Laura Carstensen

And the studies that are going on now look like we could make that trade with very little change in productivity level.

So we can think about working longer if we also think creatively about how much and when we would work longer.

Because if we had an income stream

even into our 80s, we're working many fewer hours, let's say, but you have some money coming in, it's a much more manageable situation

situation financially.

So we need to really rethink how we support century-long lives.

Thank you for saying that.

And I try to argue that every chance I get.

The least happy

workers in the labor force in this country are parents of young children.

And because every day they're making a choice between being a good parent or being a good worker, and they want to be both and they need to be both, but we ask them to make that choice.

And with an additional 30 years added to life expectancy, we shouldn't have to keep making those hard choices.

If we have new models of work where people worked more and less at different phases, very often you would work fewer hours when you had very young children in the home.

And then you could increase the hours as they're being launched out of the home and going off on their own and to college and starting their own lives.

Maybe that's when we reach the peak.

And then as we get much older, we might reduce the hours again.

But we could come in and out of full and part-time work.

It would be good for individuals and certainly good for their financial security.

Over the years, I've done a fair amount of clinical work with an older population, and there were often tensions between adult children

and their older parents about where they lived and the kind of care that they got, where the older person was saying, just leave me alone, and the younger person was wanting them to do something different.