THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

All four of these megatrends will be briefly described. Each issue
will be synthesized into a single, hard 'money question', a substantial
question to which some kind of response will occur - either by
default or by design - within the next decade. The rest of this book
will reveal how these 'money questions' can be turned around into a
surprising opportunity to make Sustainable Abundance a reality.
The first step is to recognize that this is 'a bad time to be an ostrich',
according to an editorial in The Economist on January 1, 1999. An
ostrich may experience some short-term psychological comfort, but
vital parts of its anatomy are at high risk. In short, the time has come
to pull our heads out of the sand. We start with the Age Wave - the
slowest of these megatrends, but also the one that is most inexorably
certain.
1. Age Wave
For 99% of the existence of our species, life expectancy has been
estimated at about 18 years. Over the past century, particularly the
past few decades, the combined impact of dramatic advances in
hygiene, nutrition, lifestyle and medicine has had a cumulative effect
on the number of years that people can expect to live. In the
developed world, life expectancy has now risen to 80 years for
women, and to 76 years for men. One remarkable consequence is that
two out of three of all human beings who have ever reached the age of 65 are
alive today. The age of 65 was initially chosen by Bismarck as an
official 'retirement age' during the 19th century, when the life
expectancy in Germany was 48 years. Very few people were expected
to reach that hallowed age, and our entire social contract of jobs and
pension systems was geared to take care of those few people.
Over the next few decades, a demographic transformation that is
totally predictable will take place - all the people involved are
accounted for today. In the developed world, about one person in