Longevity Driven Economy - a new concept to understand the Longevity impact on the economy

Over the last 15 years I have been observing how the world has been adapting itself to demographic reality. If in the beginning, the focus was on ageing and the fact that we have societies that are unprepared for the growing number of people over 60 years of age in the total population, today the focus is more and more on life span and healthy life span.

If at an early stage the focus was on the negative impact of this ageing of societies, today the focus is on the economic potential of longevity, where longevity is taken for granted. We will live longer and ideally better and healthier.

Knowing that it is important to understand how we age, combating ageism and promoting intergenerationally, the truth is that we are living in a moment where we need to change the vocabulary because words have meaning.

Terms like "demographic winter", "demographic hell", Tsunami, and others like that, make less and less sense. We are living in a demographic scenario with 5 generations in the labor market. That is a fact.

It is also a fact that a new area of the global economy is developed, focused on promoting people's healthy lifespans and, from there, promoting environments that promote longevity, which is also a fact.

When this year at Davos, the science of longevity was a topic and a group of companies and investors in longevity were brought closer to the World Economic Forum community, the interest in growing longevity, as an area of the economy, was made official.

Although a document has been published mentioning the longevity economy, the truth is that it is not the "longevity economy" that is being talked about. We are talking about something else, much broader, more complex and, in my view, much more interesting. We are talking about longevity as a driver of the economy.

In September, Morgan Stanley, in its document The World in 2030 In 10 Short Stories, identifies longevity as one of the major trends for this decade and, interestingly, refers to the importance and trend of private investment in the development of this area of the economy.

These are 2 examples show that longevity is today more than the need to empower societies to increase the number of people aged 65 and over. Therefore, it makes no sense to refer to the term longevity economy, because in its definition we are considering only the market of people aged 50 and over.

Reality has changed, longevity is much more than long lives, and this is the time to coin new terms for new phenomena.

The vision of the economy to be guided by longevity is intergenerational, it begins long before the person is born and even before he is a tiny embryo in his mother's womb. It goes further than the ageing and death of that person, it goes through the environment where he lived all his life.

Ideally, I conceive of longevity as the ability of a society to promote to each of its inhabitants the possibility of being the best version of themselves, at any age and at any stage of life.

Therefore, the LONGEVITY DRIVEN ECONOMY presupposes that societies have a transversal and long-term vision, with the focus on promoting an ideal space where everyone, at all times of life and in all its stages can live at their maximum exponent of fulfillment, happiness and creativity.

Some countries have already built the foundations of this "wonderful world", with the placement of longevity as one of the pillars of economic development, in this perspective that I mentioned above. I am referring to Ireland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Singapore, as an example.

This means that, ideally and strategically, if an economy wants to take most of the forces that are pushing global economy, it needs to see longevity as a strategic axis.

But more than that, it needs to create a "fertile soil" for the development of this area of the economy that has an impact on commerce, services, industry and even urbanism and real state, just to name a few areas, because in facto longevity is transversal to all areas of the economy. To this "fertile soil" I refer to the positioning of this society as an ecosystem for longevity.

Longevity is today a strong axis of economic development with an impact on attracting private capital (impact on the stock market), highly qualified human resources, luxury tourism, health systems and services with a focus on prevention and personalization of health, retail and research.

I therefore propose that the term longevity economy be dropped, because of the restriction that its definition implies, and that a concept be adopted that is more in line with reality.

#LongevityDrivenEconomy mirrors the way longevity is perceived, intergenerational and without references to a person's chronological age, not least because it makes less and less sense, in a world progressively more marked by other concepts of age, including biological age.

?Ana Jo?o Sepulveda

Longevity expert

CEO da 40+ Lab

#LongevityDrivenEconomy #Longevity #Economy #Global Trends