12 People Who Are Changing Your Retirement

The Wall Street Journal:

Joseph Coughlin describes his work as “trying to get people to ‘age cool.’ ” More specifically, as director of AgeLab, a research program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is pushing advances in transportation, health care and housing off drawing boards and into older adults’ lives.

And he can’t do it quickly enough.

“If we don’t hurry,” he says, “the products being designed now aren’t going to be there when the [baby] boomers need them.”

Prof. Coughlin is one of hundreds of people across the country whose work, in effect, is shaping the future of retirement. The motives may vary — educators, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and policy makers are all involved in the effort — but the goals are much the same: to learn about, and improve the quality of, later life.

Demographics, of course, explain the sense of urgency. Each day, on average, almost 8,000 people in the U.S. turn 60. Just last month, the first of 78 million baby boomers reached age 62 and became eligible for Social Security.

Which “change agents” are having the biggest impact on retirement? We put that question to experts in aging nationwide. From dozens of candidates, we selected the following 12 people. If you want to know what your future might look like — how Americans will live, work and play in later life — these individuals are designing some of the answers.

Read more.

Photo by WSJ.

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