#002 The Third Age Consumer

Consumer Ageism

The Third Age Consumer

When my father was born in 1918, his life expectancy, was fifty-three,  according to UK statistics. Official definitions assume no improvement in life expectancy, due to medical science, over the lifetime of that person. At the time of his birth the UK did have a state pension scheme and retirement age was set at seventy. When my father was six, in 1924, the retirement age dropped to sixty-five. The UK Government was not taking many risks with the funding of the pensions! It did not change again for  ninety-six years. The UK Government  raised retirement age by a single year in October 2020.

My father died at the age of seventy-seven. The quarter of a century of extra years that he lived are witness to how wrong were those 1918 assumptions on life expectancy. Improvements in life expectancy have come from different places over time. Between 1850 and 1900 sixty three percent of all improvements  came from those under fifteen. By comparison seventy nine percent of the improvement in the period 1990-2007 came from people over sixty-five.  Child mortality fell because  of immunization and all the other advances in medicine. The focus  then shifted to diseases of the elderly. 

I am now seventy-two and expect to live longer than my father. Indeed, my own life expectancy has improved by  twenty years since I was born. It is a remarkable fact that life expectancy in the UK has increased by three months a year, every year,  since 1860. Many authors have forecast the end of that one hundred and sixty years of continuous improvement. To date they have all been proven wrong by the trend continuing. For every year that passes we only approach death by nine months.

This is a phenomenon that is not restricted to Europe and the Western world. Norberg, an economic historian, cites the example of Kenya between 2003 and 2013. In that decade , life expectancy increased by ten years. A forty-year-old in 2003 could have expected to live for another twenty- four years. After living a, hopefully happy, decade, in 2013 they still had twenty-four years of life expectancy. 

We all  finally reach the same stage  when physical and mental disability begins to restrict our ability to live a normal life. Laslett, a British historian, called this the Fourth Age. My father only had a handful of years between retiring and the start of his Fourth Age. Laslett termed that period after retirement, the Third Age and saw it as a golden period. There are now a huge  group of Third Age consumers. They have retired but are capable of consuming as they have always done. They have the health and mental capacity to  travel, eat out, and are heavy users of all services. I am a Third Ager and am enjoying it. In a single generation  then, the onset of the fourth age has moved back to at least eighty-five. Medical science means the Third Age has become a twenty-year span.

As we will see later in my “travelogue”, everyone over sixty-five feels ten to fifteen years younger than their chronological age. They consume based on how they feel  but their bodies cannot help but age. Their senses start to fail, their cognitive ability changes and they cannot lift what they use to be able to lift or walk as far. This this the concept of healthy ageing.

In describing “old age” and ageism  I have chosen to use Laslett’s model. It is not precise and is not tied easily to chronological age. The Fourth Age does not start on a particular birthday and is a point on a continuum. Retirement is no longer a fixed point;  all be it that the date of pensionable retirement has remained remarkably fixed. It does however convey the phases of life in a way that artificially dividing up old age into sixty-five to seventy five, seventy five to eighty five etc., does not.

A recent book by an eminent Harvard professor suggests that  humans did not evolve to retire. According to David Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, mankind ages uniquely. For most species, evolution loses interest once the individual passes reproductive age. Chimpanzees, seldom survive past the age of 50, soon after they stop being able to reproduce. In evolutionary terms they are obsolete and redundant. Why then did evolution decree that humans could live much longer?

The answer lies in the capacity of humans to have a higher birth-rate and sustain their children. This gives us an evolutionary competitive advantage versus other primates. A Chimpanzee mother needs to forage two thousand  calories per day. This is enough to maintain their own wellbeing and to have a little capacity left to feed their child. They can thus raise a single infant at a time and do not fall pregnant again until that child is self-sufficient. 

Archaeological research shows a typical human hunter gatherer mother with a six-month infant, a four-year-old child, and an eight-year-old juvenile. The only way that the mother could feed her family is with the support of the older members of the community. This is also shown in the few hunter gatherer societies that remain today. The grandparents are active foragers for roots and berries to the end of their lives. They provide food for their “grandchildren”. They never stop “working” and Leiberman argues that this is the reason they live so long. Elderly humans are anything but “biologically obsolete” . 

He argues nature has provided them with the ability to maintain their bodies. Hard work keeps the elderly hunter gatherer fit and allows them to live longer. The activity in which they engage stimulates recovery mechanisms in the body that also slow ageing.  

The Third Age Consumer Market is growing massively. We are not retiring from life and are aging healthily. As we will see in future Newsletters we have the spending power to demand the attention of our providers. We have the power to demand that the urban consumer world is customized for us.

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