The Coming Cataclysm

Some time in the next 6 years the world will experience an unprecedented cataclysm. Not a tsunami or an epidemic or a large scale war, although those are possible, too. This seismic shift will go undetected by the majority of the world’s population and yet it will change our lives. Between 2015 and 2020, for the first time in world history, the population of people over 65 will be greater than the population of children under 4.

It’s all nicely laid out in a report issued a few months ago that didn’t get very much attention. I didn’t notice it at all. It was the US Census Bureau’s Report “65+ in the United States” and it consists of nothing but statistics. Most of the observations and the predictions are nothing new: the population of older people has grown (it reached 40.3 million in 2010); the median age is increasing (up from 22.9 in 1900 to 37.2 in 2010); life expectancy has shot up (going from 47.3 at birth in 1900 to 78.7 at birth in 2010 and going from 11.9 years at age 65 in 1900 to 19.2 years in 2010); more women than men make it to old age (in the over 90 set, there are only 38 men for every 100 women); the population is becoming more diverse: 84.8% of the population self-identify as white in 2010 compared to 86.9% in 2000).

But buried amid the welter of interesting but not novel data about the US are some striking statistics about the entire world. First and foremost is the unprecedented demographic shift that will take place between 2015 and 2020: the total number of people over age 65 will exceed the number who are 4 or younger. This is because both fertility and mortality rates have been falling. As a result, people over 60 went from 8% to 11% of the population between 1950 and 2011, but by 2050 they will make up 22% of the world's population--2 billion people. Looked at a little differently, the global population is projected to increase by a factor of 3.7 between 1950 and 2050, but during that same century, people who are 60+ will go up by a factor of 10 and people who are 80+ by a factor of 26. 

Today, the countries with the highest proportion of people over 60 are Japan (31%), Italy (27%), and Germany (26%) with 7 other European countries not far behind. But the countries that are aging most rapidly include 4 in the Middle East (UAE, Iran, and Oman) and 4 in Asia (Singapore, Korea, Viet Nam, and China).

Accompanying the shifting age distribution will be an ever more dramatic dependency ratio: the number of people over 65 for every 100 people aged 20-64. This means that fewer and fewer young people will have to sustain more and more old people. And it will be in the low and middle income countries that all this transformation will be occurring most rapidly.

The reason all this matters is that it will put an enormous strain—economic, medical, and social—on everyone, but especially on the poorest countries in the world. It will affect demand—for goods (more walkers than tricycles) and for labor (more personal care attendants than elementary school teachers). The net effect may be as destabilizing as nuclear weapons. As a position paper published by the State Department and the National Institute on Aging put it, global aging represents a “triumph of medical, social, and economic advances over disease”—but it also represents an enormous and most governments have not even begun to plan for the long term.

So we have one more thing to worry about, along with climate change and religious fundamentalism and infectious diseases. What can we do about it? We do not need to accept the doomsday scenario of massive workforce shortages, asset market meltdowns, economic growth slowdowns, financial collapse of pension and healthcare systems, and mass loneliness and insecurity. But we do need to take steps now.

There are lots of interventions that can make a difference. 

One is to raise the normal legal retirement age. Another is to use international migration. A third is to reform health care systems, incorporating new models of long term care. A fourth is to encourage businesses to employ older workers, enabling them to work part time and facilitating their continuing productivity through environmental modifications that address mobility, vision, hearing, and other deficits. Economists, sociologists, demographers, historians and physicians at places including the World Bank and the Stanford University Center on Longevity have come up with a menu of strategies.

It’s up to all of us to pressure both the private and public sectors to act. Contact your senators and representatives. Write letters to the editor to major newspapers. The time to act is now.