement challenges is ensuring that we help people save more which we want to do ensuring that there's incentives for people to stay in the workforce creating a retirement system that gives people an incentive to retire when they're still able and available to work but recognizing that for those people that can't continue working for those people that are lower in the income scale if we arbitrarily change their age of retirement to make it higher we're basically taking from the poorest and moving it to the wealthiest so that arbitrary move on age of retirement is effectively regressive taxation and so it's something to be concerned with because the broader framework of course that we're facing in Canada that clearly other industrialized countries are facing is a sense from the middle class that they're not seeing the same gains as other parts of society and that in and of itself is a potential breakdown that we can't we don't really have any remedies for we understand that the provincial government of Ontario we're going to start some project, a pilot project for the universal basic income is that right? I heard that well Canada is a federal country where we have provinces and federal government and it's healthy actually that we get experiments in parts of the country so the Ontario government is looking at a small scale guaranteed annual income experiment like what's happening in other places in the world we've taken a slightly different approach federally we came into office with an objective of dealing with the sense of gains being differently distributed and causing concern for citizens so what we did is we actually just lowered middle class taxes so we lowered taxes on 9 million Canadians and we raised taxes on the top 1% so there was a redistributive element of what we did immediately on coming in and then we took a look at some of our programs that are universal we had a universal childcare benefit and we means tested it so we significantly increased the amount of childcare benefit for lower and middle income Canadians to it's means tested away by about $175,000 in annual income and we did that by taking it from the people at the top end and actually adding more money for that group so I think you know as you think about elements like this these are actually ways to help people to be engaged in the workforce because if you have higher child benefits for families it allows more women to be in the workforce it allows more choices at that age and stage and there was certainly a redistributive element of it which is important because if people believe that they're seeing technology change or globalization it's not benefiting them then in the long run we just don't have the societal consensus to move forward on things that can help us to grow, help us to be wealthier. Can I add certain things on that matter as all of you know does this kind of the inequality or disparity is the biggest issue for the all over the world of course the Brexit is related to this inequality and Mr. Trump's election is also and IS also is related to this disparity. I think the key point of this issue is quite related to the new shape of the capitalism. We rely on the invisible God's hand to have appropriated the portion of the people but we may not be able to rely on this invisible God's hand so which means that we have to enhance the government's role which is the wealth or income redistribution function I believe that but this creates another issue which is I think two issues are in front of us one is that once again silver democracy issue but the other one is we may lose the social vitality if we enhance the government's role on this redistribution function likewise the basic income which is good which is bad which is something like socialism will be losing the vitality to grow so every country has to decide or find out the appropriate level of the function of the government redistribution function. That's very important issue. And I think that there's going to be a lot more conversations about the basic income but it seems to me just looking at how the hundred year life plays out that a really important government intervention is around helping people start their own businesses because it seems self evident that you're not going to be able to work in a large corporation all your life so part of the new stage that we imagine might emerge apart from the explorer someone working at portfolio is actually the independent producer and whilst technology is destroying many jobs it's also giving opportunities for people to be independent producers and I think that government particularly in Japan for example where you have a low rate of entrepreneurial development the Japanese government has a real role there to support young people and middle aged people and old people to start their own business and that actually creates that takes away some of the anxieties I think the anxiety that we face is in part because you're expecting somebody else to do something for you to give you a job but if we could empower people to start building their own businesses using the technology platforms that we're now that are being innovative then I think that would be also an interesting way for government intervention. Talking about the government Dr. Eggers do you have for the society aging society please tell us from your medical standpoint it's a very obviously loaded question government in most countries pays for healthcare as you get older they say do whatever you want and then we'll pay once you get 65 or whatever at age in that country and they give minimum healthcare and I think that's fine but I think what was alluded to before is to me retirement is not a physiologic process it's a chronologic process so when you look at the skill set that you've acquired over time you lose some skills and you gain many others and so we have to start to better quantify them and we have to start to move forward and develop workforce needs that fit those requirements because clearly you look 20 years ago people did retire at 65 and that's how society was structured but now they're going 65, 75, 85 we need to change the medical system and we need to change the job system to take advantage of that remarkable asset of the brains with 40 decades of experience that's an asset not a liability and we're treating it as a liability of a place to put them and so I think it really is a change in mindset that we have to do and it's very hard to get governments to think more than in four year scans why should I do something today that's going to help 10 years from now or 20 years from now but we have to change that time scale of government intervention no offense none taken one of the things that we talked about in our country was a first initiative for us was enhancing our pension plan and we did it in a way that actually is not going to help me at age 54 it's going to help my 20 year old and my 19 year old and my 18 year old so that was actually a pretty long term view we did it though because we thought it was the right thing we also see that it's it's actually part of a set of measures that are going to give people more ability to be engaged and effective today and be part of a society that's presumably going to be better for all of them so I think government can take long term decisions but you probably do need to link it back to the challenges we're facing today the challenge that we were seeing today was that the young people today just aren't saving and often they're starting to recognize that as a challenge that gives us the ability to actually make impact on this right now so that it's a question of framing and even forums like this are helpful for that framing Dr. Eggers talking about the incentive for preventions who has to encourage that and the government has to be involved or the corporation look at corporations what does your corporation spend on health what percent of your revenue is health I think just about 2% 3% level most companies in the United States that number is 17% 17% so a much higher and so when you look at companies I believe every company should have a chief health officer whose job it is to help the employees live better live longer because it will help the bottom line is the company as well as really set the stage for a more productive workforce going forward at the same time governments need to do those incentives also because they take over the bill later on more than half the health care in the United States is paid for by our federal government that number is even higher in your country obviously part of what our government is paying for is what companies are not having to no question but in your country you say listen you could smoke your whole life and then we'll still pay which it's going to cost three times as much but we'll pay and you don't smoke we'll pay a much lower price and to me there's an inequality there and that's an inequality we have to address and really isn't being talked about as much as it should 17% include the social security expenses probably it's health care costs in the United States are 17% of GDP and so when you look at company by company it's approximately that now we have discussed the role of the government and the corporations so far but how we should as individuals think about it and having an aging society in the end you've made the point very eloquently I think in the end it is individuals responsible and it seems to me that as we look at what will happen over the next five to ten years I think individuals will try and make their own lives as productive as possible and then corporations will catch up and governments will catch up what should individuals do they should think about tangible and intangible assets we did a lot of work in the book simply to get that framing right productivity vitality transformation and they should be measuring that what is their measuring their heartbeat that's the key you know game theory says you need a parameter on which to optimize and I love all those concepts but I don't know what parameter to optimize on I don't have a number on my watch well there is you see that this is it and this is what we're actually looking for people to work with us on this but you can do that you can actually measure intangible assets and we're doing some research next next year actually with three big Dutch companies where we're going to use surveys this is the sort of thing you would love in terms of digital just to see if we can get the same level of granularity because I agree that then you say when we do this with our students they say oh my god my networks are really low at the moment and this is what we need we need people to realize you are not now making you are now depleting the asset it's okay to deplete it for a period of time but actually you have got to at some stage start really developing the asset and what we realize actually when we think apart from the baby aspirin most investments in individual assets require time it's about the allocation of time you know time to exercise time to spend time with friends time to learn so what we're also doing is helping people realize that the allocation of time is a very important time is an attribute that they have to work with so what the people should do from a doctor's point of view how the individuals have to do to help them save the life I think they have to make a strategic plan for their own health make a one five ten and twenty year horizon for their own health and it focuses mainly on prevention it is so much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it we can prevent more than half cancers we can delay heart diseases stroke easily by over a decade decade and a half of most people yet we're not doing it and so those are the relatively simple things and at the same time companies have to redefine their workplace our bodies were designed to move so movement over time equals health and I love this thing as we're all sitting down but if you sit for five hours it's the same as smoking a pack of cigarettes so why do people have a printer at their desk it should be the other side of the office every time get up and encourage the movements you know I used to go visit Steve Jobs and we always went for a walk and he goes there are two reasons for the walk he goes one is the health reason he said the other is if you go for a walk and you get to the corner and you know it doesn't it gives you an advantage in the business negotiations that's interesting for one I'm really glad I haven't done my New Year's resolutions yet I'm going to nurture that friend that I had from the time I was five I'm going to focus on my already good marriage I'm going to take baby aspirins I'm going to buy those things for my ears so I've got a few important action steps that I'm going to take but from a standpoint you know we're really going to be very focused on how we can help individuals and help companies and you know broadly help society to think about how they can be more effectively engaged in the workforce so it's about labor force information for people it's getting that information out it's rethinking the education and training so that we allocate training dollars to the places where it can have the biggest impact and you know these are the things that we know that we can do that will enhance labor force productivity engagement and productivity and then what we're going to think about is those particular subsets in our population I'm sure it's the same for other countries that have under representation in the labor force so in Canada we still have under representation by women we still have under representation by you know our indigenous peoples we have under representation by you know recent immigrants so there are things that we can do that can have a fairly fast impact and things that are going to take longer that are going to help people over the entire span of what will be a longer workforce workplace participation it seems our time is running out unfortunately so I would like to give you each of you probably the hardest question of this question what would you like what would you hope to do when you are to live to 100 starting with you sir you know it's interesting I re-evaluated you know when I was turning to 30 so I changed the sports I play so I play tennis now because it's a sport I can play until my 90s I used to like basketball but you can't keep going on that I started to write because again writing is something I can do forever I see patients now and I'll continue to do that and many other things I'll probably give up particularly the travel but yeah I want to keep this brain active I love it and it's a privilege to do what I do and you know when I tell all the young people who work for us it's finding your passion you know nowadays careers are going to last 70 years so you got to be passionate about it or you ain't going to do it Mr. Mono well I'm I'm loving what I'm doing right now you know being in a role where you have the potential to have impact on your whole population is very exciting probably not something that you can sustain the pace of for the whole next hopefully 30 or 40 years so I think you know the idea of being engaged and impactful in different ways over time taking the kind of experience that you might get for me in this role by talking about it or writing about it afterwards would be interesting also thinking about how maybe you can use that experience you know in my case to potentially have more granular impact on specific topics that I might have gotten time to look at but only very quickly because the nature of a government role is there's an awful lot of information coming at you very rapidly and you can't go that deep so maybe that's the next iteration I hope I have it I used to play guitar especially in my young age but I want to play piano so wow and also I'd like to have more close communication and connection to the local community well I have big shock from the big earthquake and tsunami year 2011 the people living in that area surprised the world people because the people who has been losing their parents but they are trying to help the others that kind of behavior is quite related to the new behavior at the one years life time which means that too much concern on the connection with the local community to have strong concern on the live together save together I think this is the quite important hint to survive one years of life that's my concern well we're very fortunate because both of us are professors and they can work forever at the university you just never ever get kicked out you never we don't have any concept of retirement and I consider myself very fortunate about that and I would like other people to be really fortunate so I'm going to in the next couple of years carry on on this theme of longevity and we're going to look at what corporations are doing and we're just launching a big research project on that so that will keep me going way into my mid-seventies okay so thank you very much this concludes the session thank you for participating well thank you