Rethinking Aging as an Asset, Part One: We Count the Costs. Why Not the Contributions?
America keeps a remarkably detailed ledger of what it believes older people cost. We count Medicare expenditures, hospitalizations, falls, dementia, disability, nursing-home use, food insecurity, and the number of people who need help bathing or dressing. These measures matter. They identify suffering, expose disparities, and help direct essential services. The problem begins when the ledger of need becomes our entire portrait of later life. A society that measures older adults chiefly through illness and dependency should not be surprised when it builds policies and programs that see them chiefly as patients, clients, and recipients.
The federal government's principal statistical portrait, Older Americans 2024: Key Indicators of Well-Being, illustrates the imbalance. Its 40 indicators are organized into six domains: population, economics, health status, health risks and behaviors, health care, and environment. Each is legitimate. Yet there is no comparable domain for contribution, caregiving, mentorship, entrepreneurship, civic leadership, or the preservation of community knowledge. The report tells us a great deal about how older Americans are doing. It tells us far less about what older Americans are doing for everyone else.[1]
That missing ledger is not small. A Bureau of Labor Statistics exercise using 2015 data asked what would happen if volunteer work counted alongside paid employment. The annual labor-force participation rate for people 65 and older rose from 23.5 percent to 41 percent. Older adults supplied 2.2 billion volunteer hours, one-quarter of all volunteer hours, and volunteers 65 and older contributed a median of 94 hours during the year, more than any younger age group. The point is not that volunteering and employment are identical. It is that our picture of productivity changes dramatically when unpaid contribution becomes visible.[2]
Caregiving is another vast form of work that often disappears statistically and culturally. In 2023 and 2024, 38.2 million Americans provided unpaid care to someone 65 or older who needed help because of an aging-related condition. Among the caregivers, those who were themselves 65 or older were more likely than any other age group to provide care on an average day. Forty percent did so, and on the days they provided care, they averaged 4.9 hours. Those hours may keep a spouse at home, prevent a hospitalization, allow an adult child to remain employed, or hold two households together. No paycheck changes hands, but the economic and human consequences are substantial.[3]
Even innovation is filtered through a youthful lens. A study of 2.7 million business founders found that the average founder was 42 years old, while founders of the fastest-growing firms averaged 45. A 50-year-old founder was 1.8 times as likely as a 30-year-old founder to create an upper-tail growth company. Experience, industry knowledge, judgment, and networks are not leftovers from earlier productivity; they are productive assets. Yet the public image of innovation remains a young person in a hoodie, while older adults are encouraged to "give back," language that subtly recasts continued contribution as charity rather than economic and civic activity.[4]
Why does the deficit model remain so powerful? Institutions tend to encounter older adults where need is visible: clinics, benefit offices, senior housing, transportation programs, and long-term-care systems. They are less likely to see the grandmother stabilizing a family in crisis, the retired principal coaching a new school leader, the former mechanic keeping neighbors' cars running, or the longtime resident who remembers why an earlier redevelopment plan failed. These contributions are informal, dispersed, and difficult to invoice. As a result, they are treated as background rather than infrastructure.
Measurement then shapes investment. Governments fund what agencies can count. Foundations ask applicants to report people served, services delivered, and problems reduced. Those are necessary questions, but they encourage communities to design programs for older adults rather than consequential roles with them. Needs assessments ask what older residents lack, not what they know, whom they connect, or what they are prepared to contribute. Older people are invited to advisory committees as representatives of an age group, but rarely recruited as co-producers of community life.
An asset-based view must not romanticize aging. Not every older person is wise, healthy, resilient, or eager to volunteer. Inequality across the life course determines who has had opportunities to acquire education, wealth, influence, and good health. Nor should anyone have to prove usefulness to deserve care. Human dignity is unconditional. The more demanding argument is that need is not identity. A person can require transportation or help with daily tasks and still be a caregiver, strategist, artist, organizer, entrepreneur, historian, or trusted neighbor.
The central failure is not that older adults lack assets. It is that our institutions have developed sophisticated systems for detecting deficits and remarkably primitive ones for recognizing contribution. Until our measurements can hold vulnerability and capacity at the same time, public policy will continue to mistake a partial accounting for the whole story.
References
Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics. Older Americans 2024: Key Indicators of Well-Being. 2024. Current report and data.
Turner, John A.; Klein, Bruce W.; and Sorrentino, Constance. "Making Volunteer Work Visible: Supplementary Measures of Work in Labor Force Statistics." Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020. BLS article.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Unpaid Eldercare in the United States, 2023-2024." American Time Use Survey, 2025 release. BLS summary.
Azoulay, Pierre; Jones, Benjamin F.; Kim, J. Daniel; and Miranda, Javier. "Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship." NBER Working Paper 24489, 2018. NBER working paper.
