But much of the projections made by this committee and other bodies that have looked at the issue of the ageing population assume old age automatically means an individual becomes a burden.

BBC: Why old age need not be a burden

Congress began trying to provide old-age insurance for something close to 100% of the population as early as 1939, before the first Social Security benefits were paid.

CNN: A Debt-Threatened Dream

In a recent paper in The Lancet, Masashi Tanaka and his colleagues at the Gifu International Institute of Biotechnology, in Japan, reported that they had found a gene which is carried by a majority of Japanese centenarians, but by less than half of the rest of the Japanese population, suggesting that it could play an important role in a healthy old age.

ECONOMIST: Centenarians