Reading passage
The twenty-first century is witnessing a transformation in the age structure of human societies that has no historical precedent. In 2019, roughly one person in eleven worldwide was aged 65 or over; by 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be one in six. The shift is furthest advanced in Japan, where the median age has passed 48 and adult nappies now outsell those for infants, but it is by no means confined to rich countries. China, Iran and Thailand are all growing old before they have grown rich, confronting a challenge that Europe faced only after industrialisation had made it prosperous.
Two forces drive the change. The first is declining fertility: more than half of the world's countries now record a total fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and in South Korea the rate has fallen below 0.8. The second is rising longevity. Global life expectancy has climbed by more than two decades since 1950, and although the pandemic briefly reversed the trend, the underlying trajectory remains upward. Fewer births and longer lives together mean that the proportion of older people must rise, even in societies that still feel young.
The consequences are commonly expressed through the old-age dependency ratio, the number of working-age adults available to support each pensioner. In the early 1960s, the European Union had more than four workers for every person of retirement age; by 2050 there will be fewer than two. Public finances are strained from both directions, as tax revenues grow more slowly while spending on pensions and healthcare accelerates. In Japan, social security already absorbs a third of the national budget, and several European states face comparable trajectories. Labour shortages compound the strain: hospitals, logistics firms and care homes across the rich world increasingly report vacancies they cannot fill, a problem no efficiency gain has yet made disappear.
What ageing means for economic dynamism is more controversial. Some economists argue that older societies produce fewer entrepreneurs and adopt new technologies more slowly, citing Japan's long stagnation as evidence. Others point out that the data are mixed: patents are disproportionately filed by people in their forties and fifties, not the young, and countries such as Germany have combined greying workforces with robust export performance. A further possibility is that automation will compensate for labour scarcity, since robots, unlike workers, demand no pensions.
Governments have responded with a familiar toolkit, none of it painless. Raising the statutory retirement age is the most direct measure, yet pension reform in France triggered nationwide strikes, illustrating how politically explosive the issue can be. Pro-natalist policies, from baby bonuses to subsidised childcare, have generally disappointed: Hungary now devotes more than 5 percent of its GDP to family support, with only modest gains in fertility. Immigration can replenish the working-age population, but the numbers required to stabilise dependency ratios would be far larger than most electorates appear willing to accept.
A more hopeful strand of thinking proposes that societies should stop treating chronological age as destiny. What matters, gerontologists argue, is healthy life expectancy, and on that measure seventy may indeed be the new sixty. Older consumers already power a growing silver economy of travel, education and healthcare services, and many wish to work beyond conventional retirement ages, at least part-time. The World Health Organization has designated the 2020s as the Decade of Healthy Ageing, urging governments to invest in prevention, lifelong learning and age-friendly urban design.
Seen in perspective, population ageing is not a crisis but a triumph: the cumulative reward for victories over infectious disease, malnutrition and early death. The genuine problem is that institutions designed when lives were shorter and families larger, from pay-as-you-go pensions to careers ending abruptly at 65, fit poorly with the new demography. Adapting them will require political imagination of a kind that short electoral cycles rarely reward. Societies that succeed will not be those that resist ageing, but those that learn to organise prosperity around longer lives.