World Is Quickly Going Gray, U.N. Study Finds
Feeling old? You’re not alone. The whole world is getting older--a lot older, at a pace that has taken demographers by surprise and presented governments with economic and social challenges, the U.N. reported in a global aging study released Thursday.
About 10% of the world’s population is now over 60, and by mid-century that will double--marking the first time that group will outnumber children. “This is unprecedented in human history,” said Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, who supervised the study.
The trend is most acute in advanced industrial nations, where the working-age population is shrinking as the number of older citizens steadily increases--a development with “profound implications,” Chamie noted, in a world where fewer and fewer workers will be supporting more and more older dependents.
Yet ultimately, U.N. experts stress, these statistics depict a medical and socioeconomic triumph. In much of the world, increasing longevity has been matched by radically declining fertility and infant mortality rates. Women choose the timing and frequency of childbirth in the confident expectation that their infants will thrive.
The Malthusian specter of exponential population growth has evaporated as developed nations confront the reverse demographics of population implosion. An aging population is a byproduct of literacy and prosperity, statistics clearly show.
“This is great news: We are getting greater control over birth and death,” Chamie told reporters Thursday as he detailed the study’s findings.
In Japan and Italy--now the two “oldest” countries, with a median age above 40 and climbing--nearly a quarter of the population is already over 60, and that will pass 40% by 2050, the U.N. projects.
But U.N. experts say these countries aren’t the demographic anomalies they were once thought to be: They are simply ahead of the population curve. Nations where the 60-plus population is also expected to swell to about 40% in half a century include Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Sweden, Bulgaria, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Armenia.
Most other developed countries aren’t far behind. The exceptions are nations with many young immigrants--led by the United States, where the 16% of the population now over 60 is expected to rise to 27% by 2050.
Worldwide, the number of people age 60 and up will more than triple to 1.96 billion in the next 50 years, according to U.N. forecasts, representing fully a fifth of the world’s predicted population.
Even in places where the median age is extraordinarily young--in most of Africa and the Middle East, just 5% of the population is over 60--U.N. demographers predict similarly stunning shifts in a generation or two.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is the expected rapid growth in the population of those 80 and up, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. Centenarians, once revered anomalies, now number about 210,000. By 2050, there will be 3.2 million people 100 or older, the U.N. estimates.
This boom in retirees will produce economic strains as the group is supported either directly by families or indirectly through taxes. Today there are nine people of working age--defined by the U.N. as 15 through 65--for every older person. That ratio will shrink to 4 to 1 in 50 years, the U.N. says. And in industrial nations, where the ratio has already dropped to 5 to 1, there will be just two working-age people for every senior citizen by 2050.
Politically, as has already been seen in precincts from Florida to Florence to the foothills of Mt. Fuji, this sets the stage for conflicts over funding for social security and health care on the one hand, and schooling and unemployment benefits on the other.
“There will be changes in electoral patterns generally,” Chamie said. “A person who is 25 has a very different outlook on life than someone who is 65.”
Inevitably, there will be increasing pressure to raise the retirement age, now 65 in most industrial nations, but just 60 in France and much of Eastern Europe. (In Asia and Africa, mandatory retirement at 50 is not uncommon. Yet the law means little when social safety nets are handmade: 74% of elderly men and 42% of elderly women in the poorest nations are still active members of the work force, in contrast to 21% and 10%, respectively, in the industrialized world.)
The aging phenomenon has been accelerated by radically changing social mores. Mediterranean Europe, where Catholicism has long dominated, is now the slowest-growing region on the planet.
In Scandinavia, as many as 40% of the women of childbearing age are childless and are expected to remain so, Chamie said. Birthrates are plunging equally dramatically in places as different as Quebec and Hong Kong.
“We are talking about a transformation in the population age structure,” Chamie said. “The pace is much faster than we anticipated in the past. And the implications of the consequences are becoming much more evident.”
