Have you ever heard of the "geometry of aging"?  The concept is quite simple, yet it has major implications for American society as more than 60 million baby boomers approach their retirement years.

Consider a triangle: ê. That's how the American population looked just one hundred years ago.At the widest base on the bottom were the youngsters. At the narrowest point on the top were the very old. The rest of the population comprised a gradually sloping middle. 

Today, the geometry of aging has radically transformed. A diagram of the population today looks very much like a rectangle:0.  This difference is more than pictorial. It portends some very serious public policy issues.

In 1900, only one out of every twenty Americans was over the age of 65 and almost half of the population was age 21 or younger (48.3%).  By the time much of the Baby Boomer Generation is in retirement in 2030, the percentage of older adults in the population will equal the proportion of younger persons, about 20% each. This means a very large number of retirees will be supported by a smaller group of workers.  Just two employed persons paying taxes will be supporting each Social Security pensioner compared to more than twenty workers to each retiree when Social Security first started in the United States in 1935.

Last month, more than 100 people gathered at North Shore Community College (NSCC) to engage a wide-ranging discussion of the impeding "demographic age wave" and its potential impact on the way of life on the North Shore.  The event, entitled, Aging: A 2020 Vision for the Greater North Shore, was sponsored by NSCC's Public Policy Institute and Beverly State Representative Mary Grant. The expectation is that this forum is the first of a series on these pressing issues.  We will keep you posted in future editions of The Shoreline as the sessions are scheduled.

For more information about some current and future trends affecting the North Shore and the metropolitan Boston region, see the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's MetroFuture Report and the economic report, On the Edge Facing a Challenging and Uncertain Future, produced by The Gerontology Institute and the John W. McCormick Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Read the coverage on Aging: A 2020 Vision for the Greater North Shore from the  Danvers Herald.