Monday, November 05, 2007

New Age Thinking: Alternative Ways of Measuring Age, Their Relationship to Labor Force Participation, Goverment Policies and GDP

New Age Thinking: Alternative Ways of Measuring Age, Their Relationship to Labor Force Participation, Goverment Policies and GDP

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures reflecting a person's stage in the lifecycle distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios. Two alternative measures of age are explored: mortality risk and remaining life expectancy. With these alternative measures, the huge wave of elderly forecast for the first half of this century doesn't look like a huge wave at all.