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Opinion
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The Effects Of Global Graying
Phillip Longman
New America Foundation
Friday, June 7, 2004
Turn on your TV these days and you're bound to see images of
Iraqi youths dancing atop burned-out Humvees, or Mexican youths
slipping across border fences. We see Liberian child soldiers
brandishing rifles and Palestinian kids throwing stones. No
wonder so many Americans form the impression that Third World
population growth is a major threat to global stability.
Yet these images capture only the surface of life and miss a
deeper demographic reality. The United States and other
industrialized countries are all aging societies. Europe
already has more elders than youths, and by mid-century all of
the United States will be older than Florida is today. Yet the
most rapidly aging areas of the world, according to the United
Nations, U.S. Census, and virtually all other demographic
forecasters, are the places we associate with destabilizing
youth bulges -- with the Middle East being among
the most rapidly aging of all.
Iran, for example, is aging four times faster than the United
States. It took 50 years for the United States to go from a
median age of 30 to today's 35. It would take another 50 years
for the median age here to reach 40. But while the median age in
the United States will be increasing by just five years, the
median age in Iran will be increasing by 20 years, reaching 40.2
by midcentury, according to U.N. projections. Similarly, Egypt
is aging at three times the rate of the United States, and Iraq,
nearly 2.5 times faster. Virtually anywhere one looks in the
devoloping world, the pattern is the same.
Between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age will increase 20 years,
leaving half the populaton over age 42, and making the country
older than its northern neighbor. On current trends, 30 percent
of China's population will be over 60 by midcentury. Even Africa
is aging at nearly double the rate of the United States.
Countries such as France and Japan at least got a chance to grow
rich before they grew old. Now, most developing countries are
growing old before they get rich.
Why is this happening?
Primarily, it's because of the dramatic decline in fertility
rates that is now spreading to every corner of the globe. As
more of the world's population moves to urban areas, in which
children offer little or no economic reward to their parents,
and as women gain in economic opportunity and reproductive
control, people are producing fewer children.
No industrialized country produces enough children to sustain
its population. And even in countries where fertility rates are
above replacement levels, a dramatic fall in the number of
children born to each woman is leading to a steep slowdown in
population growth, as well as to unprecedented rates of
population aging.
The global fall in fertility certainly brings a number of
benefits. For example, as the relative number of children
declines, so does the burden of their dependency, which partly
explains the current economic success of countries such as India
and China.
Looking to the next decade, the "middle aging" of the Middle East
will ease the region's overall dependency ratio, thereby freeing
more resources for infrastructure and industrial development. The
appeal of radicalism may also diminish as Middle Eastern societies
become increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with
health care and retirement savings.
Just as population aging in the West during the 1980s was
accompanied by the disappearance of youthful indigenous terrorist
groups such as the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground,
falling birth rates in the Middle East could well produce
societies far less prone to violence.
Yet even if declining fertility rates initially bring a
"demographic dividend", that dividend eventually has to be repaid
if the trend continues. At first there are fewer children to
feed, clothe and educate, leaving more for adults to enjoy. But
soon enough there are fewer productive workers as well, while
there are also more dependent elderly, who each consume far more
resources than do children. In the longer run, of course,
falling fertility leads not only to population aging but to
population decline. World population could well be shrinking
before today's children reach retirement age, and there is an 85
percent chance that it will be doing so by the end of the
century, according to projections by the International Institute
for Applied Systems.
If global fertility rates converge with those seen today in Europe
or among native-born Americans, by 2200 the world population could
shrink to half of what it is today, even without any major wars or
pandemics, according to U.N. projections. The only precedent we
have for such a decline in population is the period of late
antiquity, when falling birth rates helped bring about the
collapse of the Roman Empire.
Global aging is better than its alternative, but to borrow a
phrase from my late grandmother, it's not for sissies.
Phillip Longman is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the
New America Foundation.
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