Pierre Buhler
The Shrinking North
PARIS – “Demography is destiny,” Auguste Comte is reported to have said. Today, his maxim appears to encapsulate the fate of a number of the…
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Laurence Kotlikoff
Fiscal Child Abuse
BOSTON – The Bible enjoins us to do better unto our children than we would do unto ourselves: “From generation to generation.” But, in much …
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Fang Cai
Aging Before Affluence in China
BEIJING – Just how fast is China’s population aging, and what does a lower proportion of working-age people mean for the country’s economic …
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Alina Solomon, Bengt Winblad
Alzheimer’s at the Crossroads
STOCKHOLM – “Perfect health, like perfect beauty, is a rare thing; and so, it seems, is perfect disease,” said Peter Latham, a nineteenth-ce…
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James W. Vaupel, Björn Schwentker
Managing Longer Lives
ROSTOCK – People in most countries are living longer and longer. Indeed, the rise in life expectancy is seen as a major looming social and e…
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Harold James
From Bismarck to Bankruptcy?
PRINCETON – Democracies find it hard to deal with inter-generational social transfers, and with pensions in particular. Like all such transf…
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Edoardo Campanella
The New Old Generation Gap
ROME – A willingness to embrace change represents one of the main differences between affluent but aging societies and poor, younger ones. T…
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Cynthia Kenyon
Aging, the Final Frontier
SAN FRANCISCO – Even if young people think they are immortal, they can’t help but notice how fast their pets age. The puppy we receive as a …
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John Hutton
States of Gray
LONDON – All over the world, people are living longer. That trend is set to continue. Indeed, life expectancy in OECD countries will increas…
Old World: Project Syndicate - Old World
A problem far more serious than today’s trade imbalances, trillion-dollar rescue packages, and long unemployment lines lies on the near horizon: the prospect of slow growth, low productivity, soaring public spending, and labor shortages – all due to aging populations.
The scale of the problem is immense. With the share of people over 60 set to double by 2050, the IMF calculates that the cost of aging-related spending on pensions and health care alone will be ten times that of the recent financial crisis. And, barring massive natural or man-made disasters, there is no escape: every one of those people has already been born.
Not all countries will be affected in the same way, of course – but all will have to adapt. For example, while most developing countries do not yet have to worry about aging, the absolute number of older people there will more than triple by 2050 – in many cases with little or nothing in the way of a state-funded welfare net. And in the rapidly aging rich countries of Asia and Europe, an epic generational showdown looms over ballooning entitlements as governments seek to prevent a fiscal blowout.
Old World, available exclusively from Project Syndicate, focuses leading economic, political, and scientific minds on what may be the most far-reaching question of our time: What will a significantly older world look like socially, economically, politically, and – perhaps most importantly to aging people – medically?
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