ABSTRACT
In the West and some non-Western countries such as Japan, demographic aging has raised the specter of economic and political decline while spawning entire industries catering to the elderly. When retirement was a relatively new phenomenon, it was common to see life as consisting of three stages: formation in youth, work in adulthood, and retirement in old age. Driving government and popular awareness of issues related to aging is the spread of demographic knowledge. A 2014 World Health Organization (WHO) study indicates that one in seven persons in the world will be over the age of 60 in 2020 and one in five will be over 60 in 2050. In the most ambitious work on the future of pensions, Bernd Marin looked at the case of Austria, which he called a 'low-work' or 'idle society'. As a result of both demographic transition and the extraordinary achievements of the welfare state, Europeans need to reinvent retirement by extending working life incentives.
