SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Emma Twin. I'm a virtual twin for Dassault Système. My job, simulate multiple medical conditions on myself to develop new treatments for all. Basically, I'm like a crash test dummy for healthcare. It may sound like science fiction, but in fact, it's just science. I explain it all on my LinkedIn account. Look up Emma Twin from Dassault Système.
SPEAKER_03: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_02: I customarily killed old women. They all died there by the big river. I didn't used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. The women were customarily afraid of me.
SPEAKER_05: No wonder. That's the account of a man from the Aceh, an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay, as told to anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado. He explained that grandmothers helped with chores and babysitting, and when they got too old to be useful, you couldn't be sentimental. The usual method was an axe to the head. For the old men, Aceh custom dictated a different fate. They were sent away and told never to return. What obligations do we owe to our elders? It's a question as old as humankind, and the answers have varied widely, at least if surviving traditional societies are any guide. Jared Diamond, another anthropologist, says the Aceh are hardly outliers. Among the Kwah Long in Papua New Guinea, when a woman's husband died, it was her son's solemn duty to strangle her. In the Arctic, the Chukchi encouraged old people to kill themselves, with a promise of rewards in the afterlife. Yet many tribes took a very different approach. They were gerontocracies, in which the young do as the old say. Some even expected adults to pre-chew food for their aged and toothless parents. What does seem common is the expectation that, until your body let you down completely, you'd keep working. That's no longer true. Many of us expect to reach a certain age, then receive money from the state or our former employers, not in return for work today, but in recognition of our work in the past. This curious stage of life is called retirement, and the payment a pension. Pensions for soldiers date back at least as far as ancient Rome. The word pension comes from the Latin for payment, but only in the 19th century did they spread far beyond the military. The first universal state pension came in Germany in 1890. The right to support in old age is still far from global. Nearly a third of the world's older people have no pension, and for many of the rest, the pension isn't enough to live on. Still, in many countries, generations have grown up assuming they will be well looked after in old age. It's becoming a challenge to meet that expectation. For years, economic policy wonks have been sounding the alarm about a slow-burn crisis in the pension system. The problem is demographic. Half a century ago in the OECD, a club of rich nations, the average 65-year-old woman could expect to live about 15 more years. Today, she can expect at least 20. Meanwhile, families have shrunk from 2.7 children to 1.7. The pipeline of future workers is drying up. All that has many implications, some good and some bad. But for pensions, the situation is stark. There'll be many more retirees to support and many fewer workers paying taxes to support them. In the 1960s, the world had nearly 12 workers for every older person. Today, it's under 8. By 2050, it'll be just 4. Both state and private pension systems now look expensive. Employers have been scrambling to make theirs less generous. Forty years ago, most American workers were on so-called defined benefit plans, which specify what you'll get when you retire. Now, it's fewer than 1 in 10. The new norm, defined contribution, specifies what your employer will pay into your pension pot rather than what income you'll be able to get out of it. Such pensions don't logically have to be more miserly than defined benefit schemes, but they usually are, often vastly so. It's easy to understand why employers are ditching defined benefits. Pension promises can prove expensive to keep. Ponder the case of John Janeway, who fought in the US Civil War. His military pension included benefits for a surviving spouse when he died. When Janeway was 81, he married an 18-year-old. The army was still paying Gertrude Janeway her widow's pension in 2003, nearly 140 years after the war ended. The wonks can see trouble ahead. A bulge of workers is approaching retirement, and their workplace pensions may be worth less than they'd expected. That's why governments around the world are trying to persuade individuals to save more towards their old age. But it's not easy to get people to focus on the distant future. One survey finds that under-50s are barely half as likely as over-50s to say retirement is their top financial concern. When you're saving for your first house, or raising a young family, you may not feel a pressing need to provide for the old person you'll one day become. Indeed, you may find it hard to conceive of that future old person as you. Behavioural economists have come up with some clever solutions, such as automatically enrolling people in workplace pension schemes, and scheduling more saving from future pay rises. These nudges work pretty well. We could opt out, but instead we tend to save through sheer inertia. But they don't solve the fundamental demographic problem. No amount of saving changes the fact that we'll always need current workers to generate the wealth to support current pensioners, whether that's through paying taxes, renting properties owned by retirees, or working for companies in which pension funds are the major shareholders. Some think we'll need a more radical shift in our attitudes to old age. There's talk of retirement itself being retired. Perhaps, like our ancestors, we'll be expected to work for as long as we're able. But the varied customs of ancestral societies should give us pause, because they appear to have evolved in response to some discomfortingly hard-nosed trade-offs. Whether elders could expect lovingly pre-tude food, or an axe by the Big River, seems to have depended on whether the benefits they offered to the tribe outweighed the costs of supporting them. In tribes like the Aceh, those costs were higher, because they moved around a lot, or food was frequently scarce. Today's societies are rich and sedentary by comparison. We can afford the rising cost of pensions if we choose. But there are other differences too. Once we relied on elders to store knowledge and instruct the young, now knowledge dates quickly. And who needs grandma when we have schools and Wikipedia? We might hope we're long past the days when levels of respect for old people unconsciously tracked some balance of costs and benefits. Still, if we believe a dignified old age is a right, perhaps we should be saying that, as clearly and as often as possible.
SPEAKER_03: We'll live to a hundred. How can we afford it? is one of many reports calling attention to the pensions crisis. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_05: Before you go, I just want to remind you about one of our other big podcasts of 2019. A while ago I mentioned 30 animals that made us smarter. All about what we humans have learnt from the animal kingdom. How the Kingfisher inspired the design of the bullet train, for example. And the story of the mosquito and the surgical needle. Well, now all 30 episodes have been released. 30 amazing stories available right now to download and binge on. They're fascinating and fun. Let me hand over to the presenter of 30 animals that made us smarter to tell you more.
SPEAKER_04: Octopuses, the mosquito, a woodpecker, fireflies, mussels, geckos, sea otters, termites, and carp-wheeling desert spiders. The natural world is full of problems. They've had millions of years to test them out. Now it's our turn to take inspiration from them. Extend the time that we can preserve, transform, make enjoying ice cream. 30 animals that made us smarter. From the BBC World Service. The podcast which investigates the amazing ways in which animals have inspired us. Just search for 30 animals that made us smarter wherever you found this podcast. This stuff is better than science fiction.
