Latest UN Figures Show Rapid Global Aging

“Aging is a more immediate threat than climate change. Why isn’t the UN doing anything to slow it down?”
I remember that as a very bad movie, “Logan’s Run”.

From the headline,I thought Mother Earth was suddenly feeling her age...

When us old, white guys are all dead the world will burn.

Yup, and the remaining people of the world will blame it all on us.

By the traditional measure of aging, counting the number of those 65 years and older per hundred people 20-64, the ratio of elderly dependent persons will rise sharply from 16 to 28 by 2050. In Europe there will be 49 elderly per 100 workers; in Japan, Korea, and Spain there will be a stunning 80 elderly per 100 workers. Conversely, in Africa, just 7 elderly are supported by 100 workers today, and this will rise slowly to just 9 by 2050.

Mark Steyn harps repeatedly on the phrase 'demographics is destiny'. He's absolutely right. The above describes the death of western civilization, and at this point, I do not believe there is a damned thing that can be done about it. It's not like you can manufacture actual human workers. It takes about 20 years to make one, and there is no way to get around it. Automation and robotics will help a bit, but not nearly enough. Japan is doomed, despite all they may do, simply because they can't be bothered to have children. 20 workers simply cannot support 80 workers.

I don't know where this notion that growing population is good comes from among conservatives.

It is not necessary that the population increase, but you can't have an aging population without younger folk coming up along behind them to help support them. Unfortunately, with increased affluence, it has become quite apparent that you also get decreased birthrates. This is fine as long as it doesn't drop below replacement rate, especially if longevity continues to increase, if you are going to also maintain a welfare state for the aged, which is essentially what 'social security' is.

Drop 'social security', and you can have a reduction in population, that will be painful, but not catastrophic.

Without younger folk to hold the system up, demographics will kill an advanced society, just as surely as plague. I really do not see how folks expect to have a person spend 18-25 years as essentially an unproductive citizen, who then works for 40 years (from 25-65), then retires for 30 years or more.

Let me suggest a contrarian view which might or might not play out:

Contrary to what most economists and analysts tell us, a large population, or even a growing population, might be more harmful than beneficial in the new age of AI and robots.

If we want to talk about national wealth, much depends on how we define it but if we define it as the mass of goods divided by the number of supplicants for those goods we begin to ask, if our GNP is produced by artificial intelligence and robots, do we need more than 330 million people to increase production? If we are dividing the sum of production by the population, would not a more manageable population make us richer rather than poorer?

If we are entering a technological age in which wealth at the level of conception is done by a very few brilliant human minds while the bulk of production is done by smart machines, how do we distribute the wealth? If we don't distribute the wealth, do we risk revolution? If we do distribute the wealth will we certainly kill off incentive?

It seems to me these questions become all the more intractable the more disparity between the elite and the consuming class is increased by virtue of size of population.

Most of the arguments in favor of large population, or more intelligently of growing population, center on the need to create markets for consumption. In an age in which 3D printing is making us rethink the entire concept of economies of scale, should we not also rethink this maxim?

You touched on another argument in support of an ever-growing population: Social Security.

I do not understand an argument that essentially says that the way to shore up a Ponzi scheme is to expand the Ponzi scheme to an ever greater number of participants. I do not accept the view that we need to engage in an immigration/population Ponzi scheme in order to maintain a growing economy. That is what we say about Social Security. In effect we divide the cost of maintaining our seniors by an ever shrinking workforce and despair at the arithmetic so we simply kick the can down the road and make it ultimately worse.

Instead, we should analyze these problems in terms of productivity of our machinery rather than productivity of our workers. Inevitably, we are going to have to substitute robots for people as we have already done in the world of information technology. The downside of the present system is to encourage sending our jobs to India and China. I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policymaking arena.

I'll respond to each point you bring up if you don't mind.

If we want to talk about national wealth, much depends on how we define it but if we define it as the mass of goods divided by the number of supplicants for those goods we begin to ask, if our GNP is produced by artificial intelligence and robots, do we need more than 330 million people to increase production? If we are dividing the sum of production by the population, would not a more manageable population make us richer rather than poorer?

The biggest problem we would face if we started trying to think of ways to mitigate the transition between an economy based largely on the proposition that we have a constantly growing population is that in the modern age, we have no real precedent for it. As you say, it would take us looking closely at our concepts of production, GNP, and how this interacts with the population. I think it would behoove us greatly if we could actually take the time to look at how we manage taxation. Presently, the government generates a substantial percentage of it's revenue based on income taxes. In a world where more and more labor is actually being performed by robots, and 'AI', (a rather nebulous concept at present, as even the best AI systems these days are more idiot savants than anything else), do we somehow tax the productivity of these machines. I admit that I don't really see any way to do that, mainly because we all know that the government almost always takes things to a ridiculous extreme.

If you continue to tax incomes as is done today, to actually speed up the move towards automation, since you do not have to pay taxes on the work of automatons. Even with a reduced population, people are still going to need to work, and not all folk are suited to the work of IT, programming, and the like. Service industries will still have a place, though even there, you can easily see the ever increasing amount of such work being taken over by machines of one sort or another. Even places like restaurants are increasingly seeing things like kiosks or tablets at the table to manage the taking of orders and payment.

If we are entering a technological age in which wealth at the level of conception is done by a very few brilliant human minds while the bulk of production is done by smart machines, how do we distribute the wealth? If we don't distribute the wealth, do we risk revolution? If we do distribute the wealth will we certainly kill off incentive?

The incentive problem is where the real rub is. It is likely that some, if not many folk will want to work, and will do what it takes to keep themselves employable, while many are all too likely to fall into a pattern of indolence. I read a lot of science fiction, and these days you often see references to a 'BLS', or Basic Living Stipend. Few authors take the time to think through the logical consequences of such a system. If you're looking at a BLS system that acts as a 'floor', you still need to be able to somehow come up with a way to pay for such a system. Do they continue to tax income? Do they move to a VAT-type of tax? Do they simply charge fees for services rendered? I have noticed that those governments that have a VAT, still also have high levels of personal income taxes, and higher corporate taxes than the U.S.

Lacking anything else, I suspect we are going to be stuck in a world for the foreseeable future where what you get out is dictated by what you put in. i.e., if a company's management believes you are providing $x value per hour, you will be paid $x-y%. I'm not sure what to do about people with no marketable skill.

Perhaps the solution is, as you say, to start thinking in terms of population reductions rather than growth. Even with that though, I'm not sure how you could maintain or even stabilize the economy given that by definition, half of the population has an IQ of less than 100. I certainly don't think I'd trust any government to handle this in any but the most brutal and destructive manner, as it seems that history tells us that governments are much better at tearing things down than they are at building them up.

I do not understand an argument that essentially says that the way to shore up a Ponzi scheme is to expand the Ponzi scheme to an ever greater number of participants. I do not accept the view that we need to engage in an immigration/population Ponzi scheme in order to maintain a growing economy. That is what we say about Social Security. In effect we divide the cost of maintaining our seniors by an ever shrinking workforce and despair at the arithmetic so we simply kick the can down the road and make it ultimately worse.

I believe the entire notion of social security is one of the most destructive things to come out of the 20th century. We knew going in that ponzi schemes like this are unsustainable, yet we bought into it. You are right that it was the fuzzy thinking of us having an ever growing workforce to sustain it that probably overcame the logical hurdles. That, and the fact that people are lazy and always want something for nothing. Once we realized what our prosperity and advancing technology was doing to actuarial tables, we should have immediately started the process of scrapping it, and used things like personal 401ks instead. By the time I was 18, if not considerably before, I have simply ignored the existence of SS, because I've never thought it would apply to me. Even though I'm now much closer to the end of my life than the beginning of it, I fully expect for means testing, or some other method to cut me out of it because I have been somewhat diligent in taking care of future myself.

I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policymaking arena.

I'm not sure how we can get there, because there is going to be a large part of our population that simply cannot be productive enough to make a difference in the face of 21st century technology.

Well, being 4.5 billion years old does wear on you.

I think it’s better that you save for yourself, provided that your country’s tax and business climate allow for such. Here in America, our House of Representatives (the lower House of our Congress) is working on a bill extending the period which we can contribute to our 401(k) plans (named after the section of tax code allowing it) from age 70.5 to 72 before we have to withdraw from them. Also, we will be allowed to simultaneously save into them while withdrawing from them for some years past 72, should Congress pass the bill, and should our President sign it into law.

☑

Baloney, I'm getting older just as fast as last year.

#MeToo

Rock ‘n Roll was better when there were only 3 billion people on the planet.

That you for your thoughtful reply.

I offer the following lengthy reply from 2017 as food for thought:

As conservatives, we consider the implications of automation. The implications are not limited to job displacement but to the very structure of our economic system and therefore the very existence of our liberties.

The public eternally argues whether automation produces more jobs than it eliminates. If we look at the Industrial Revolution which was a form of automation, it clearly produced more jobs than it cost. The problem was the Industrial Revolution affected farms greatly and made many agricultural workers redundant who flocked to the cities and infested places like London's gin alleys. The social dislocation was brutal and vividly described by Dickens.

But it was not "automation" alone that caused dislocations (a point we might keep in mind in an age of outsourcing), the cloture movement in England and Ireland and the Crofters in Scotland caused huge social dislocations. The Scots emigrated around the world giving us the likes of Carnegie as a result and one can even connect the dots to the Irish potato famine, their migrations not just to America where they produced presidents like Barack Obama but throughout the Empire.

The dislocations, however caused, inevitably produced reactions. Those who cite the virtues of technological advancement cite the reaction of the Luddites as an example of overreaction and misplaced grievance. To destroy the looms being powered by water and later by steam in order to bring back a cottage industry was a futile reaction.

Eventually, the Industrial Revolution caught up and provided jobs but the difficulty in human terms was seen in the time lag between redundancy and new industries creating new jobs. Besides the time lag there was also a culture lag. An agricultural worker who kept time by the sun and the seasons was not the sort of fellow to show up to work on time and tie himself to a tedious machine for 12 hours, six days a week.

Something to consider when we seek to explain the failures of the Great Society and its training programs to make worker bees in the inner-city. In this context we think of a checkout employee at Walmart and we see a tedious repetitive task, highly automated and intentionally designed by very smart people to be operated as mindlessly as possible by less clever people who are utterly ignorant of the workings of the technology they operate. In fact, the whole idea of this transformation is to discourage individual initiative where the rubber meets the road. Human drones make the best employees in this situation.

In addition to the time lag and the culture lag, there is an education lag which is extremely challenging because it is a moving target. As the digital revolution incessantly rolls over it becomes exponentially more sophisticated in bewilderingly short spaces of time, it's new technical skills require new language (literally so in computer programming), new ways of thinking (with the binary system instead of thinking in 10s), a whole new concept of time and space (your x-ray might well be read in real-time by a radiologist in India).

The digital revolution requires a difficult to define alteration in conceptual thinking regarding sectors of the economy. Advertising in newspapers is going the way of delivering the mail by pony express. Marketing is now being redefined by social media. Delivery of medical services must now take into account the fact that I can look my symptoms up on the Internet and challenge my doctor's diagnosis, often to his ill-disguised annoyance. Meanwhile, there is a bit of irony which might be appreciated today by Luddites of old if an Englishman's x-ray is read by an Indian doctor, reversing the mercantilist manufacture of garments in England with Indian cotton. Old-fashioned industries are utterly revolutionized by computers: horizontal drilling and fracking in oil recovery; subterranean radar in mining and oil exploration; gene-splicing of grains in agriculture, much feared by my neighbors here in Germany-or is theirs merely a protectionist reaction?

Since the object of automating labor is to substitute machines for people at a cost-benefit, automation seeks low hanging fruit and is most profitably deployed where it will eliminate the most workers. These workers are human which means they come in many flavors: many will be intelligent but many will not be clever enough to adapt to cyber world; many will be ambitious but many will also be lazy and prone to dependency; many will be fit but many will also be alcoholic and drug dependent; many will be young but many will be old and uneducable; many will be mobile but many will also be tied to the soil or family and unable to pull up stakes to find employment in geographically as well as psychically far removed venues; many will be resilient but many will also be defeatist.

We conservatives should never forget that victims as well as survivors of the computer revolution will vote. We should never forget that leftists will pander to the losers and demagogue capitalism for producing technological progress which they will describe as exploitation. They are liable to win this debate because they tend to win debates by controlling the language, co-opting institution with cynical race and class demagoguery. They are liable to win because they are likely to get the government to subsidize their side.

Leftists will be eager to demonize capitalism as the author of dislocation just as they exploit "climate change" to destroy capitalism. The strategy will be to create a class of victims of those left behind to create a political force to impose government controls over the entire economic system. Community organizing will be moved from a geographical locus to a class basis. Demagoguery will rise as the left seeks to divert inquiry away from other causes of job dislocation such as burdensome and ubiquitous government regulations, a suffocating tax structure, unwise trade deals promoting job exfiltration from America, unnecessary and misdirected environmental restrictions, open border infiltration of job seekers, an ever-expanding and deadening public as well as private debt, a political system waxing increasingly corrupt as it increasingly engages in market-distorting crony capitalism, a pathetically incompetent educational system, and, ultimately worse of all, a debilitating victim and dependency culture.

Here we see ingredients for a toxic cocktail of dislocation and systemic breakdown which could become a perfect storm if the timing is right. This list does not even contemplate several foreseeable crises such as the entitlement funding balloon bursting in a few years nor does it contemplate the unforeseeable black swan events which the gods whimsically introduce into human affairs to confound all wise men. In the storm, should it come, the left will not let a good crisis go to waste. History suggests the right will simply muddle.

All of the leftist inspired, government-imposed causes of job dislocation cataloged above will only be made the more acute by automation and the dislocation caused by robots. If Chinese factories are automating and eliminating 90% of their workers, the impact on American employment statistics will be devastating. In a perfect storm, or in a gradually gathering storm, the remedy offered by the left for failed socialism, that is for government policies which have brought us to this place will be more, not less, socialism. That is the whole idea of not letting a crisis go to waste.

Perfect storm or gathering storm, conservatism must know what it believes in order to know what to do.

I’ll let you know next Tuesday....

True enough! We have had superannuation since the 80’s and I have done ok out of it. Especially as it has an insurance component that I was able to use after a back operation. It was meant to grow into a substitute for the pension but has stalled somewhat as part of it was mandated employer contributions (given in lieu of wage rises) and voluntary contributions. The mandated contributions have stalled at 12% and should have been 15% or 18% by now but slow wage growth has lead the government to delay the rises! So my generation finds itself stuck in the middle - I hope for my kids a better outcome! They are blessed however, my parents and myself have done ok so we will leave them well provided for. Not bad seeing as my grandparents were impoverished tenant farmers on a little island off the coast of France and/or potato farmers in Ireland! A lot can happen in two generations!

Since you mentioned the Luddites, I'd like to comment briefly about a common misconception about what the Luddites were all about. Most folk think they were simply opposed to the automation in the textile industry. In fact, initial sparks of this movement surrounded the fact that that the King had granted patents to the weaving and sewing hardware, particularly that of early sewing machines by Barthelemy Thimonnier. The biggest problems that tailors of the day had with Thimonnier is that he wouldn't sell the things, and others were prohibited by law from making their own, thus he was able to massively undercut the prices of those who still had to hand-tailor clothing. Had the fellow merely become a manufacturer of the machines, he'd have probably become quite prosperous, instead of dying in poverty.

That wasn't all that was behind the movement, as the cause was taken up by those wanting to gain power and money by stirring up those who would be displaced by the technology. You will always find those willing to stir up folk because destruction is always easier than building things up.

Leftists will be eager to demonize capitalism as the author of dislocation just as they exploit "climate change" to destroy capitalism. The strategy will be to create a class of victims of those left behind to create a political force to impose government controls over the entire economic system. Community organizing will be moved from a geographical locus to a class basis. Demagoguery will rise as the left seeks to divert inquiry away from other causes of job dislocation such as burdensome and ubiquitous government regulations, a suffocating tax structure, unwise trade deals promoting job exfiltration from America, unnecessary and misdirected environmental restrictions, open border infiltration of job seekers, an ever-expanding and deadening public as well as private debt, a political system waxing increasingly corrupt as it increasingly engages in market-distorting crony capitalism, a pathetically incompetent educational system, and, ultimately worse of all, a debilitating victim and dependency culture.

Here we see ingredients for a toxic cocktail of dislocation and systemic breakdown which could become a perfect storm if the timing is right. This list does not even contemplate several foreseeable crises such as the entitlement funding balloon bursting in a few years nor does it contemplate the unforeseeable black swan events which the gods whimsically introduce into human affairs to confound all wise men. In the storm, should it come, the left will not let a good crisis go to waste. History suggests the right will simply muddle.

The above is worth re-quoting because it is just so dead on accurate. Also thrown into the mix is a class of folks who believe that power itself is its own reward, and are more than willing to push other people into destructive activities if they believe there is some temporary advantage to be gained from it. On top of that are those who would be quite happy with an entire world of serfs as long as they are the ones sitting on top of that pile of beaten down humanity.

Actual liberty is a precious thing, that sadly, has not been the default state of humanity. We'd do well to think of ways to keep the flame of freedom burning through the dislocations that are absolutely on the way.

Soon that will stop. Only a few countries are still growing like Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, just to name a few. Gulf countries and North Africa all have below replacement birth rate.

There are 101 countries where the fertility rate is at replacement level (2.1) and above.

CIA Factbook--fertility rates by rank

There are 191 countries that have positive population growth rates.

CIA Factbook--growth rates by rank

Africa will be the source of the greatest increases in population growth. Notably, of all the continents, only Southern and Eastern Europe show negative growth rates in 2017, with Southern Europe at -0.12% and Eastern Europe at -0.15%. Europe as a whole has had a modest population increase of 0.08%, which is the smallest growth rate of the inhabited continents, although Western Europe continues to have a high population density of 178.31 per sq km. In contrast, all of the regions of Africa show significant population growth rates, with increases of 2.5-3% across Central, Eastern, Western and Sub-Saharan Africa.

191 countries are growing because baby boomers are still alive. Wait 20 years, you will see many countries decline in population.

No doubt, but for now, the world’s population continues to increase. As the graph shows, Africa is the biggest source of population growth from now until the end of the century.