The Graying of the United States and the World
Learning Outcomes
- Describe the graying of the United States, including the impact of aging baby boomers
- Examine aging and elder care as a global issue
The Graying of the United States
Demographically, the U.S. population over sixty-five years old increased from 3 million in 1900 to 33 million in 1994 (Hobbs 1994), 36.8 million in 2010, 47.8 million in 2015, and 49.2 million in 2018 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018). This is a greater than tenfold increase in the elderly population, compared to a mere tripling of both the total population and of the population under sixty-five years old (Hobbs 1994). This increase has been called “the graying of America,” a term that describes the phenomenon of a larger and larger percentage of the population getting older and older.
There are several reasons why the United States is graying so rapidly. One of these is life expectancy: the average number of years a person born today may expect to live. When we review Census Bureau statistics grouping the elderly by age, it is clear that in the United States, at least, we are living longer. In 2010, there were about 80,000 centenarians in the United States. According to the CDC, the number of centenarians in the United States in 2014 was 72,197. [1]. They make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the population (Boston University School of Medicine 2014).
People over ninety years of age now account for 4.7 percent of the older population, defined as age sixty-five or above; this percentage is expected to reach 10 percent by the year 2050 (U.S. Census Bureau 2011). As of 2018, about 15.2 percent of the U.S. population is age 65 or older.[2]
It is interesting to note that not all people in the United States age equally. Most glaring is the difference between men and women; as Figure 2 below shows, women have longer life expectancies than men. In 2010, there were ninety sixty-five-year-old men per one hundred sixty-five-year-old women. However, there were only eighty seventy-five-year-old men per one hundred seventy-five-year-old women, and only sixty eighty-five-year-old men per one hundred eighty-five-year-old women. Nevertheless, as the graph shows, the sex ratio actually increased over time, indicating that men are closing the gap between their life spans and those of women (U.S. Census Bureau 2010).
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Baby Boomers
Of particular interest to gerontologists today is the population of baby boomers, the unprecedentedly large cohort born between 1946 and 1964 and now reaching their 70s. Coming of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, the baby boom generation was the first group of children and teenagers with their own spending power and therefore their own marketing power (Macunovich 2000). As this group has aged, it has redefined, particularly through the mass media forms that emerged during their adulthood, what it means to be young, middle-aged, and now old. People in the boomer generation do not want to grow old the