Robert Butler, the nation’s preeminent expert on aging, tackles the sweeping implications of the aging of society in his new book, The Longevity Revolution.

He gives due attention to the challenges — such as the increased costs of chronic health problems and the continuing problem of ageism (a term he coined). But he is ultimately optimistic about the gift of longevity, and urges us to take advantage of it by reinventing ourselves to remain in the workforce.

Butler, who founded the National Institute of Aging and the first medical school department of geriatrics, won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book, Why Survive? In Longevity Revolution, he argues, “We must re-examine our personal and societal approach to aging right now, so that the boomers and the generations that follow may have a financially secure, vigorous, and healthy final chapter life.”

Here are a few excerpts from Chapter 13, “Live Longer, Work Longer: Productive Engagement”:

“Is it realistic for people to spend about 25 percent of their adult lifetime in retirement? To spend half as much time in retirement as they spend at work? Can society afford it? Is it good for men and women? Can they afford it? Does it serve health, longevity, and quality of life for a person to be idle? Should millions of baby boomer retirees have no work to do while collecting Social Security and using Medicare?

“These questions are especially pertinent in the industrialized world. Early retirement becomes wasted productive capacity. Yet until very recently, people retired at an increasingly early age, despite declining birthrates and longer lives. Most people over sixty-five are not working full time; neither are 50 percent of those between fifty-five and sixty-four. For example, between 1950 and 1990 the median age at which people retired in the United States declined steeply from age sixty-seven to sixty-three. By 1996 the average retirement age was 61.5 years and people averaged about twenty years in retirement.

(snip)

“Given these trends in the developed world, how will people without considerable wealth finance their longevity in long retirements? Can we keep older persons healthy, reeducated to prevent job obsolescence, productive, and on the job? Can we ever hope to achieve a society in which everyone in good health who needs to work will be able to get a job?

“Restructuring, downsizing and redundancy threaten workers of all ages, especially the youngest, the oldest, and the unskilled. Yet in truth, there is never really a shortage of work to be done. There are so many needs to be met. Rather, the private and public sectors have failed to establish mechanisms to link work with jobs and skills both on a paid and voluntary basis and to create full-employment societies.

(snip)

“It is time to overcome the factors that encourage early retirement, introduce shared work and more flextime and phased retirement, advance the ages of eligibility for Social Security, and secure more effectively the employment and rights of older persons and the disabled. Productive aging and engagement will help quell the three great fears of longevity—that there will be an unprecedented number of economically dependent older persons, that old people will drag down economic productivity, and that there will be intergenerational conflict.”