At least every couple of months, I get a call from a politician for an update on the latest developments in biology, medicine, or defense. Almost always we end up discussing what will happen to the economy as people live longer and longer. I tell him or her that there is simply no economic model for a world in which people live forty years or more past the time of traditional retirement. We literally have no data whatsoever on the work patterns, retirement arrangements, spending habits, health care needs, savings, and investments of large groups of people who live, quite healthily, well into
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