The world is aging: how should we fight the grey tsunami?

Written by Estropico, November 16th 2010.
Translated by Michael Mottola. See the original article in Italian
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Photo taken from Foreign Policy The Grayest Generation

What follows is a (selective) summary and comment on a must-read article in Foreign Policy, about the “grey tsunami” of global aging: Global Aging. A gray tsunami is sweeping the planet –and not just in the places you expect. How did the world get so old, so fast?

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich wrote in his apocalyptic book, The Population Bomb, that in the 1970s and 1980s, “hundreds of millions of people will die of hunger (…), and nothing can prevent a significant increase in the global death rate”. Ehrlich’s hypothesis was thankfully nothing other than just that. His mistake was assuming that the baby boom, which took place in the 1960s, was going to continue indefinitely. However, today demographic studies are not raising concerns about too many children being born, they are worried with the exact opposite…

The author of the article in Foreign Policy is Phillip Longman, who also wrote The Empty Cradle.

It is true that in the next 40 years the global population will increase from 6.9 billion to 9.1 billion, but the growth will not be powered by the birth rate (which has plummeted, and not just in the West), but by the growth of the elderly population. The number of children under the age of 5 will decline by 49 million in the second half of the century, while the number of people over the age of 60 will reach 1.2 billion, thanks to longer life expectancies. In the West (and Japan I would imagine) we are observing that the population of people in their 60s is skyrocketing. In 20 years, the same thing will happen with the population of people in their 80s. The rest of the world will replicate this trend a few decades later. Today, the trend can already be seen in many Asian and South American countries, as well as Morocco, Lebanon, and Iran. Of the 59 nations whose birth rate is not sufficient to replace the previous generation, 18 are so-called “developing countries”.

When the global baby boom has passed, the population will decline as rapidly as it grew beforehand. Russia and Japan have already paved the way. According to forecasts by the UN, in 2150 the global population could be half of what it is today.

The causes do not involve birth control programmes, but have more to do with factors such as urbanization, where children represent a cost (and not a form of help on a farm for example), employment opportunities for women, and the spread of pensions. Another surprising cause seems to be the spread of television: in Brazil, TVs made their arrival to several parts of the vast nation at different times and the decline in births followed the arrival of television sets both rapidly and faithfully. In my opinion, perhaps the television is just an indicator of having reached a certain level of economic prosperity, at which, for some unknown reason, the birth rate begins to decline.

An unexpected consequence of the new demographic situation is that the highly debated “Asian century”, which has just begun, may not come to fruition. The economic problems of Japan began towards the end of the 1980s, when their workforce began to shrink. Is this also what the future holds for Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and possibly China? In China and India, gender equality issues for cultural reasons also weigh heavily on the situation. No society has ever seen its population age as rapidly as Asia is currently witnessing today, which makes it very difficult to make forecasts. What is certain, however, is that no other region will face such a profound demographic crisis.

With the trend of global aging, we will also witness an economic slowdown: less young people means less new houses, etc, and less of an entrepreneurial spirit. An older workforce is going to be more interested in protecting their current jobs rather than looking for a new career or starting a new business. And this is the most concerning piece of news in this blog, since we assume that the paradigm of “economic progress = scientific and technological progress = social progress = progress towards the post-human future’ is true.

The author of the article does not see many solutions. One possibility is to follow the Swedish model: huge state intervention to alleviate the career/family conflict so that mothers can have children without suffering economically. The problem is that countries that have adopted this strategy have obtained only modest results. The other approach (not suggested as a serious proposal!) is that of the Taliban: a return to “traditional” values. Women would just stay at home and have children, with few other options… A third possibility suggested in the article, proposes to make children return to being an asset or investment, as they can be in the case of small, family-run businesses. [...]