5-to-1 to 3-to-1

These are U.S. Census Bureau projections, expected to impact the United States over the next twenty years, as to the change in the current to future ratio of workers to retirees. With fewer workers generating income to support retirees, something has got to give. And it’s not just Social Security but pretty all company and union retirement programs. The industrialized world is, simply, getting older. Between improvements in medical technology and a healthier quality of living, modern nations are simply producing contracting populations that are living longer.

Between governmental population restrictions, such as those imposed by the Peoples Republic of China, and the accelerating cost of raising and educating children in higher-level societies putting a downward pressure on fertility, only the impoverished nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America have the explosive rates that kept demographers awake decades ago. “Every minute of every day, according to the Population Reference Bureau, the number of births exceeds the number of deaths by 158. But the growth isn’t spread out. Of that net increase, 154 are in the developing world.” Washington Post, October 30^th.

Indeed, the overall global population growth rates remain staggeringly high; it’s just the richer, industrialized countries where the contractions are so profound: “The world population is expected to expand by 37 percent to 9.5 billion in 2050, according to the report, but growth will not be evenly distributed. Developing countries will grow the most, with the population in Africa expected to double.” Business Week, August 12, 2010.

In those industrial states, where populations are contracting, a relatively sudden and recent phenomenon, there are shortages of future workers... and consumers... that plague economists in search of growth. “[T]he unexpectedly abrupt demographic transition has created economic upheaval. For the countries that hit the fertility brakes the hardest, the graying of society has become a full-blown crisis. They’re suddenly desperate for babies. They need more workers to provide goods and services to huge numbers of pensioners.

“The fertility rate in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and many other nations is less than 1.5 children per woman, dramatically lower than the ‘replacement’ rate of 2.1 children (the extra .1 accounts for children who do not survive to adulthood). Japan (fertility rate 1.4) is already the oldest country in the history of the world; South Korea (1.2) is not far behind. China (1.5) is racing to get rich before it becomes old.

“In far better shape demographically is the United States, with a fertility rate just slightly below replacement level. Immigration boosts the workforce. But the baby-boom generation is storming the higher age brackets; the number of Americans 60 to 64 jumped from 11 million to 17 million in the most recent census. When Social Security was established in 1935, life expectancy in the United States was just under 62 years at birth. Today it is 78 and still rising.” The Post.

Japan, followed by a couple of Eastern Bloc nations, is an extreme example of population decline (and the concomitant graying of the citizenry): “Japan is expected to see its population contract by one-fourth to 95.2 million by 2050, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based research group, making it the fastest-shrinking country in the world. Former Eastern Bloc nations Ukraine and Georgia came in second and third, respectively, in a ranking of more than 200 countries by Businessweek.com based on the Population Reference Bureau's 2010 World Population Data Sheet...

“‘Europe, Korea, and Japan have gone into panic mode,’ says Carl Haub, a senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. A declining population impacts a country’s economic growth, labor market, pensions, taxation, health care, and housing, according to the U.N. Globally by 2050, the number of older persons in the world will exceed the number of young for the first time in history, according to the U.N. The imbalance will create havoc in the pension systems and make it difficult to support retired and elderly persons, Haub says.” Business Week. “A complex mix of factors, varying by country, has slowed [economic] growth, and the slowdown has been exacerbated everywhere by the worst financial crisis and global recession in 70 years.

“The combination has left Europe and the United States with frustrated populations that still have more sacrifices ahead. ‘These are very difficult moral issues,’ said Benjamin Friedman, an economic historian at Harvard. ‘We are really talking about the level at which we support the elderly retired population.’” New York Times, November 6^th. Are the elderly expendable in the modern world, literally set adrift on the economic ice flows at the end of their lives? Are we breaching our societal promise to them in a flurry of desperation? Nature seems to be sensing that population growth needs further moderation in impaired economic times. The recession has slowed fertility among those waiting for that illusive economic stability before starting a family. Throw in a whole pile of student loans, and you and just feel that population decline forcing itself onto America.

Does this mean that older or childless couples will deny educational benefits to succeeding generations (after all, they are only paying for other people’s children)? The political and economic ramifications between contracting industrialized nations and those with explosive but impoverish populations also augurs badly for peace and stability. How will social directions change as a result of these demographic shifts? How will economic growth be accomplished (or will it?) in such contracting modern societies? The questions are numerous, and the theories presented are varied and, of course, contradictory. What are your thoughts?

I’m Peter Dekom, and each new issue blends into the messy soup we call life.