The Graying of America

HOW A ONCE-IN-A-CENTURY SHIFT IS RESHAPING A NATION

The United States is aging faster than at any point in its history. Here's what that means for how the country lives, works, and pays its bills — and for the 61 million Americans already living it.

Every day, roughly ten thousand Americans turn 65. It has been happening since

2011, when the oldest Baby Boomers crossed that threshold, and it will keep happening for another decade. The result is the most significant demographic transformation in the country's history: in 1950, seniors were 8% of the population. Today they are 18%. By 2050, nearly one in four Americans will be 65 or older.

This isn't a story that belongs only to older Americans. A population this size, reshaping how it works, spends, and draws on public programs, changes the texture of the entire country — the labor market younger workers enter, the tax base that funds schools and roads, the housing stock, the shape of Social Security and Medicare, and the very idea of what retirement means.