Sustainability, the “characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely,” cannot be applied to our population because we are already changing.
The main event that will ensure change is population aging. Population aging is where the number and proportion of older adults are increasing. This is happening at such speed and magnitude that the United Nations has identified aging as unprecedented, enduring, pervasive and profound. This is happening faster in developing countries. Although it took France over 110 years to become an aging country—one of the side effects of a declining TFR, from 7% to 14% of the population being 65 years and older—most developing countries will experience this within two decades. And all countries are reducing the number of children born.
Population aging will ensure that we will never see such a young population again among our species. Our population will be changed permanently.
This is a living experiment. The main push is not that we are living longer but that we are having fewer children. This seems strange at first, but people are not living much older at old age, they are surviving better from childhood.
In the United States, an older adult at 65 increased their life expectancy by only 5.7 years. What this means is that in 2000 a 65-year-old was expected to live an additional 5.7 years more than someone who was 65 in 1900, a hundred years ago. As strange as this sounds, gains in our aging population are occurring among children.
For the first time in the history of our species, we are seeing a decline in the number of births. The decline in births is the primary cause of aging, it lowers the proportion of younger adults and it enhances the survival rate of children so that they have a better chance of reaching older age.
Around the 1950s and '60s, birth rates in most of the developed world started to decline. The primary reason for this is that after the Second World War, women for the first time had access to employment, education and contraception, which resulted in delaying pregnancy, extending the period between pregnancies and stopping having children at an earlier age.
All these factors determined a decline in the birth rate. Once this process of having fewer children started, it proved to be irreversible.
All developed countries, including the United States, have a fertility rate that is lower than that required to replace existing population (i.e., without immigration the population will decline). Without our healthy immigration, the United States will be experiencing severe pressures on our health and social services similar to what European countries are experiencing now.
Despite incentives in some European countries for couples to have more children, there is no indication that we can reverse this process. By itself this is of some concern, but there are also the findings that as a species we are loosing our ability to have children.
Since 1992 researchers at Copenhagen University have reported a decline in sperm counts around the world. We have been seeing this trend continue. In addition, by retarding the age of first pregnancy, women are also reducing their fecundity (their ability to become pregnant).
At the other end of the spectrum, the older adult population is increasing at a rate that we have not seen before. Helped by slightly better life expectancy, but fueled mainly by the sheer number of people, the fastest-growing group is that of centenarians (those 100 years of age and older).
Recent surveys estimate that there are 450,000 centenarians worldwide (about 50,000 in the United States). However daunting this great success is, if we look at super-centenarians (those over 110 years of age), we find that this figure drops to 30.
As a species, our life span (the longest that we have ever lived) was defined by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calmert who lived to 122 years. There is evidence that indicates that we, as a species, are reaching this outer limit of life.
How sustainable is our lifestyle if we have a scenario where there are fewer children being born and where most older adults are pushing survival up to the life span (100 years plus).
Harry Dent has long maintained that our demography is destiny and that our economic market is held hostage to this powerful changing foundation. This profound change is already having pervasive repercussions on many aspects of our lives.
We are experiencing the beginning of these effects on our economy with declining savings and investment and diminishing demand for infrastructure such as highways, housing and schools. The recent realty collapse is just one (major) effect of the aging of the baby boomers.
However, the biggest fear of all, as expressed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, is Medicare. Unlike Social Security, which is a known quantity, because of the spiraling cost of medical procedures and advancing surge of medical technology, Medicare remains an ever-increasing and variable liability that will dwarf all other federal expenditures. By 2024, Medicare spending is expected to exceed Social Security spending and will continue to escalate thereafter.
The only way that our demography does not determine our destiny is to ensure that there is enough political will to address these issues. Are we making that commitment?
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