clicking share of the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. book tv street is live online 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and hours. the booktv.org. >> up next come ted fishman assesses what the world will be like in the year 2013 and 1 billion people will be over the age of 65 and the number of people will for the first time ever outnumber people under 17. this talk was just over 45 minutes. >> safety for having me. one of the country's premier salons for readers and readers to read reader's. so that you very much. i have a gift for you all tonight. i was thinking that this is election season. how would i get a lot of precedents in? well, maybe i can start off by

fabricating my military record. i am the most highly decorated soldier of the great war. i no there is some really dynamite reporting in the room. i hope you dig into that and falsified and i get lots of publicity from it. it sounds absurd to say that. the last veteran of the great war died -- the english veteran died it recently. he was commemorated. but if this were a time of war right now, and we were thinking 100 years into the future from the war we are having now we would not be talking about the veteran because over the last century the human life span has expanded by two and a half years every single decade. so there would be lots of hundred year old veterans

around. and if you think about it in terms of the amount of time that you're going to spend with me this evening that means for every minute that you listen to me you're gaining 15 seconds to your life. i hope it doesn't feel like that. but next time you are having your gilded moment sitting in a meeting that seems endless and boring just think, yeah, i'm living longer. this is helping me. this is vitamins, baby. and that also should give you a sense of one of the reasons that we have arrived where we have. a society that really has a lot of good news. there are some grim things. i will not deny it. there are some things that we ought to wrestle, things that we ought to apply our intelligence to in order the solve, but we are here because of our own brilliance as a species, because we have doubled the life span.

since the james watts steam engine people are living twice as lawyers we were. if we live as much longer in the next century as we have added we will be adding hundreds of billions of human life years for the people who are on the planet today. that is amazing. it makes you have a different view of intergalactic travel. but this is one of the miracles. since the first people started talking to spirits are mixing herbs they have wanted nothing more than to live longer and healthier. we are lucky enough to live and the moment, and it is really a brief moment when you think about human history, with this has been achieved. we get to enjoy this great gift. my cousin send me a letter. these flash, ted fishman in favor of longer life. yes, i am. longer, healthier, engaged life.

the reason i wrote the book is because we are at this moment right now. we have applied our best intelligence for millennia to get here. still the moment surprises us. we are in crisis mode about it. we have to apply the same intelligence to negotiating, navigating, creating this society that we want and the lives we want for ourselves. that is what "shock of gray" is about, to give us the lens and goggles to look at this new world so that we see the dynamics, and our families, in our workplace, and our communities, in our countries, and even geopolitically. i will go through some of these things. so why are we getting older as a society? you know, their is a difference between the way people and places age. you all a day-by-day with every day, year by year with every

year. society's doubt. society's age in different ways. and we say japan is the oldest in the world, it is not is because it has existed the longest time it is because the median age has been pushed up, the groups of older people are disproportionately large compared to what they have been historically. in just about any way you can measure in aids society japan is it and most of the world is going that way. well, one reason is that you have longer. when we live longer we push up the average. there are other big reasons why societies age. the number one reason is that we are having smaller families. this relates to longevity, our increased health, all of the reasons that give us increased of. families are smaller nearly everywhere in the world except for a handful of places. families are about half or less as big as they were a generation

or two ago. nowhere in the developing world except for a few exceptions, very small countries, most of them, is the fertility rate above the replacement rate for the population. in many they are quite far below. japan will be back to its world war one population of around 55 million people at the end of the century if nothing it dramatically changes. that is quite stunning. europe very soon will cross the threshold from when its population is growing, now growing marginally, to when it is shrinking barring some vast change in the number of children people have or in its immigration. i don't think those changes are going to happen. that is something that we can discuss. there is another reason why the age demographic of a place can change. that is immigration. you know, in "shock of gray" i talk about why that a change of

the world informs the way money moves, the way people move, and the way goods move. one of the very startling things is the way an aging society encourages younger people to move in and fill in the gaps that are missing. we know that. if you have a family that has caregivers' you may have an emigrant caregiver who has come in the prime of life to make his or her way here in this country. one of the country's high-profile in spain. spain is very interesting in this regard. for most of the 20th century spain was the sending country where it had a surplus of your people, and they left to serve families in germany's or elsewhere in western europe. but then a round 2,000 the profile changed dramatically. and from having virtually no emigration, very few foreign-born people to lead time in which its aids demographic started tipping and getting over

-- older and older in media and people to fill in the workforce. so in very short order spain became a receiving country for immigrants from south america in from north africa. sometimes these changes are so dramatic that they change the demographics of the country the people were sent from. so here we are in new york. the center for ecuadorean. there are actually two places in the world. they move between the ages of 18 and 35 and generally they have two places where they go. one is new york and the other happens to be barcelona. they both have a around half a million ecuadorean. they have come rather recently, but they have come suddenly. right now ecuador is the country that has the most people of its own working outside its country. one out of eight works abroad. this has changed the

demographics of ecuador which has gone from being a young country to one that has exported some indian people it is now one of the world's rapidly aging countries. in very short order mexico will be a rapidly aging country. it all goes according to the trend, mexico will be an older country than the united states. pretty amazing. we have longer life, smaller families, and immigration. and going to go through some of these. so one of the people in the audience is muddier editor. we have been exploring global issues together for a long time. colin has sent me all over the world to explore. one of the big projects that did was china eight. one of the fascinating things

about china was when you arrive in that country you see a fascinating place that seems to you to be the highest place in all the world. you get to shanghai, and neon wonderland. literally crisscrossing the street. be shanghai, for example, is a city that it has about a million people a year every single year. virtually all of the additional population between the ages of 8925. in new go to factories in china which seemed to the collections of young people, enormous collections of young people. i have been to factories with 20,000 people under 25. if you have an ipad or iphone or hewlett-packard computer you buy products.

they have 960,000 employees, most of its 205. this year they will add 400,000 more. they will have 1 million employees, virtually all under the age of 25. that is enough to fill six of the ten jobs in manhattan. so you walk into these places and think, what is the most important fact? low wages? probably important. is it where it is in china? also important what is the one thing that gets you through the door to mack it is the fact that you are a young person. you know, we all know it is hard to pass a camel through the eye of a needle, but it is pretty easy compared to passing a 45 year-old through the human relations department of a chinese company. you just don't see them.

i'm from chicago from the south side of chicago. when i see separations of populations i start thinking that there is something structural. there is a reason. it may be an economic reason or social reason. then because colin had asked me to look more deeply that the issues around 8-started thinking about how this was affecting the global commerce between the aging world in europe and america and elsewhere in east asia. if you look at the industrial workplace in the plan -- japan, europe, and the united states the effective retirement rate at which workers are leaving those places is going down. at the very same time 100 million or 200 million new workers, all under the age of 25 are being acquired in china. so i started wondering, well,

maybe globalization itself as a creature of the aging of the world. our fortunes are all determined by whether we live in an economic environment that in some way is to find deeply by the cost of an aging world. the most expensive and please, as you all know, the ones you pay the highest salary to because they have acquired knowledge. they have specific knowledge. they get paid more. ball, a flexible work environment, when you outsource a job you don't need that firm's specific knowledge and more. health care for older workers is expensive. not just expensive for those workers, but all your health care is more expensive. benefit packages are more expensive. so when the effective retirement age goes down at the very same time the official retirement age

is going up there is a reason why these jobs are being said. there is a reason why they're being acquired in china. china does not have an effective pension plan, and effective health care plan. people say, it is all about low wages, not about discriminating. well, if it is about the low wages what about the parents of these workers. they are the lowest paid people in the world. they are completely out of the monetary economy, the hardest working people. the break soil until they cannot live to whole anymore. it is about creating a low-cost environment that can be pitted against a high-cost environment because of age-related expenses. so that was one of the genesis of this book. once you start seeing the world in that way you can start seeing a dynamic in which aging of the world propels globalization and

globalization propels the aging of the world, and you can see why we are in this feedback loop which makes societies older and older and older. there are some challenges to that. we all know that. in france, in spain, increase, even around the united states we are hearing and seeing people hit the streets because they don't want their pensions taken away. they don't want their pensions reduced. the don't want the retirement age to change which is in effect renegotiation of their benefits. but the sectors in which these are dominant. in the united states the service sectors, public employees whose jobs cannot be outsourced abroad. industry solve the problem, but we have not solved it in the public sector. we have not renegotiated society in a way that handles the economic burden of the public

sector. we have to be very careful. so i told you i traveled around spain. it is sunday, wonderful, then make the most of what god gave him. my editor in spain, a guy who i'll call marcus, gave me the idea that spain was the place to report in. he did it over a lunch in which she was looking interminably. made it through half a pack of cigarettes, three glasses of wine, appetizers, ham. while he is smoking in checking and eating is heavy said, ted, i think your on to something because here in spain our damn mediterranean diet just let this die. of course i want him to live forever. then i was looking at his plate

and his ashtray and his wine glass. i thought, that is a good way to live forever. it turns out that, you know, this mediterranean diet, although we all think of it as a certain thing, lots of vegetables, no animal fat, light portions, eating moderately, that is life prolonging. but if you look closely the fat content is huge. the spanish eat more ham than anyone else in the world by far except the danes who are also very long left. yet they still live this very long life. i was wondering about this. but if you look at the way spaniards eat, not the things that they eat, it is markedly different than the way that we often meet, which is socially. if you read alone in spain you have not eaten.

it is your time to be with your family in difference. it is a very big experience. lunch takes forever. this is something i would recommend to my colleagues. that two hour three drink him laden lunch. off is really like that. it seems like they are getting nothing done. there is a lot happening. they are trading information. they're making emotional connection and investing in a long and healthy life. there is did research around this about what a socialite can do for your long-term health. this is the mediterranean diet. there is another feature which is surprising. that is, what happens to a family in a country which is so adamantly self identified as pro-family. a travel to china, japan,

throughout southern europe reporting. these are places where people are so quick to tell you, we are not like you americans. we value our old people. well, what are the places in the world that have the fewest children? the prices that are self identified as being the most pro-family. why is this? because they put the most burdens on women in those cultures. as soon as the women have an out where they can pursue their own aspirations are education they take the time to do that. they run to that window. there is an interesting section of the book that was fascinating for me to report. the laws in japan that were enacted said that japanese women would not have the soldiers of gi's limited to four years because as soon as they were given access to birth control the ticket. the demand of being a japanese

woman is so severe. without those children and the expectation japanese women have a better chance of achieving their aspirations. this is one of the miracles. we will turn the clock back on it, but it keeps families small round the world. it creates burdens down the line. you have this idea of families as the bulwark against the ravages of old age. your children will take care of you when you are old, but actually in the countries that hold this idea dearest and loudest they don't have the children to take care of the. also they live so long that the children were taking care of them you would have 9-year-old being taking care of by seven year-old. when you talk to families around the world one of the things that they tell you is the one thing i don't want is my children taking

care of me. this is not something parents tend to want in places where they have struggled hard to get their kids' education costs are all hard to get them a foothold in the world of work. and so with the exception of japan what you get is an environment that is ripe for immigration. that is why when societies age they often have high care burdens for the members of the family, but often those burdens are shared with somebody who has come into the country. i talk about that, and that obviously has an effect not only on the family which allows adult children to stay in the work force, be productive, help the economy overall, but also has a huge effect on the country from which these immigrants come from. the families that leave ecuador, the philippines, central europe,

they are sending money back to educate their children. now we're starting to see how aging propels globalization. we can turn to how globalization propels aging. so when you have a newly industrial country in ten people have come to the city and women can achieve their aspirations, stay in the workforce, you also did an urban population which will have smaller numbers of children to read what did they do with their small families? they invest in them. if you have five or six children you can only provide them with so many calories. so much education. if you have wondered to you can pump lots of calories into that one a child. for 5 inches taller than they would be otherwise. you can measure rural families

against urban families. there is a health differential, which is huge. you can pump educational resources, not only you as the parents, but grandparents do this, too. you start to get the dynamic of a developing world, a prosperous world. so with all of the grimness we think of as an aging world you also get this rejuvenation of the world in where families can provide the children that they do have with more and more resources. you get a far more urban world. so not only to the workers stay in the city's and the children they have stay in the city's, but parents come in from the countryside in order to take care of the children so that the adults who have the children can stay in the work force longer and stay productive.

so, this is the global view, but there is another thing i want to talk to you about. that is how the aging of the world changes places that we live in and your lives and my life here in the united states. i think we all owe it to ourselves to see the dynamics of global aging because that puts you, your children, your parents in a global context that is very real and defining the fate of where you live, defining your own professional life and defining the fate of our country. it has done another -- it has had another a factor that has interested me quite a lot. that is, it is encourages people to rethink where they live, how they live there, and what is the nature of the place that the live. it away it makes people redefine the place that they have committed their life to end makes the place is redefine

themselves so that people stay there. older workers have been the most easily discarded in a globalized economy, especially older industrial workers. if you looked around the country many of our oldest communities are aging industrial communities. these are places where all the people have stayed, yarder, educated people leave, and the demographic shoots up. one of these places as rockville illinois and northwest of chicago. for most of the 20th century it was one of the richest 25 towns in the united states. one prosperous family company after another, many employing hundreds of thousand people. the clusters of the industry that existed have been decimated by the migration of manufacturing out. the workers that exist in the company that are still there are much reduced in number because one of the responses to

globalization by some companies is to automate. if they can't find love it -- lower cost workers they will find robots and machine is the will do it all in an attempt to shed the cost of an aging work force. if you live in rockford and you are a skilled worker working in one of the many factories that was or is still there around 52, 53, 54 you start hearing signals from your bosses about its time to move on. we have a package for you command early retirement package. you really ought to take it. maybe we will throw in some training, pay for your insurance. usually they are misled on the insurance. when you walk you see lots of these workers who were once very happily employed at companies they were at for a long time. now they are in retail environments or run cleaning

services or are caregivers for older people. there is something in the air that makes you feel very old at age 50. you feel like you and your cohort are passed your used by date. the young people do leave. when you talk to families wanting that they complain about bitterly is that it is impossible to teach well educated young people. mostly they come to chicago, some come to new york. it is one of those buses that wherever you go you start asking, anyone here from rockford. so the town faced this situation. they elected a young mayor. he ran on a platform to rejuvenate the town, bringing people back, get the young people back comedy you -- new

young professionals back. never going to improve museums, of river rock, parks, have cultural events. there was a huge stakes giving- museums, of river rock, parks, in order to talk the extra for aeons into coming back to town. some places have success, rockford has not. they had a whole young staff. there were doing things specific. locally prepared cheeses. to me this was a great example of how a place can take advantage of its unique assets. where did rockford succeed? succeeded in ways it did not expect. but there is a booming economy. it is the health care niche. if you go downtown there are

struggling. if you go this population has created a vibrant business in the health care sector. it turns out the health care sector acts as a manufacturing industry for your town because you actually get export income from the health care sector because you get to import money that the federal government raises nationally, and it is all paid locally. and so the companies went for this. the rockford main health care system sent to the philippines to find 100 young nurses to come be part of this new niche. now ucla and a population coming in, often immigrants from central europe or from the philippines are from mexico. they are filling the churches that were once empty, the stores

that need customers. they found their strength. i started thinking, is this a mode for development in the future? can you build your economy, your sense of place? your population is aging. in order to do this i had to call on all of my skills as an investigative reporter gained over the years, often under the stick of some people in this room and figure out how would report this. i did what i do whenever i face an important challenging story that i don't know how to begin attacking. i asked my mother. i said, mom, she is 83. she was 80. what can i do to dig into this issue? she said, go to sarasota, florida. so i went. what did i find?

it is the oldest large metropolis in the united states demographically. quite a bit older than just about any other place you could name. interestingly enough the demographic is just about the same as the demographic of white rockford. and they have bet wholeheartedly on what rockford cannot provide. if you feel old at age 50 in sarasota you feel young an age 65. you get there. you are the new arrival. you are the active elder. you have a bunch of 85 year-old to tell you to calm down. that is enough but jager already. some of the most likely places i visit were not the wealthier, but the ones on the edge, the trailer homes, the manufactured homes, even more social than it was elsewhere. actually a fabulous place to

live. for the first time in my life i started thinking if i wanted to live in a trailer home. maybe i will meet tonya harding. an aids tonya harding, now there is something. so sarasota is not only organizing a kind of silicon valley for aging where there are so many intimating countries that have come together and figure out how they can export the models developed in this crucible of competition. the people itself have organized. sarasota is now the highest per capita number of not-for-profit organizations in america because people want to reinvent themselves. the reinvention becomes part of their journey. they know they have to be social. if they are they will add to their years. in a nutshell i think this is the challenge that we all face.

people who have grasped the reality of their being, know what kind of community they are and, made economic virtue out of necessity, and have really, you know, led the way for the world so the sarasota is now not only attractive to people from the united states, but has become an economic -- its initial siddur for people to retire. competition has made it so and the people who live there have made it so. so what is the shark -- "shock of gray"? to profile the world's population is inverting. we used to have lots of young people and few older people at the top. think of your tasting table. the bunch of kids. a few old people. that is a bunch of all people firing spitballs and a bunch of kids telling your people that they are embarrassing them.

it is really how do we take this world so that we protect ourselves from the impulse of strong economic forces that want to devalue older people and reduce their wages, remove their jobs to where your report can be employed and get ourselves and all of the people who are filling the upper reaches so that they are the most valuable, most active, most happy where we might dismiss them. with that i would love to hear your questions. that you very much. [applauding] >> there is a mite that we can pass around. ask me something hard. there is one.

>> hello. >> hi. i am in the medical tourism business. we are looking at sending people overseas for medical treatment, both the elderly and even people who retire and go into nursing homes. how do you think that will affect the population of the world and how it can shift around the demographic? >> requested. nice to see you. you know, medical tourism is quite a phenomenon. you know, spain, in addition to having an older population is also a favorite. it is the sarasota of europe. if you are a scandinavian where health care is expensive your government will pay you to be a medical tourist and spain. in japan there are whole medical expeditions' that cut to the philippines for things that require long-term recuperation or something like that. you can get transplants and other countries. if you are refugees from the

socialized medicine -- a system of socialized medicine that you feel is not serving you. i think this is an interesting export. so, i don't know that it will ever compare to the kind of medical complex and will grow up in our communities where people are aging, but for certain procedures that require longer care where it pays to have a patient lower-cost health care environment, i think you will see it. americans may be less prone to do that than europeans and asians. >> what do you say about cities like new york? i mean, they are almost their own country in no way. cities like london and paris and new york that have an identity? how do you see them? >> well, cities are a great

topic in a great world. i talk about it because it is fascinating. i believe that the aging of the world will propel the urbanization far faster than any of the mainstream estimates of it. the reason for that is cities are good places to aids. a good city is a great place to eight. new york has lived a pretty long time compared to the rest of the american population. maybe it is darwinian. you drive the weaker people out. they are coming to northern industrial illinois to buy vacated homes. you walk if you are in a city. public transportation. i happen to think the best city in the world for its other people is tokyo, japan. you cannot sneeze and not hit the train, but you have to walk downstairs are upstairs. the diet is good.

japanese, when they are healthy, are very convivial, but they anathematized people who are sick. it is a bad thing. it's in general the lifestyle is great, and it is also the fact that cognitively challenged. we have all heard that if you do sit juku or cross were challenged -- puzzles that you will be a target of the fit, i don't put much stock in that. i think if you do crossword puzzles he joined the community of crossword puzzles and feel like you're making a connection. but if you give somebody at age 60 or age 70 or 75 or 80 a map of the tokyo subway system and tell them to go figure out how to get from place a to be some of their going to do two things. they will study that map and learn how to do it or they will adapt some fabulous piece of japanese technology that tells them how to do it and stay current that way. because cities are target of the

challenging they also keep you cognitively help the. at think they are excellent places stage. yes. >> just curious. there is a theory that made a lot of press in germany a couple of years ago called asset. which more or less explored how a society at a certain point in the aging process, the number of people who are suddenly cashing in their investments start to pull down on the investment universe of that particular country. you know, you actually definitely put a great spin on the individual challenges and successes that the town of a city might have in attracting young people. what happens when you have an entire society, a country that is going to start seeing that

kind of eating of its own feed corn where you might have a brazil or indonesia or turkey with populations at age 45, 26, 27, a sweet spot of family creation. how do you see it from a larger geopolitical sense would? >> well, that is "shock of gray." that is a really great question. i first learned about this topic from my editor. it is something that we wrote about. you know, this is, of course, an issue, but it does also relate to how long people can stay vital. so when does this trying down happened? so what i proposed in the final remarks of my talk, maybe i will allow a break right now. i think one thing that we need in order to avoid the scenario that you said, what you just described and which people start

spending down their lifetime savings in order to survive into old age, we might think of an accumulation of intellectual capital in addition to the accumulation of your real capital. and by this i mean, what can we do for us and for our neighbors so that when they arrived at age 62 or 65 they are the most valuable they have ever been because they have accumulated knowledge, maybe technology helps them with the things that a challenging, but they acquire skills, knowledge, judgment and wisdom. when you get to that late stage in your career you cannot be devalued. you can already see this taking shape. the people, very high work force participation hysterically. half of this population has been reduced to bad jobs, minimum wage jobs to attend jobs, self employment of some lousy kind or

another. a large portion of our knowledge workers, lawyers, workers, inventors come a engineers who actually need to spend their whole life getting smart and want to work deep into their 70's or 80's or even 90's. and if we can facilitate that we will avoid this scenario altogether. after nine. >> if i were a ceo of a company in america. >> and i wish you were. >> by were ceo of a large company in this country will what i'd do differently or think about differently? >> i learned a bitter lesson from writing. when you write a really scary book about the difficult realities and it gives people excuses to act in absolutely the ways that you hope they don't. you say, okay. globalization is happening. i better get on board. you know, my goal with this book

really is tough lay out what i think is the situation empirically. describe it. then once people see the landscape in the way that i propose then you will get this networking reaction of solutions that are all around. as the ceo sees it and as the people who work for him see it on network of suppliers see it the whole world will be reconfiguring. in the short term what i see happening, the forward thinking ceos to think of demographics and some important way have changed there thinking radically because of the recession. before 2007 when i heard on this book was so contrary to my instincts that i wondered whether it was so. the baby boomers are getting old. there will want to leave the work force early. what is corporate america going to do?

hundreds of millions of years of expertise are working off of the shop floor. and then the recession happened. oh, my god. all of these older workers who think they are entitled to everything. we are going to design our organizations to have maximum flexibility. china is graduating more than india and the u.s. put together. it is all part of a dynamic, and we are competing to make a living. once we see this that will change. take you, everyone. i will be a round and would love to hear your remarks and questions. [applauding] ..