The Second Half

Do you want to know the age to which you will live? One way to do this is to use the age of your longest living same sex parent or grandparent. If you are a female add 13 years to this number. If you are a male add 11 years to this number. This is the age you will live to plus or minus 3 years. This was presented to me as having a 70% accuracy rate.

When I did this my first thought was "No Way! I’m not living that long!" But check out these statistics:

In 1900 life expectancy in the United States was 47. In 1935 life expectancy was 55. In 2000 life expectancy was 76. In 2007 life expectancy was 78.
2 out of 3 humans who have ever existed on our planet and lived to age 65 are alive today.
A girl born in the Year 2000 in North America, Western Europe, or Japan has a 50% chance of living 100 years.

This came from the winter meeting of Washington State Library Directors I recently attended where presenter Bill Morton founder of Second Half Strategies shared these and other statistics showing how our population is aging and will continue to do so.

Why did he present this to a group of librarians and how does it relate to library services? This type of information can be extremely valuable to use in planning our programming, selecting for our collection, promoting our services, and hiring. An additional statistic that really spoke to me about how we will plan for the future is:

The number of people in the United Stated aged 55-70 will increase 69% from 2000-2015.
The number of people in the United States aged 25-40 will decrease 4% from 2000-2015.

What a significant and amazing shift in our demographics. Here’s planning for to the Second Half of life.

For more related information from Bill Morton and Second Half Strategies go to: http://www.secondhalf.net/

Laura Tretter, Director
San Juan Island Library
360.378.2798
ltretter@sjlib.org

news @sanjuanislander.com

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The Second Half