As we all know, America’s population is getting older and older. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, by 2030 there will be 72.1 million people over age 65 in this country — more than double what there was in 2000.
Normally, following statistics such as this are comments about what this rapid increase in elderly people will do to the healthcare system and the labor market, but a new study published in the PLOS ONE journal suggests that it might also enhance innovation and produce other positive benefits.
The “The Advantages of Demographic Change after the Wave: Fewer and Older, but Healthier, Greener, and More Productive?” study, led by researcher Fanny Kluge of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, finds a number of silver linings to the approaching demographic cloud.
For instance, the researchers speculate that the fact that these older people will drive less and consume fewer goods will lead to a decrease in CO2 emissions. “The expected reduction in the levels of carbon emissions due to population decline could be even greater if more environmentally-friendly technologies are adopted,” they write.
They observe that the overall educational attainment level of the population is increasing, which could lead to productivity gains that may offset the loss of workers. They write, “The higher educational attainment at the population level can be advantageous for economic growth.”
In an analysis of the research published in the Washington Post, Dominic Basulto writes that with more of the population enjoying greater free time, there could be a surge in innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs. In other words, we might have to change our image of college-age entrepreneurs working so furiously at startups that they can’t even properly eat to that of a more seasoned entrepreneur, launching a business at age 65 and staying active and financially secure in retirement.
“Life expectancy is increasing almost universally,” the researchers note, “and the health status of the older population is improving.” These are both good reasons to cheer up and look forward to America’s grayer future.
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Tag: Seniors
When an Elderly Veteran Tried to Build a Wheelchair Ramp, These Volunteers Didn’t Let Him Go at it Alone
Eighty-six-year-old Navy veteran John Walker of Gulfport, Miss., is used to taking care of himself. So when his wife Kathleen broke her leg, he decided to build a wheelchair ramp to make it easier to get her in and out of the house.
But when the Retired Senior Volunteer Program of Harrison County (RSVP), learned about the situation, the group contacted Disability Connection, a nonprofit that helps with emergency home repairs and modifications for veterans, the disabled and low-income families.
Disability Connection executive director Janie O’Keefe tells Trang Pham-Bui of WLOX that after Walker build his ramp, “We came and inspected it and it did not look like it was as safe as it should be. It did not look like it would survive long term, so we agreed to basically start over and give him a fresh, brand-new ramp.”
At first Walker refused the help. “I’m used to doing for myself, for my family,” he said. But he soon realized he and his wife could use the support of people like U.S. Army Specialist Kegan Wood, who pitched in to build the new ramp using materials that the Home Depot donated. Pham-Bui asked Walker how he felt to see so many people volunteering to work on the project and he says, “It makes me want to cry.”
“If anybody deserves it, you and your wife do,” O’Keefe tells Walker.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
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The Unlikely Group That Has the Power to Solve the Student Loan Debt Crisis
We’ve talked about the staggering figure before: Americans owe $1.2 trillion in student loans. But one of the most compelling facts about this bubble, a recent government report found, is that this crushing debt doesn’t just affect the young. Senior citizens are also saddled with this financial burden — but they may also be the remedy to this crisis.
According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the federal student loan debt for Americans 65 and older has continued to rise from $2.8 billion in 2005 to a whopping $18.2 billion in 2013. Due to (frankly unreasonable) interest rates, an increasing population of older Americans can’t make their loan repayments: 4 percent of seniors now have student loan debt compared to only 1 percent six years ago.
About 80 percent of these seniors hold debt from their own education (versus college loans taken out for a child). Take Rosemary Anderson of Watsonville, Calif. The 57-year-old tells the Associated Press that the $64,000 debt she amassed from her undergraduate and graduate studies in her 30s has more than doubled to $126,000. Even though she has worked all her life, she could be in her 80s by the time she pays it all off. Unfortunately, if she doesn’t make the payments, she might default or see her Social Security benefits garnished by creditors. As a result, she might not have enough money to retire when the time comes.
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Anderson is not alone. “As the baby boomers continue to move into retirement, the number of older Americans with defaulted loans will only continue to increase,” the GAO says. “This creates the potential for an unpleasant surprise for some, as their benefits are offset and they face the possibility of a less secure retirement.”
However, there might be a silver-haired solution. As Education Dive puts it, “seniors vote, and most successful politicians cater to seniors.”
A vast majority of seniors turn out to vote in each election (much higher than any other age group), which means that they also have significant political clout. Many senior citizens are also fiercely protective of the Social Security payments they receive from the federal government. So as more people see their money taken away due to unscrupulous lenders and predatory interest rates, they will demand reform. Politicians know they can’t upset this large voting bloc.
The public has been increasingly angry about mounting student debt, but there has been little government action to solve this enormously expensive problem (Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance student loans died on the senate floor in June). But when a growing sector of these politically powerful Americans are feeling the burden of student loans, they’ll take their sentiments to the polls.
If senior citizens are the ones who will ultimately push lawmakers to take action on student loan reform, let’s get out the vote — even more than usual.
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To Raise Money for His Fellow Comrades, This Septuagenarian is Running Across the Country
When most of us are 70 years old, we’ll be lucky if we can still touch our toes. But Jim Shiew of Buena Vista, Colo., could serve as inspiration to us all: the Korean War veteran and West Point graduate is currently jogging across the country on a mission that he calls Run America for Vets, raising money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.
Shiew has been running for 11 months now and has no plans to stop until he reaches his goal. “It’s very important that we take care of our vets, because they’re not being properly taken care of, and they need a lot of help,” he said.
He serves as his own support crew and travels with two cars — a van and a station wagon with hand-painted red, white and blue stripes, flags and info about his mission (so people know how to donate to his cause).
How does he run and drive two vehicles? He described his process to Stephanie Santostasi of WCYB: “Drive the van forward a couple miles, run back pick up the car, drive it to the van, then move the van forward again. I just kind of follow myself.”
As he inches his way across the country at about 12 miles a day, “I’ll be going east, but running west,” he told Maisie Ramsay of The Chaffee County Times before he embarked on his journey Nov. 1, 2013 in Colorado. He ran to California, waded in the Pacific, then doubled back, heading east all the way to Virginia Beach, which he plans to reach on Sept. 24.
“As far as I can tell, if I can do this, I’ll be the oldest one to run across America,” he told Ramsay.
According to Holly Kozelsky of the Martinsville Bulletin, each day Shiew phones his coordinator, Jim Blakeslee, to report on his progress. (He invites people to track his journey on his Facebook page, Jim For Vets.) Blakeslee arranges accommodations — often at veterans’ organizations or camping facilities — for Shiew.
As for how Shiew feels about America after seeing it one step at a time? He told Kozelsky, that he’s had “wonderful weather, and met some great people. It gives me faith that this is a great country. I just haven’t met anybody who has treated me any way but nice.”
MORE: How Does Running Coast-To-Coast Help Veterans?
What Do Toddlers and Senior Citizens Have in Common?
When most of us picture a public park, we see a vision of squealing kids climbing around on playground equipment and adults jogging and walking their dogs.
But UCLA professor Madeline Brozen, who directs the school’s Complete Streets Initiative, and her colleagues are challenging communities in the U.S. to form a new idea of how parks can contribute toward keeping a rapidly aging population healthy.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, collaborated with Brozen on an award-winning toolkit that advises communities how they can create mini “parklets” in urban areas without a lot of green space. During that time, she realized that seniors weren’t using public parks as much as other age groups. The team wondered if this is because, unlike some in Asia and Europe, U.S. parks are almost never designed with the needs of elders in mind — instead emphasizing playground equipment and ways for younger adults to recreate.
So Loukaitou-Sideris, Bronzen, and other colleagues are now working on a project that will investigate what seniors need from public parks and how to design parks in order to attract those in their golden years. They plan to pay particular attention to the needs of low-income, urban seniors who don’t have a lot of recreational options.
“What we are trying to do with this project,” Loukaitou-Sideris tells Sharon Hong of UCLA Newsroom, “is, first of all, find knowledge from different fields about what an open space or public park for seniors should look like, how it should be different for different groups of seniors, incorporate some of the voices of senior citizens, create guidelines for future such spaces, and hopefully even apply this knowledge towards the creation of a park.”
With the population of Americans aged 65 or older expected to double between 2000 and 2030 to 72.1 million, this kind of thinking about people who are often forgotten by city planners is a must.
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When Food Is Left Unharvested, This Organization Gleans It and Feeds the Hungry
Dotting the Maine countryside are small plots growing more fruits and vegetables than the farmers who work the land could ever pick. But despite this bountifulness, some of the state’s residents forgo buying produce because of tight budgets.
This is where Hannah Semler, the coordinator of the gleaning initiative for the nonprofit Healthy Acadia, steps in. Semler leads a team of volunteers to pick whatever is left after farmers have harvested as much as they can.
In Blue Hill, Amanda Provencher and Paul Schultz of King Hill Farm welcome her regularly to their fields. “We just don’t have time to pick everything we grow, so we’d just till it right back into the soil or feed it to the animals, but it’s still totally good food,” Schultz tells Seth Freed Wessler of NBC News. “Hannah is identifying a resource that we have that otherwise we just would not be utilized because there are not enough hours in the day.”
At King Hill Farm and 18 other Maine farms, Semler and the volunteers for Healthy Acadia glean 30,000 pounds of food a year that would otherwise go to waste. They deliver it to food pantries for the needy and to the Magic Food Bus (sponsored by Healthy Peninsula), which delivers produce to schools and housing complexes for elderly people.
According to Wessler, about 40 percent of American crops are never harvested. Meanwhile, 15 percent of Americans are food insecure (i.e. they don’t have enough healthy food).
Rick Traub, the president of Tree of Life, a Maine food pantry that distributes food that Semler collects, tells Wessler, “Poverty here is everywhere. I go to the grocery store and the person who cashes me out, I see her the next day at the pantry. The problem of hunger in the U.S. has very little to do with a scarcity of food. There’s far more food available around here than people to eat it. The problem is really about access.”
With a team of volunteers using their time and muscle to harvest good produce that otherwise would go to waste, access to nutritious food is expanding in Maine. Let’s hope this practice spreads to other states, too.
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If You’re a Caregiver, Having a Flexible Work Schedule Can Make All the Difference
It’s next to impossible to find a parent who believes that there are enough hours in the day.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 69.9 percent of American mothers with children under 18 work outside the home or telecommute, and according to the Pew Research Institute, 15 percent of adults in their 40s and 50s are financially supporting both an elderly parent and a child. These numbers indicate that many people are forced to juggle the inevitable tug-of-war between work and family demands.
A new study by researchers from several universities and institutions, “Changing Work and Work-Family Conflict,” sought to determine whether flexible work schedules can help ease this crunch.
The researchers randomly assigned information technology employees of an unnamed Fortune 500 company to two groups. The first group had a standard work schedule, whereas members of the second were allowed to set their own schedules — including the number of hours in a day in which they worked in an office and the number of hours that they worked from home. Researchers trained employee supervisors to demonstrate an understanding for the demands of the workers’ personal lives, and the supervisors led several meetings about the new, flexible schedules.
Those in the modified-schedule group reported modest but statistically significant decreases in work-family conflicts and improvements in having enough time for their life outside of work. The benefits were the strongest among workers who were members of “the sandwich generation,” those caring for both kids and elderly parents.
Researchers found that the employees in both groups worked a similar number of hours — no one was slacking at home or letting work completely overtake family life since the boundary between work and home had been erased. But the employees in the flexible-work group on average did increase the number of hours they spent working at home from 10.2 hours a week to 19.6 hours a week.
The authors conclude, “We provide the first experimental evidence that workplace interventions can reduce work-family conflict among employees and change work resources, specifically increasing employees’ control over the time and timing of their work and the support they receive from supervisors for their family and personal lives.”
Since there’s no way to add extra hours to the day, employers looking to keep their workers happy and less stressed should open their minds to flexible schedules.
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These Autistic Students Struck a Beautiful Friendship With Local Seniors
One group is often ignored, the other group is often underestimated. But what happens when you put them together?
A beautiful partnership.
As 11Alive reports, every Tuesday the seniors at the Dogwood Forest Retirement Community get a visit from autistic students at the Lionheart School in Alpharetta, Georgia. Together they’ve formed a friendship that’s mutually beneficial and also tremendously meaningful.
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It’s already difficult to land a job in this recovering economy, but for young adults on the autism spectrum, it’s even harder. According to a study published in HealthDay, only 55 percent of young adults with autism have a job in the first six years after high school.
The students at Lionheart, however, are learning real-life skills that will help them get ready for the workplace. You’ll see at 1:57 in the clip below that these students help deliver mail, set the tables, and entertain the residents with games and music.
Meanwhile, the retirees get to interact with these students and make new connections. As one elderly man named Sparky told the TV station, “It means a lot to have people come to see us.”
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Victoria McBride, head of therapeutic services at Lionheart, told Huffington Post that “social interactions and language processing can be difficult for both students in the school and seniors at the retirement center. Because of this, the pace of conversation and social interaction between the students and the residents can be slower, which allows both parties to engage and interact with more confidence.”
Sounds like a win for everyone involved.
Besides working with the seniors at the retirement center, the younger students at Lionheart also participate in the school’s adorable “LionPaws” program. NorthFulton.com reports that students get to interact with puppies who will become service dogs. This mutually beneficial program helps autistic children relax and reduce their anxiety while their new fuzzy friends get to interact with people.
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When Seniors Have Nowhere Else to Turn, This Nonprofit Protects Them
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 13.7 percent of Americans are now at least 65 years old. And startlingly, as the number of elderly people in America increases, so does elder abuse.
Seniors are most often abused by family members or caregivers who can drain their financial accounts or harm them physically or mentally through neglect or brutality.
Fortunately, a nonprofit in New York City is looking out for seniors suffering from abuse and raising awareness of the issue.
The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center for Elder Abuse Prevention operates a long-term care facility, Hebrew Home at Riverdale in New York City, which welcomes victims of abuse alongside its regular residents. Since the Weinberg Center opened in 2005, it’s funded over 53,000 shelter days for needy seniors — admitting about a dozen victims each year.
The Weinberg Center provides victims with medical attention, psychological counseling, social services, and activities, so the seniors — many of whom were isolated by their caregivers — can feel a part of a community again. According to Nicole Lewis of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, about half of the seniors the Weinberg Center provides emergency shelter to choose to stay on at Hebrew House.
Joy Solomon, the co-founder and director of the Weinberg Center told Lewis, “So many victims remain in the shadows, untouched and unknown.”
Which is exactly why they’re educating the public to be on the alert for elder abuse, even conducting workshops for Manhattan doormen instructing them on the telltale signs.
Dennis P. Brady, executive managing director for a company that manages two Upper East Side apartment buildings with many elderly residents arranged for the training, and told Winnie Hu of the New York Times last year, “It’s a good thing to do if we can help one person.”
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States Are Working to Keep Seniors on Their Feet
$67.7 billion.
That’s the anticipated cost of medical bills due to falls among the elderly by 2020, estimated by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Falls aren’t just catastrophic for seniors because of the expense. According to the American Recall Center, one in every 200 falls in people ages 65 to 69 and one in 10 falls in people over the age of 85 causes a hip fracture. Of those with broken bones, 25 percent die within six months. As a result, elderly people are often so afraid of falling that they cease engaging in activities that were once important to them.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, as a variety of programs across the country are focusing on fall prevention.
Back in 2011, the CDC gave the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health a $1.5 million grant to study the effectiveness of fall prevention programs. They found that two programs sponsored by the Pennsylvania Department of Aging — Healthy Steps for Older Adults, a four-hour workshop, and Healthy Steps in Motion, an eight-week exercise class — reduced falls by 17 percent.
Another such program is the one offered by Wichita State University in Kansas. There, researchers assembled the Falling Less in Kansas toolkit, a free downloadable guide that allows seniors to assess their risk of falls and make necessary changes to prevent them.
The state of Ohio is also trying to prevent falls among seniors with an online program called Steady U. The website advises people how to arrange their houses to prevent falls — including tips such as keeping stairways clear, rugs securely attached to the floor, and adding night lights.
“We know that falls are the leading cause of injuries, ER visits and death,” John Ratliff, the Ohio Department of Aging’s Assistant Chief of Communications and Government Outreach told Hilary Young of the Huffington Post. “Coupled with the fact that our population is rapidly aging, it’s our responsibility to try new, innovative approaches to education about fall prevention to help our elders.”
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