There are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate
change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population
bust, the old age of the world.
اضافة اعلان
That kind of column opener is a hostage to
fortune. If I am wrong, it might be quoted grimly or mockingly in future
histories written with New York underwater and Texas uninhabitable.
But it is important for the weird people
more obsessed with demography than climate to keep hammering away, because
whatever the true balance of risk between the two, the relative balance is
changing. Over the past 15 years, some of the worst-case scenarios for climate
change have become less likely than before. At the same time, various forces,
the COVID crisis especially, have pushed birthrates lower faster, bringing the
old-age era forward rapidly.
The latest evidence is the news from China
last week that its population declined for the first time since the Great Leap
Forward, more than 60 years ago. A tip into decline was long anticipated, but
until recently, it was not expected to arrive until the 2030s — yet, here it is
early, with the Chinese birthrate hitting an all-time recorded low in 2022.
This means that just as China emerges as an
almost-superpower, it is staring into a darkened future where it grows old and
stagnant before it finishes growing rich. Meanwhile, variations on that shadow
lie over most rich and many middle-income nations now — threatening general
sclerosis, a loss of dynamism and innovation, and a zero-sum struggle between a
swollen retired population and the overburdened young. (Last week’s mass
protests in France over Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age to
64 from 62 were a preview of this future.)
In an aging world, the technocratic desire to reform old-age entitlements will become evermore essential and correct
So it is worth thinking about some rules
for the age of demographic decadence — trends to watch, principles that will
separate winners and losers, guideposts for anyone seeking dynamism in a
stagnant world.
The rich world will need redistribution
back from old to young.
In recent decades we have seen many cases
of technocrats proven wrong in their assumptions — from the widespread belief
that we needed deficit reduction almost immediately after the financial crisis,
to the unwise optimism about the effects of free trade with China. But in an
aging world, the technocratic desire to reform old-age entitlements will become
evermore essential and correct — so long as the savings can be used to make it
easier for young people to start a family, open a business, own a home. And
countries that find a way to make this transfer successfully will end up far
ahead of those that just sink into gerontocracy.
Innovation is not enough; the challenge
will be implementation and adoption.
If you want growth in an aging world, you
need technological breakthroughs. But as economist Eli Dourado noted in a
recent piece about the effects of the new artificial intelligence technology,
the big bottlenecks are not always in
invention itself — they are in testing, infrastructure, deployment, regulatory
hurdles. And since aging, set-in-their-ways societies may be more inclined to
leave new inventions on the shelf, clearing those bottlenecks may become the
central innovator’s challenge.
Ground warfare will run up against
population limits.
You can see this dynamic already in the
Russia-Ukraine war. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization efforts are
not what they presumably would be if his empire had more young people. Ukraine,
with lower birthrates than even those of Russia, faces a deepening of its
demographic crisis if the war drags on for years. The same issue will apply to
Taiwan and other flashpoints: Even where strategic ambitions militate for war,
the pain of every casualty will be dramatically compounded.
Countries that manage to keep or boost their birthrates close to replacement level will have a long-term edge over countries that plunge toward… half-replacement-level fertility
In the kingdom of the aged, a little
extra youth and vitality will go a long way.
This is true internationally: Countries
that manage to keep or boost their birthrates close to replacement level will
have a long-term edge over countries that plunge toward South Korean-style,
half-replacement-level fertility. And it will be true also within societies: To
predict the most dynamic American states and cities, the most influential
religious traditions and ideologies, look for places and groups that are
friendliest not just to the young but to young people having kids themselves.
The African diaspora will reshape the
world.
The faster aging happens in the rich and
middle-income world, the more important the fact that Africa’s population is
still on track to reach 2.5 billion in 2050, and reach 4 billion by 2100. The
movement of even a fraction of this population will probably be the 21st
century’s most significant global transformation. And the balance between
successful assimilation on the one hand and destabilization and backlash on the
other will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in
revitalization or collapse.
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