This week the US census bureau announced that within 10 years and for the first time in history, old people will outnumber young people across the globe. They were careful not to be too judgmental about this — there being so little we can do about it anyway — and concentrated not on consequent problems but on the “challenges to policymakers.” And yet whenever this demographic shift comes up, it is presented in terms of a crisis on one hand and a burden on the other.
Pension areas always in turmoil and dependency ratios, particularly in developed economies, are always dangerously skewed. Various newspapers talked about the bureau having “sounded the alarm,” about the “burden on carers and social services” and “intense pressures on individuals and families.” These are the terms of any discussion about an ageing population — that it represents a calamity. But what if it isn’t calamitous? What if it’s a good thing?
To start with, there is no sweet spot with life expectancy. The orthodoxy is the higher the better. In Zimbabwe a combination of HIV/AIDS, starvation, bad sanitation and the wellspring of these ills, poor governance, has cut life expectancy at birth to 40 years.
In Japan, the country with the highest life expectancy, you can now expect to live to 82. Nowhere in any census or policy document will you see anyone saying “some kind of midpoint would be nice ... 61?” This is for a number of reasons — the most obvious being that people, while they enjoy good health, tend not to want to die.
The rise in the number of the old (and according to this report, the “oldest old,” classified as more than 80) is a massive human success story: Life expectancy increases because of better education, greater wealth, lower infant mortality, better healthcare, less disease, the reduction of armed conflict and the development of technology and its application in pursuit of good. It is frankly insane to look at an aging population and not rejoice. Why do we even have a concept of public health, of cooperation, of sharing knowledge, if not to extend life, wherever we find it?
The problem then is not age as such but the proportion of the aged: Not only will the old outnumber the young globally, but in 11 major nations the population is aging while its numbers simultaneously decline — an unprecedented combination. It will lead to a very substantially increased “older dependency ratio,” which is taken to be damaging to economies.
Again this presentation ignores benefits that are much more significant than any country’s GDP. It is a consensus among environmentalists that a decline in human fertility will, if not solve the planet’s problems, at least give us some breathing space in which to solve them. The specter of Malthus, the world’s most famous Guy Who Was Wrong, muddies the water unnecessarily. Yes, he was wrong; and yes, the neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich fell victim to overblown predictions of catastrophe in the 1960s.
In The Population Bomb, he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
That kind of drama didn’t transpire, but he wasn’t far off — 300 million people have died of hunger or related causes since 1967. But just because burgeoning fertility has not been the catastrophe some have claimed, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take heart from its decline. And if fertility does fall, then of course this will tip the balance in favor of the old.
Another difficulty with those “worrying” older dependency ratios is that they are all based on a traditional retirement age — which most of us know to be outdated. For the UK, the country’s National Association of Pension Funds points out that women’s eligibility for the state pension was reduced from 70 to 60 in 1940. The prewar situation was the hardboiled if bizarre one that life expectancy as a woman was 64, and yet you didn’t qualify for state aid until six years later. For men it was moderately worse. Their life expectancy was 59 in 1941, and their eligibility for state pension wasn’t brought down to 65 until 1948. The state has never expected to support people for 21 years before death; rather for a year or two, or hopefully minus six.
The counter-argument is that as life expectancy rises, so do chronic and degenerative conditions, so that people just aren’t well enough to work, in the five years before their death, as they were when life expectancy was lower.
This is contested territory though, and the specter of decades of disability at the end of life is not borne out by the figures. Many prefer the “dynamic equilibrium” prediction, in which the factors extending life — a healthier lifestyle, faster detection of conditions, better treatment — also minimize disability; and where there is ill health, it is compressed into a short period before death.
Our aging world, in other words, is brilliant news. This is what we have been working toward for as long as the concept of working toward anything has existed. The response so far makes me think that maybe there is just no pleasing a statistician.
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