The World Turns Gray
How global aging will challenge the world's economic well-being
Birth dearth. So there is a new problem for mankind. Global aging. Next year, for the first time in history, people over 60 will outnumber kids 14 or younger in industrial countries. Even more startling, the population of the Third World, while still comparatively youthful, is aging faster than that of the rest of the world. In France, for example, it took 140 years for the proportion of the population age 65 or older to double from 9 percent to 18 percent. In China, the same feat will take just 34 years. In Venezuela, 22. "The developed world at least got rich before it got old," notes Neil Howe, an expert on aging. "In the Third World the trend is reversed."
And that means trouble. For one thing, the cost of supporting a burgeoning elderly population will place enormous strains on the world's economy. Instead of there being more workers to support each retiree--as was the case while birthrates were still rising--there will be fewer. Instead of markets growing, they will shrink, at least in large parts of the globe. Economists define a recession as two or more consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. Yet as Peterson points out in his new book, Gray Dawn, in the world's richest and most productive countries, the number of working-age people will be dropping well over 1 percent a year within 20 years. Even assuming healthy increases in productivity, such a continuing contraction in the work force could mean decades of declining economic output.
For Selina Gonzalez, that world has already arrived. In her store in Mieres, a once prosperous town in northern Spain, Gonzalez sells baby clothes at a discount, but turnover is slow. As she sews a button onto a tiny, lacy blouse, she admits that the garment has been in the shop for some time. "Many young people move away from here to look for work," she says. "And the ones who stay don't have any financial security, so they don't have children."
Mieres could be ground zero of the global aging phenomenon. It lies in the least fecund province of the least fertile nation on Earth. Spanish women now have an average of just 1.15 children in their lifetimes. In Asturias, the province containing Mieres, the lifetime fertility rate is just 0.79 children. The implications of the birth dearth are abundantly clear. After making allowances for premature death, at least 2.1 children per woman are needed to replace the population. This means that Spain's population will very likely shrink from 39 million to less than 30 million over the next 50 years in the absence of a dramatic increase in immigration.
Certainly a lackluster economy partly explains why young adults in this part of the world have suddenly become so wary of parenthood. Spain's unemployment rate, long the highest in Europe, hovers around 20 percent. And Asturias, which has been buffeted by the decline of its coal-mining industry, has one of the highest jobless rates in Spain.
Productivity problem. Yet economics alone are not enough to explain people's reproductive behavior. After all, in general the world's highest birthrates are in the poorest countries. Teresa Castro, a fertility expert at the Spanish government's Superior Council for Scientific Research, points to diffuse cultural factors at work. In Spain, she says, the Roman Catholic prohibition against birth control is now widely ignored. The church, she says, "lost all influence in family matters years ago and now serves only as a setting for rites of passage," such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Another key factor is the incorporation of a majority of women into the work force. This change, says Castro, "has come about so rapidly that there are not enough day-care facilities for working women who would like to have children."
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