For supporters of the encore idea, a persistent challenge is the concern about greedy geezers destroying America’s financial future. It’s hard to keep the conversation focused on all of the positives associated with encores when someone else brings up all the negatives packed into that concern. It’s especially hard when the negatives seem to rest on a tried-and-true measure. For many doomsayers, that’s what the dependency ratio is: it appears to justify, with a quantitative formula, drastic cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs.

The dependency ratio was one of the phrases I heard a lot when I began to focus on the encore idea a year ago, and I’m grateful to The American Scholar for publishing what I learned about the ratio from research and reporting. As I say in “The Fear Factor,” the cover story of the magazine’s summer issue, the dependency ratio is a crude demographic tool that has become an economic one. As a result, the aging population of America is repeatedly — and mistakenly — blamed for the country’s economic problems.

As a range of scholars urge, it’s time to replace the dependency ratio with a more accurate measure, taking account of how many of today’s older Americans remain productive, whether they are continuing to work in their longtime careers or are engaged in encores. It’s time to recognize something else as well: rather than being eclipsed by the dependency ratio in importance, encores are important in their own right. They help demonstrate why that ratio can be so misleading. Encores make vivid and help explain what Robert N. Butler, Laura Carstensen, and Marc Freedman mean when they say that older Americans represent a great asset, hidden in plain sight.

– Linc Caplan, Senior Advisor