Author(s)

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  Camilla Cavendish

  Camilla Cavendish is an award-winning writer and broadcaster, former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Prime Minister David Cameron, and Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School where she researches demographic challenges. She writes the big weekly oped Saturday column in the Financial Times, where she is Contributing Editor. She sits in the UK House of Lords as a crossbench peer, Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice.   She is also author of “Extra Time: Ten Lessons for an Ageing World” which has been translated into 4 languages since it was published by Harper Collins in the UK in May 2019 - and is now launching in the US on March 3, 2020. The book deals with the many implications of two profound demographic changes: increasing life expectancy and falling birth rates outside sub-Saharan Africa - what Cavendish calls “The Death of Birth”. By 2020, for the first time in history, the world will have more people aged 65 and over, than children aged five and under. Cavendish argues this means we must change our approach to welfare, retirement, work, healthcare systems, and even the very notion of family itself: we will need new support networks based on neighbourhoods and friends, not blood relatives. She also argues that narrowing the gap in healthy life expectancy is now a financial and moral imperative. Only in Japan has the government has made strenuous efforts to turn the tide. Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University, has said of the book: ‘Demographic change is the most neglected shaper of our future. Camilla Cavendish has written the most interesting, perceptive and iconoclastic guide to its many implications. This is a truly important book’. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, Baroness Cavendish is a member of the steering group of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Longevity and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Longevity.