Is a Shorter Work Week our Demographic Destiny?

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Repeat the old truism ‘demographics is destiny’ to a young person and you’ll probably spark gloomy thoughts of the coming wave of boomer retirements and the strain they’re likely to put on the public finances. After all, we’re the ones who are likely to get stuck with the higher taxes, longer working lives and a bankrupt social security system. But do demographics hold any positive surprises for the youngest members of the workforce?

An article in the Guardian today suggest that yes, in fact demographic change promises some things that are more positive than office drudgery into our 80s. Reporting a recent study published in medical journal, The Lancet, the UK paper says,

Professor Kaare Christensen and colleagues at the ageing research centre at the University of Southern Denmark calculate that at least half the babies born in the UK in the year 2000 will reach their 100th birthday. Life expectancy is increasing so fast that half the babies born in 2007 will live to be at least 103, while half the Japanese babies born in the same year will reach the age of 107.

With US life expectancy lagging behind most of the developed world, how many centenarians we can expect here on this side of the Atlantic is up in the air. (How’s that health insurance reform thing coming, Senators?) But whatever happens to the US health care system, this is certainly good news. Still, longer life expectancy does nothing to change the fact that we’re going to spend a whole lot more time working, right? Not necessarily, say the researchers, who have “a radical solution” to the strain of our demographic imbalance:

Young and old should work fewer hours a week. Over a lifetime, we would all spend the same total amount of time at work as we do now, but spread out over the years.

“The 20th century was a century of redistribution of income. The 21st century could be a century of redistribution of work,” they write. “Redistribution would spread work more evenly across populations and over the ages of life. Individuals could combine work, education, leisure and child rearing in varying amounts at different ages.”

It is a theory that is beginning to receive “some preliminary attention”, the authors say, citing a study in the Science journal three years ago which suggested that shorter working weeks would help young people and increase western Europe’s flagging birth rate.

A proposal that would help the notoriously apolitical (read, non-voting) US youth as much as those dedicated ballot goers, our senior citizens? What a radical idea.