Numlock Sunday: March 17, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Eugene Steuerle who recently wrote Has Society Gotten Older or Younger?, a paper at The Urban Institute. Here's what I wrote about it:

It’s worth seriously considering how we think about aging, a new Urban Institute study suggests. See, for years the red line for “aging” was 65 years old, so when we see studies that claim America is getting older, they typically phrase it as the population over the age of 65. But a 2019 age 65 isn’t the same as a 1989 age 65. So instead it suggests viewing age through the prism of life expectancy, and that twist makes America look a little more spry than previously estimated. From 2010 to 2050, the percentage of people age 65 and older is projected to rise 11.6 percent. But the percentage of people with a life expectancy of …