Stage (Not Age)

INTRODUCTION

A New Demographic Reality

One hundred years old.

There’s something about that marker, a century. It’s a simple number. Easy to grasp as a real milestone for a life. For a long time, it was so rare that it was celebrated. People who reached one hundred were newsworthy. Just a hundred years ago, the average American could expect to live fifty-four years. By the end of World War II, it was sixty-four. When the personal computer debuted in 1981, life expectancy had reached seventy-four. Today it’s nearly eighty, and in one generation, public health and medical advances will enable children born since 2000 to expect to live to one hundred; adults like me who arrive at good health at age sixty-five have better-than-even odds of living ...