If you're interested in the up-coming demographic crisis, this week's Economist is running a series of short articles that discuss the problem and its solutions.

Intro: A slow burning fuse: Age is creeping up on the world, and any moment now it will begin to show. The consequences will be scary.A shortage of babies: Most of the rich world is short of babies.
A world of Methuselahs: The benefits, and the costs, of living longer.
Selling to older people: There's money to be made in the grey market, but it takes thought.
Targeting pensions: Pensions will have to become far less generous.
Work till you drop: Retirement has got out of hand.
China's ageing predicament: Getting old before getting rich.
Coping with global greying: The world has never seen population ageing before. Can it cope?

We really need those robots.

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Extrapolating population figures 40 years into the future sounds really simplistic.

I expect the problem to self regulate, too many old people -> not enough people in the producing age for their care -> fewer old people -> problem solved.

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Later in the century, our robot servants will care for us. There's no reason not to have a robot nurse come out of wall along side the robot maid.

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It does, that's why they did something different.

There are no parts of the world with chronic malnutrition, for the same reason.

This isn't exactly breaking news. This has been a major sociological issue for many years.

"Begin" to show?

It's already showing. The age graph should be /\ (young at the bottom). Presently it's more or less || in the richer countries.

Want to invest some money? Invest in retirement homes, geriatric research and such.

The trend was visible in the seventies. Schools being closed instead of being built, senior citizen housing popping up all over the place. Even after correction for post baby boom numbers and the increase of single/double generation families (instead of triple), the trend is unambiguous.

The work force is beginning to evolve. A number of years ago you couldn't get a decent new job if you were >40. Companies are now slowly beginning to realize that they need the "older" people and are changing hiring habits.

An entire industry is arising which focuses on the >60 sector.

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Ach, mein Sinn, wo willst du endlich hin, wo soll ich mich erquicken? Bleib' ich hier, oder wünsch' ich mir Berg und Hügel auf den Rücken?
Bei der Welt ist gar kein Rat, und im Herzen steh'n die Schmerzen meiner Missetat, weil der Knecht den Herrn verleugnet hat.

Not to derail the thread, but that's also partly because people younger than 30 have different work habits, and this is apparently a big issue.

This is odd to hear because the likes of Jonathan Porrit and Sir David Attenborough are saying people should be having less children because of the environment and climate change. The rule they have been saying is no more than two children, if that.

They are the environmental experts so they should know what they are talking about, I would have thought.

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You got that right.


"Some ... argue that even today’s population is too large to maintain without ravaging the environment and creating an inhospitable planet."

Christian Science Monitor

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"Human consumption of renewable resources is already overshooting Earth's capacity to provide."

Optimum Population Trust

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"If demand continue[s] at the current rate, two planets [will] be needed to meet global demand by 2050."

People and Planet

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True. You get more time to correct your errors in demographics though, for obvious reasons.

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Yes, aside from investing in robotics, I really want my personal robot. I want to make a trip to Japan later this year to have a look myself. They're quite advanced in this field, necessity being the mother and all that.

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Although I know what you mean, this is strictly not true. As you say, the same cohort doesn't have chronic malnutrition, because they die. But the next ones do- the state of chronic malnutrition can persist from one generation to the next.

That's the same with greying populations. We're talking about a stable cross-section. The high proportion of elderly may persist even if the eldest die off.

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They're on the leading edge of this curve.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I don't see any issues in this. The world's population is stablizing (slowly but surely), so that coupled with conservation, technology, and and greater prosperity will take care of one end of the problem; employing the able-bodied aged, better health care, and (again) technological advances such as personal robots will take care of the old-age problem.

The big problem with extrapolating statistics like this is that pundits often assume straight-line extrapolations when in reality historical trends often follow the scribble you get when you leave a 5-year-old kid with a crayon in front of a piece of paper. This applies to birth rates as much as it does economic and technological trends.

- Maha Vailo

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Oops. Sorry you two. The text next to the links are the subtitles on the articles. Not my words. Sorry, I should have made that clearer. I avoided using the quote function there as the whole post become too unwieldy.

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That's right. I've also read that in this recession companies are preferentially holding on to their eldest workers. But that's just what I've read, anecdotal evidence as it were; I haven't checked the figures.

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True. Having said that, the two are not strictly mutually exclusive. After lowering the population to the number considered "sustainable", you can raise your birth rate again to match the death rate- i.e. stabilize the population and improve the cross-section. The problem is that between here and there you have a considerable period of time when your cross-section is skewed towards the elderly. It's just something we have to deal with.

Of course the other way to do it would be to increase the death rate, but somehow that's unacceptable these days.

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My wife and I chose to be child free. I believe that there are few problems in this world that couldn't be minimized or solved by a reduction of the population by about three billion people.

The problem with these projections, as well as an unbridled capitalistic system is the essential assumption that growth and increased utilization of natural resources will go on forever. Unless we discover a major breakthrough in physics this assumption is fatally flawed. As we drive the system harder we increase the consequences of inevitable bubbles bursting.

Who's going to support you when you're older?

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Yup, but I had to quote it some way. Sorry.

This change has been going on over the last few years, not months.

As to the reasons for the upset in the deomographic, the advent of DINKs (= "Double Income No Kids") is primarily a product of affluence, not worry for the environment.

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Ach, mein Sinn, wo willst du endlich hin, wo soll ich mich erquicken? Bleib' ich hier, oder wünsch' ich mir Berg und Hügel auf den Rücken?
Bei der Welt ist gar kein Rat, und im Herzen steh'n die Schmerzen meiner Missetat, weil der Knecht den Herrn verleugnet hat.

If you live around my way you wouldn't say that. Just no Fathers attached!

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I certainly agree about this part. However, this is not going to happen any time soon (barring some unforseeable-as-of-now disaster). Even a worldwide birth rate of 1.05 children per woman will still take about 80 years to halve the global population. A more realistic 1.5 will still mean 160 or so years to halve it.

Quite true, but nanotechnology and smaller scale ones will likely allow more efficient use of existing resources. So new technologies using even current-knowledge physics can still yield serendipitous surprises. Good old fashion recycling can also help.

Still, my reasons for choosing to be childfree are personal: some are lifestyle choices, others are philosophical reasons.

Cannot really judge until we have the exact
numbers of fallers off the perch each year
and numbers of welcome new cutie pies in
each nation. The mortality histogram for
current years peaks in the seventies I think.
The more cheerful population histograms have
falloffs encroaching upwards but not as much
as claimed I suspect. But these exact diagrams
will provide real data rather than vacuous
claims without evidence.

At the moment when this subject is on the
news we have glib statements that people are
living longer without any clarifying statement
of this being on average. I have been shocked
by news of friends and people I know not
getting past their fifties. A natural thing
perhaps as 25% are said not to reach 65. These
numbers might be increased slightly if I was
able to reach through the television screen
and wring the necks of these stupid
commentators but unfortunately I cannot!

Well . . . I actually want more children. Plural, even. But there are good psychological and economic reasons it's not going to happen right now. At any rate, do figures of how many children per women include women who can't have children? Because, if so, even assuming I have the two more children I want, one of them still counts as someone else's.

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We will have to live on our investments and social security, like so many other elderly people. But beyond that I think that the implication of your question, that one's kids can be counted on to support their elderly parents, is essentially flawed.

You do realize that Social Security is a government backed Ponzi scheme hedged upon the generation up and coming financing the generation that depends on it...

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

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I don't mind helping my folks out really. It's the least I can do, given the fact they brought me up.

But, anyway, that was not why I asked the question. I was just trying to make the point that the younger generation always support the elderly. If not your kids, then someone else's. When you spend the money that you've saved to buy stuff, that stuff has to be produced, right then and there. So, either kids or robots are needed.

I personally don't believe in the resource/environment doom and gloom scenario, but neither do I object to environmentally conscious people or DINKs wanting to have smaller families. Once the demographic consequences are sorted out, or have passed, I don't see the harm in a smaller population.

But the consequences are there, no getting away from it. From fossil fuels to an ageing population, we've got a lot of adjusting ahead of us.

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Yes, I know. The post was heavily tongue-in-cheek.

There is uncertainty around any forecast, but I see no evidence that this forecast was based on straight-line extrapolation.

Which forecast are you reading? The one I read doesn't say anything like that.