curry. everyone in the theater would sing along, shout out the lines, and throw popcorn at the screen ; many would dress up like the characters. now, i didn't dress up - sorry to disappoint you - but no party was complete until all of us danced " the time warp " to the movie's famous song. 1 / 4 bis - central bankers'speeches as it happens, i still remember the steps, and i had intended to demonstrate the time warp for you, but that will not be possible today. instead, i will offer a few thoughts that i might have benefited from hearing when i was sitting in your chairs a mere 45 years ago. embracing change the years since my graduation have brought waves of fundamental change to the workplace and to society at large, much of it driven by technology. imagine a world with no internet, no email or texting, no personal computers or cell phones, no social media. some of you parents are no doubt thinking : i would be fine with that world! the pace of change will likely continue to be very fast. be alert to the ways your working life may change. think about how you can be prepared for those changes and to turn them to your advantage, and to society's advantage. the practice of law has been transformed over the years ; if you do choose the path of a practicing lawyer, i would think about what practicing law could look like in 10 or 20 years. in a world that will continue to evolve quickly and in unexpected ways, you will need to be agile. embracing change and taking risks can be an important part of your development as a professional and as a person. your formal education may end today, but you are not done learning. many of the important things you will need to know can only be learned through experience. and experience can be a hard but irreplaceable teacher. as an example, near the end of my second year here, it was time to select the next editor in chief of the georgetown law journal. i thought that there were plenty of colleagues who were better qualified, but who simply did not want the job. so, with much trepidation, i put my name in. i was secretly, but utterly, terrified that i might be chosen. and amazingly enough, i was. what now? it turned out that, as i feared, i was not well prepared for that responsibility. i had to keep people interested and motivated enough to work on the

provisional. these uncertainties - - especially our inability to identify the upper bound of future demands for medical care - - suggest significant prudence when considering spending initiatives. new programs, whether spending or tax benefits, quickly develop constituencies who tend to fiercely resist any curtailment. as a consequence, our ability to rein in deficit - expanding initiatives, should they later prove to have been excessive or misguided, is quite limited. programs can always be expanded in the future should the resources for them become available, but history has shown that they cannot be easily curtailed if resources later fall short of commitments. i fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby - boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver. if existing promises need to be changed, those changes should be made sooner rather than later. we owe future retirees as much time as possible to adjust their plans for work, saving, and retirement spending. they need to ensure that their personal resources, along with what they expect to receive from the government, will be sufficient to meet their retirement goals. addressing the government's own imbalances will require scrutiny of both spending and taxes. however, tax increases of sufficient dimension to deal with our looming fiscal problems arguably pose significant risks to economic growth and the revenue base. the exact magnitude of such risks is very difficult to estimate, but, in my judgment, they are sufficiently worrisome to warrant aiming, if at all possible, to close the fiscal gap primarily, if not wholly, from the outlay side. in the end, i suspect that, unless we attain unprecedented increases in productivity, we will have to make significant structural adjustments in the nation's major retirement and health programs. our current, largely pay - as - you - go social insurance system worked well given the demographics of the second half of the twentieth century. but as i have argued previously, the system is ill - suited to address the unprecedented shift of population from the workforce to retirement that will start in 2008. much attention has been focused on the forecasted exhaustion of the social security trust fund in 2041. but solving that problem will do little in itself to meet the imperative to boost our national saving. raising national saving is an essential step if we are to build a capital stock that by, say, 2030 will be sufficiently large to produce goods and services adequate to meet the needs of retirees without unduly curbing the standard of living of our working -