Robert Holzmann
BROOKINGS | December 14, 2015
Bad news sells well. So demographic
projections that suggest that the world’s population under most
scenarios will continue increasing and becoming older provide fodder
for professional doomsayers. Indeed, without changing policies the
demographic challenge risks turning into a global disaster at economic,
social, and other levels. Population aging is likely the most important
socioeconomic change since the dawn of mankind, the importance of which
equals that of climate change. Yet some visionaries propose turning the
projected demographic trend into an opportunity—they see this very new
phenomenon not as a wave that can be ducked (it can’t), but as process
that needs to be proactively managed with appropriate policies.
Population aging has two sources—increased life expectancy and
decreased fertility rates. Life expectancy at birth has been constant
at about 30 years for thousands of generations. In the 18th century it
started to increase, first in some industrializing countries and then
across the world, and the trend of the frontier in life expectancy is linear since 1840, albeit with some exceptions (as seen recently for white males in the United States).
A similar historic pattern is seen in the sustained fall in the
fertility rate, which contributes temporarily to population aging if
converging to above the reproduction level, and permanently if it falls
below.
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