5 House Districts With the Highest Ratios of Older People to 'Working-Age' People

Here's another installment in a series of articles we're running about the demographic variables that shape House members' lives, based on data from the Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey results. The world's population is getting older, and the U.S. population is getting older. House members from some districts are already living with that. The Census Bureau uses "old-age dependency ratios" to summarize how big the population of people age 65 and older in a place is when compared with population of people ages 18 to 64. An old-age dependency ratio is the 65-and-older population as a percentage of the size of the 18-to-64 population. In 2017, at the district level, the median old-age dependency ratio was 56.7%. Across the nation, district-level old-age dependency ratios ranged from a low of 12.3%, in a district in Arizona, up to more than 75%, in a district in Florida. Any lawmakers or staffers from districts with high old-age dependency ratios can already see for themselves why the kind of lifetime income planning promoted by annuity issuers might be critically important to their constituents' quality of life. For the five districts with the highest 2017 old-age dependency ratios, see the data cards in the slideshow above. — Read 10 States Where Workers Went to Hell, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.