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It is no secret that the number of people 65 and over in the United States is growing rapidly, a phenomenon recognized as the “graying of America” (Himes, 2001). The numbers are staggering. There has been an exponential increase in older people in the United States since 1870: from 1 million up to 52 million in 2018—a number now larger than the entire population of Canada (Mather, Scommegna, & Kilduff, 2019). During recent decades, the 65 and older group has been increasing twice as fast as the rest of the population, and adults 80 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the population globally (Hudson & Goodwin, 2013).

As a result, the U.S. population looks different than it did earlier in the 20^th century. In 1900, average life expectancy at birth was 47 but is now close to 79. A hundred years ago, only 4% of the population was over the age of 65; by 2017, that figure had jumped to more than 15%. The pace of growth continued in the first decades of the 21^st century, and in 2011 the huge baby boom generation—those born between 1946 and 1964—moved into the ranks of older adults. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2030 the proportion of the population over age 65 will reach close to 20% and there will be at least 400,000 people who are 100 years or older. This rate of growth in the older population is unprecedented in human history. Within a few decades, one in five of all Americans will be eligible for Social Security and Medicare, contrasted with one in eight today; in 2019, 9 out of 10 persons age 65 and older received Social Security (Social Security Administration, 2019a).

We usually think of aging as strictly an individual matter. But we can also describe an entire population as aging or growing older, although to speak that way is metaphorical. In literal terms, only organisms, not populations, grow older. Still, the average age of the population is increasing, and the proportion of the population made up of people ages 65 and older is rising. This change in the demographic structure of the population is referred to as population aging (Clark et al., 2004; Olshansky, 2015; Uhlenberg, 2009).

Population aging results from two factors: The proportion of older persons in a population increases because of persons living longer (e.g., longevity), and the proportion of children in the population decreases because of lower birthrates. Both of these trends took place throughout the 20^th century and have continued into the early 21^st century, but the drop in the numbers of children being born is a more significant factor for population aging than is people living longer. In 1900, the United States had a relatively young population: The percentage of children and teenagers in the population was 40%. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, by 2017, the proportion of youth had dropped to 24%, an all-time low. By contrast, those ages 65 and older increased from 4% in 1900 to 16% in 2017, with larger increases still to come (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2017b). During the next several decades, overall population growth in the United States will be concentrated among middle-aged and older Americans.

The United States is not the only country undergoing population aging (Bosworth & Burtless, 1998; Cherlin, 2010; National Institute on Aging, 2007). For example, average life expectancy at birth in Japan is currently 84 years (World Population Review, 2020), the highest in the world, and the proportion of the population ages 65 and older there is 27% (World Bank, 2019). In Germany, Italy, and Japan, the population is aging because of low birthrates as well. Think of the state of Florida today as a model for population aging: a population in which nearly one in five people is already over the age of 65. We can ask: How long will it take different nations to reach the condition of “Florida-ization”? The answer is that Italy already looked like Florida by 2003, Japan by 2005, and Germany by 2006. France and Great Britain resembled Florida in 2016, whereas the United States in general will not reach “Florida-ization” until 2023.

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Exhibit P.1 Life Expectancy at Birth, by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: United States, 1980–2014

Source: Figure 18 in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015); CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System.

Note: Life expectancy data by Hispanic origin were available starting in 2006 and were corrected to address racial and ethnic misclassification.

Population aging also shows up as an increase in the median age for the entire population, that is, the age at which half the population is older and half the population is younger. The median age of the U.S. population in 1820 was only 17 years; by 1900 it rose to 23 and by 2018 to 38. It is estimated that the median age of the American population by 2030 will be 42 years. This shift is a measure of the dramatic impact of population aging.

It is clear, then, that populations age for reasons different than individuals do, and the reasons have to do with large-scale demographic trends. In the first place, population aging occurs because birthrates go down. With a smaller proportion of children in the population, the average age of the population goes up. Population aging can also come about because of increases in life expectancy—people living longer on average. Finally, the process of population aging can be influenced for a time because of the characteristics of birth cohorts. A cohort is a group of people born during a particular time who thereby experience common life events during the same historical period. For example, the cohort born during the Great Depression of the 1930s was relatively small and thus has had minimal impact on the average age of the population. By contrast, the baby boomers born after World War II are a large cohort. Because of this cohort’s size, the middle-aged baby boomers are dramatically hastening the aging of the U.S. population. Even larger than the baby boomer cohort is the Millennial or Gen Y cohort, the members of which were ages 24 to 39 as of 2020 (Pew Research Center, 2020). How will this large cohort, numbering 72.1 million, impact population aging in the U.S. in future decades?

In summary, then, trends in birthrates, death rates, and the flow of cohorts all contribute to population aging. What complicates matters is that all three trends can be happening simultaneously, as they have been in the United States in recent decades. Casual observers sometimes suggest that the U.S. population is aging mainly because people are living longer. But that observation is not quite accurate because it fails to take into account multiple trends defined by demographic factors of fertility, mortality, and flow of cohorts.

A demographic description tells us what the population looks like, but it does not explain the reason that population trends happen in the first place. We need to ask: Why has this process of population aging occurred? The rising proportion of older people in the population can be explained by demographic transition theory, which points to a connection between population change and the economic process of industrialization. In preindustrial societies, there is a generally stable population because both birthrates and death rates remain high. With industrialization, death rates tend to fall, whereas birthrates remain high for a period, so the total population grows. But at a certain point, at least in advanced industrial societies, birthrates begin to fall back in line with death rates. Eventually, when the rate of fertility is exactly balanced by the rate of mortality, we have a condition of stability known as zero population growth (Chu, 1997). The population is neither growing nor shrinking.

The Western industrial revolution of the 19^th century brought improved agricultural production, improved standards of living, and also an increase in population size. Over time, there came a shift in the age structure of the population, known to demographers as the demographic transition. This was a shift away from a population with high fertility and high mortality to one of low fertility and low mortality. That population pattern is what we see today in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The result in all industrialized societies has been population aging: a change in the age distribution of the population.

Most countries in the developing world—in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—still have fertility rates and death rates much higher than those of advanced industrialized countries. For the United States in 1800, as for most developing countries today, that population distribution can be represented as a population pyramid: many births (high fertility) and relatively few people surviving to old age (high mortality). For countries that are approaching zero population growth, that pyramid is replaced by a cylinder: Each cohort becomes approximately the same in size.

As we have seen, the increased number of older people is only part of the cause of population aging. It is important to remember that, overall, population aging has been brought about much more by declines in fertility than by reductions in mortality. The trend toward declining fertility in the United States can be traced back to the early 19^th century, and the process of population aging has causes that date back even longer (Olshansky & Carnes, 2002). To complete the demographic picture, we need to point to other factors that influence population size and composition, such as improvements in the chance of survival of people at different ages or the impact of immigration into the United States, largely by younger people. But one conclusion is inescapable: Today’s increased proportion of people ages 65 and older springs from causes that are deeply rooted in American society. Population aging is a long-range trend that will characterize our society into the 21^st century, driven largely by changes in immigration and the aging of the baby boomers, as well as the even larger millennial cohort. It is a force we all will cope with for the rest of our lives.

But how is American society coping with population aging? How are the major institutions of society—education, health care, government, the economy, the family—responding to the aging of a large number of individuals? The answer, in simplified terms, is rooted in a basic difference between individual and population aging. As human beings, we are all familiar with the life course process of individual aging. It is therefore not surprising that, as a society, we have devised many policies and practices to take into account changes that predictably occur in the later years, such as planning for retirement, medical interventions for chronic illnesses, and familiar government programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Whether it involves changes in biological functioning or changes in work roles, individual aging is tangible and undeniable, a pattern we observe well enough in our parents and family members, not to mention in ourselves. But population aging is more subtle and less easily observed. We have many institutional policies and programs to deal with individual aging, but our society is just beginning to wrestle with the controversies generated by the population aging trends now emerging, with the prospect of even more dramatic debate and change in the decades ahead. These demographic changes are significant and are stimulating tremendous ferment in our society’s fundamental institutions. For that reason, this book is organized around controversies along with the facts and basic concepts that stand behind them.

Our society’s response to population aging can best be summed up in the aphorism that generals prepare for the next war by fighting the old one over again. That is to say, in our individual and social planning, we tend to look back to past experience to guide our thinking about the future. Thus, when the railroad was first introduced, it was dubbed “the iron horse.” But it wasn’t a horse at all, and the changes that rail transport brought to society were revolutionary, beyond anything that could have been expected by looking to the past.

The same holds true for population aging. We cannot anticipate the changes that will be brought about by population aging by looking backward. Population aging is historically unprecedented among the world’s societies. Moreover, we should not confuse population aging with the process of individual aging. An aging society, after all, is not like an individual with a fixed lifespan. Why is it that people are so often fearful when they begin to think about the United States’ future as an aging society? Part of the reason is surely that many of us are locked into images of decline that are based on prejudice or outdated impressions of what individual aging entails. Because our social institutions have responded to aging as a problem, we tend to see only losses and to overlook opportunities in the process of aging.

An important point to remember is that the solutions to yesterday’s problems may not prove adequate for the challenges we face today, or for those we’ll face in the future. For example, Social Security has proven vital in protecting older Americans from the threat of poverty in old age. But Social Security was never designed to help promote second careers or new forms of productivity among older people. We may need to think in new ways about pensions and retirement in the future. Similarly, Medicare has proved to be an important, although expensive, means of guaranteeing access to medical care for older people, but it was never designed to address the problems of long-term care for older people who need help to remain in their own homes. Finally, as the sheer number of people ages 65 and older increases—from 52 million in 2018 to a projected 95 million by 2060—the United States as a society will need to consider which institutions and policies are best able to provide for the needs of this growing population (Mather et al., 2019).

Social gerontologist Matilda White Riley pointed out that our failure to think deeply about population aging is a weakness in gerontology as a discipline. Gerontologists know more about individual aging than about opportunity structures over the whole life course. By “opportunity structures,” we mean that the way society is organized or structured affects an individual’s chance or ability to gain certain resources or meet certain goals. A good example is the way the life course has been shaped, with transitions from education to work to retirement. These transitions do not seem to prepare us for an aging society in the future. In effect, we have a “cultural lag” in facing the future (Katz, 2005; Riley & Riley, 1994). We know that in this century, the age of leaving the workforce to retire has been gradually going down, whereas the age for leaving schooling has been going up. Riley pointed out that, if we were to project these trends into the future, sometime in the 21^st century, people would leave college at age 38 and immediately enter retirement. This scenario, of course, is not serious. But it does make a serious point. We must not take current trends and simply project them into the future.

Part of the problem is that we have less knowledge than we ought to have about the interaction between individual lives and the wider society. During the 20^th century, nearly three decades on average were added to human life expectancy. Now more than a third of adult life is spent postwork. People ages 65 and older are healthier and better educated than ever before. Yet we lack opportunity structures to integrate this older population into major institutions of society such as education or the workplace. We have yet to design a blueprint for an aging society of the future. And there are important questions to be asking about what such a blueprint might look like. Today, we grow old and experience aging and later life differently than our grandparents did, and in a way differently than will our children, so it does little good to look backward as we move into the 21^st century.

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Exhibit P.2 Demographic Transition

Source: Population: A Lively Introduction, 4^th edition, by Joseph A. McFalls, Jr. Population Reference Bureau.

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Exhibit P.3 Birthrates and Death Rates

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2010).

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Exhibit P.4 Distribution of the Projected Older Population by Age for the United States, 2010–2050

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2010).

Note: Line indicates the year that each age group is the largest proportion of the older population.

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Exhibit P.5The Dramatic Aging of the United States, 1900–2030

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Adapted from Himes (2001).

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Exhibit P.6 Projected Population of Adults Ages 65 and Over by Race in the United States, 2010–2050

Source: Figure 4 from U.S. Census Bureau (2014).

Note: Unless otherwise specified, data refer to the population who reported a race alone. Populations for each race group include both Hispanics and non-Hispanics, as Hispanics may be of any race.

The challenge is to change our way of anticipating and planning for the future by thinking critically about our underlying assumptions. This task of critical thinking may be more difficult in gerontology than in other fields because of the familiarity and deeply personal nature of aging. Revolutionary changes took place in the 20^th century, but most of us tend to assume that aging and the human life course have remained the same. Despite our commonsense perceptions, however, history and the human sciences tell us that the process of aging is not something fixed, but is both changeable and subject to interpretation.

Taking a more critical and thoughtful stance, we know that “stages of life” have been viewed differently by different societies, in different cultural contexts, and in different historical periods. Even in our own society, the experience of growing older is not uniform but means different things to individuals depending on their gender, ethnicity, social class, and other dimensions of difference and diversity. From this perspective, a familiar practice such as retirement turns out to be less than a century old and now is in the process of being reexamined and redefined. Even in the biology of aging, scientists are engaged in serious debate about whether it is possible to extend the maximum human lifespan from what we have known in the past.

In short, wherever we look—biology, economics, the social and behavioral sciences, and public policy—we see that aging, despite its supposed familiarity, cannot be taken as a fixed fact of human life. Both individual aging and population aging are socially and historically constructed, subject to interpretation, and therefore open to controversy, debate, and change.

It is astonishing to realize that more than half of all the human beings who have ever lived beyond age 65 are alive today. What aging will mean in the 21^st century is not something we can predict merely by extrapolating from the present and the past. Still less can the study of aging consist of an accumulation of facts to be assimilated, as if knowing these facts could somehow prepare us for the future. The changes are too significant for such an approach.

What we need most of all is to consider facts about individual and population aging in a wider context: to understand that facts and theories are all partial, provisional, and, therefore, subject to interpretation and revision. That is the second major reason that the study of aging in this book is presented in the form of controversy and debate, offering all of us an opportunity to reflect on and construct an old age worthy of “our future selves.”