According to this article in this morning’s Washington Post, the real problem is global aging. [It is for me.-ed. For once we agree.]
No challenge “is as certain as global aging,” said the Center for Strategic & International Studies in another recent study, “and none is as likely to have as large and enduring an effect — on the size and shape of government budgets, on the future growth in living standards, and on the stability of the global economy and even the world order.”
Geezer war? Okay, let the jokes fly, but the good news is that once again we dastardly ‘Murricans will be at an advantage (some anyway):
As it begins to confront the costs of an aging population, the United States is in far better shape than most of the developed world. By 2040, 26 percent of the U.S. population will be at least 60 years old, up from 16.3 percent in 2000, according to CSIS. But that will make the population relatively spry. At least 45 percent of the populations of Japan, Spain and Italy will be 60 or older by then. In each of those countries, there will be one retiree for every worker.
But chauvinism aside, let’s hope cooler (read: less partisan) heads prevail when Bush puts Social Security on the table in the SOTU tonight. As the WaPo article indicates, this relatively small pension program (compared to the real cost of retirement) is but the tiny tip of a rather large iceberg headed our way. The excellent WaPo piece gives a good overview of the various potential calamities confronting our aging and diminishing brain cells. (hat tip: Knucklehead)
Of course some people are remaining young at heart, at least, although I suspect Dennis the Peasant may be letting his blogging success go to his head. I came across this photo online, captioned only DP and Bunnies …
Maybe we should consider switching to metric years. That way most of us will be 100 – 200 years old and it won’t look like such a problem…
Metric years? How does it work? Inquiring minds etc..
Katherine — 100-day years. Kind of like Methuselah’s years in the Old Testament… or Porgy and Bess:
Methuselah lived 900 years
Methuselah lived 900 years
But who calls that livin’
When no gal will give in
To no man what’s 900 years…?
Bruce Sterling wrote a fine SF novel on this topic, Holy Fire.
“Product Description:
The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. . . . Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, ekeing out a meagre survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age.”
OT and speaking of DtP, I was ever so pleased during the year when I could say, “I’m not old. I’m 37.”
Speaking about the aging population and its effect on Social Security, a friend of mine suggested that to make the cost of Social Security more palatable to the younger generation, we should institute the save the geezer program. With this program, each worker gets a picture of the Social Security recipient he is supporting along with a letter of thanks each month. It is suggested that the recipient refrain from ending the letter with thanks for working so hard to support me sucker.
As the economy becomes increasingly globalized, it would seem that population aging in individual countries would be less of an issue. In the US, would it matter if Arizona and Florida had aging populations while at the same time California and Georgia had youthful and growing populations? Perhaps we can achieve a similar balance on a global scale. For example: capital in large quantities needs to flow from the US to countries like India where infrastructure is being built. At the moment, there are significant restrictions on investment in Indian firms by US investors: these really need to be addresssed by the Administration. Free trade cus both ways.
I forgot what I was going to post!
A hattip! My very own hattip! All I can say is link. (turn your speakers on).
OK, what does this put me on the hook for? I plead guilty to adding to the Greying of America since I am, after all, oh so much more than twenty.
But here’s a “companion” article, The Global Baby Bust (just a headsup – nyuknyuk).
These are two sides of the same coin – at least I think they are.
So what’s driving up the costs for the elderly and why are babies getting busted?
From the WaPo piece:
They don’t itemize but the big hitters are Medi* and SSN.
From Foreign Affairs:
I think there’s more to the “Baby Bust” than the pure monetary costs, but I suppose it can be looked at as an economic matter. In an affluent economy I believe fewer people chose to have children – and those who do have children have fewer of them – because, even if children were free, they represent a major impact on one’s lifestyle. As I frequently tell my daughters, “You coulda had a BMW and a fancy-ass condo on the beach. Picking you seemed like a good idea at the time but you’re making me reconsider.”
So how are we going to deal and adapt moving forward over, say, 60 or 80 years? No doubt (or so it seems to me), we’ll be forced to delay retirement and reduce benefits but while the Boomers are still working there rat’s way through the snake’s belly those will be bandaids on a sucking chest wound.
I speculate that while we’re screaming and yelling and wheeling and dealing we’ll also be adapting. The adaptation I speculate is the reformation (and possibly a radical reformation) of the family unit. I speculate that we will move toward a restoration of multi-generational and expanded families (siblings, etc) behaving as the interdependent economic units that are now “atomic” families. We can’t disaggregate the family any further – its reached nearly subatomic levels.
Such a social adaptation done over two or three generations (by which time the BoomerRat will be fully digested and the snake svelte again) will mitigate such costs as “Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, heating and housing assistance, and other programs for the elderly” as well as freeing the fewer and younger from some portion of the costs (such as real-estate and other asset aquisition) that has already been bourne by the elderly. Offspring “coming home” living with mom and dad, after all, don’t have to come up with the down payment for the house and, often, the house is long payed for. And there will be asset transfers from the elderly to the young (the elderly today are, as a whole, remarkably wealthy).
Very incomplete, very inarticulate, but I find this issue enormously interesting to speculate about. And as for we filthy ‘murricans, I further speculate that our proven ability to adapt will serve us well.
Not only do we have to pay for Viagra, some are lobbying for that $30,000 gastro surgery to stop them from being overweight.
They don’t get it, they die, the gov’t wins.
Geez, at that cost, we could provide a trainer 2x/wk and weekly dietician for at least 2 years.
Gimme, gimee, gimme. Sex and food, sex and food.
“Gimme, gimee, gimme. Sex and food, sex and food.”
You wouldn’t consider posting an address for purposes of rapid delivery, would you? Chinese takeout OK?
Richard, thanks, by this method I am truly richÖ in years.
But doesn’t Europe’s love affair with euthanasia begin to play into all this? At the point that the European economy will start to become too stagnant to continue, don’t you think all those old people will conveniently start to die of “natural causes”? It’s not quite “Logan’s Run,” perhaps, but it’s not an encouraging thought.
Why should we assume that the demographics will travel in a straight line without any behavioral change by Europeans attempting to mitigate a negative outcome? Thirty years is a long time in a world that sees incremental (but dramatic) shifts in views toward sanctity-of-life issues on an almost daily basis.
I don’t think the U.S. will be dealing with the crisis in the same way the Europeans will, however. We’re smart, and we should be able to figure out how to manage longer lives without crushing the hopes of the young in the process.
If we must keep the population boom stoking, then we truly have a tiger by the tail. Exponential growth, that’s what it is, has a limit in the real world. The bravest optimist must admit that there is some upper limit on the number of people the planet can support, no matter what miraculous technologies we develop. As the population grows and consumes, we are making successive sacrifices. Yes, as we live longer the burden becomes greater on the relatively fewer working people. That’s much better than some sudden population collapse when the limit is reached. Things get more complicated as you near the limit. More and more problems need to be solved. We ARE ingenious at solving those problems, but not as smart as we think we are.
Unfortunately, we really don’t have to worry about depopulation. Natural selection will take care of that for us. Already you can see signs that certain cultures encourage population growth more than others. The mix of cultures is shifting across the globe. Soon enough, Israel will be populated mostly by the traditional Orthodox and the US will be filled with Hutterites and Catholics. In other places, it will be different mixes. I have nothing against those particular groups, I might be wrong about which groups, but I can do the math. Exponential growth of subpopulations will subsume the supposedly shrinking main population. But, not in our lifetimes I suppose.
We are the generation of Peter Pan. We don’t ever want to grow up.
But in truth I wish we would grow up before we grow old.
I keep hearing how our medical system is archaic and we just let people die etc, and it seems there are more and more of us all the time and we just keep ticking.
I think we might need to reconfigure a lot fo these entitlements if they are going to survive another half century. Isn’t this plan Bush is talking about a lot like the SS in Chile?
Smallishbees:
Euthanasia isn’t the only tool available to accomplish this. Rationing, and delayed delivery, of medical services are also available to, ummm…, reduce costs.
JJ:
Extrapolating any trendline off into the infinite future is always a recipe for making some big mistakes. We have to keep in mind what these articles are talking about. Neither is talking about “depopulation”. Birth rates are apparently declining which means that the rate of growth of population is decreasing. And they are talking about decades, not a few short years.
IIRC, under current extrapolations world population will peak at around 12 billion in the latter part of this century. We’ll have twice as many people in the world as we have now before we have to figure out how to live with fewer people and a declining population.
What both these articles are claiming is that the world’s population is growing older. That presents problems that need to be understood, adjusted for, and adapted to.
Articles such as these always seem to assume that nothing fundamental will change. Well, clearly that’s not true. The same sorts of experts were telling us just a few decades, a generation, ago that we had a overpopulation timebomb on our hands and we’d be headed for mass famine. They failed to anticipate that we’d learn how to grow more food from less land and that improving material wealth would lead to dramatically reduced birth rates. Thirty years hence we will undoubtedly be able to identify some factors that the current crop of experts failed to anticipate.
People change how we behave. Speculating about what changes and adaptations we’ll make to deal with an aging populatin seems interesting to me. Tweaks to social security and medic* systems, while necessary, aren’t really particularly interesting, IMO. Those are the things we patch the hull and pump the bilge with. I’m more interested in how we might change the shape of the ship.
What, no Soylent Green in our future? Aww….
Seriously, I think Knucklehead is onto something. We may well see a re-integration of the family into units of three (or even more) generations. Should we call it the molecular family, as opposed to the nuclear family of the 50′s and the atomized family of more recent vintage?
I remember reading an old Tom Wolfe essay about the emergence of retirement communities. As with so much else of his journalism from the ’60′s, he celebrated what he saw as an aspect of social liberation. You no longer had to associate with or rely on your ungrateful children and annoying grandchildren. But perhaps it hasn’t been so good for our social cohesion.
One thing to note here, in the case of European nations we are talking about depopulation. In some instances even with immigration.
Take Russia. By the middle of this century Russia as a whole will have a population under 100 million. That’s
Isn’t part of the reason for the decline in the birthrates the existence of social security itself?
People respond to the environment in which they live. In human civilizations, that means the laws and customs to which they are subject.
If you know that the central government will take care of you in your old age you have one less incentive to have children. Having children is difficult in every sense. Time consuming, money consuming, energy consuming, hair consuming. Each incentive to not have them will tip the balance for a certain fraction of the population. But when the balance tips too far the whole society is no longer capable of sustaining itself.
Social security is a version of what the economists call an externality. It allows me to enjoy all the benefits of other people’s children, while they are subjected to paying the costs.
Terrye — I’m looking forward to growing up. It may be hard to believe, but I was a bit of an ass as a kid.
I said…
Another advantage to metric years:
I just got my periodic statement from Social Security, with its estimates of how much I would make if I retired at 65, how much at 70…
Based on their progression, if I can retire at 150, I’ll make out like a bandit!
Wichita,
This is an argument I’ve long tried to use, without success, when discussing with people why I am “against” some various expansions of “the safety net”. I think of it as “marginality”, but its basically the idea that we get more of what we encourage and less of what we discourage.
Each time we expand some welfare “benefit” or “entitlement” some people at the margin will chose the “benefit” over struggling to achieve whatever they get by their own means. Make welfare more “attractive” and we get more people on welfare and the additional people will typically come from the marginal group that the “benefit” is “attractive” to.
Fortunately marginality also works in reverse. Remove the “benefit” and some of those at the margin will find a way to replace it by their own efforts. Unfortunately “benefits” don’t take long to become “entitlements”. I strongly prefer that we continue to use the word “benefits” rather than “entitlements” because a benefit is essentially a gift and the benefactor may choose not to continue giving the gift.
If, and it seems almost certainly, the cost of supporting an aging population under our current system become increasingly untenable we will be forced to “reduce benefits”. People at the margins will find some way to do without or replace the benefit. I speculate that wrt to maintaining an adequate economic situation one of the methods people will use will be to group themselves into larger “family units”.
For example, we don’t really need 2,500 sq. ft. of housing and 2.5 baths to adequately support 4 people or to have one or two retired people living in 1,500 sq. ft. There are many among us who somehow managed to survive and prosper growing up with 6 people living in 1,200 sq. ft. with 1 or 1.5 baths. We have, as a matter of course, levels of comfort and convenience that just a single generation ago were largely unimaginable to most commoners. And, if needs be, we’ll manage to redefine (after untold pissing and moaning) what we consider adequate. The middle classes today live under conditions that were once, and not long ago, luxurious. And the “poor” in US society often have a level of material comfort that was once the province of the middle.
There’s a whole lot of adjustment that can be made in people’s notion of adequate without inducing any real level of suffering or discomfort. We too quickly confuse petty inconveniences with discomfort and even “suffering”. I don’t look forward to or advocate for widespread reductions in material wealth for our society but we can survive signficant reductions without returning to the world of the Jobes and the Grapes of Wrath. Just sayin’.