Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[wactuary]

I've been lurking for a while, and now have something perhaps useful to contribute:

The aging projections for the US and world population are based on fairly sophisticated assumptions and methods. It is quite clear that that unless the trends of the past 100 years somehow reverse themselves, the world will be much grayer in 20 years than it is today. Many experts in fact believe that the US Social Security reports are too optomistic, and that the dependency ratio (number of retirees divided by number of workers) will be go up even faster than the government projects.

This means that the Social Security trust fund will more likely than not run out of money much faster than the government says, and that major changes to the system will be required to set it right. For example, those of you younger than 40 may not be able to get full Social Security benefits until you reach age 70, and benefits payable before that age will be reduced even more than under current law.

Here's a website that contians a lot of current research on gloabel aging.

http://www.csis.org/gai/pubs_subject.htm