07-07 Demographics

Sexy. Not the right word. Scary. That’s better. I am talking about demographics. About population changes taking place that have massive implications.
It seems that all my life we have been talking about the “baby boom”, the explosive population growth that followed WW2. Initially, we were talking about the sale of diapers, then children’s toys, then building schools, then the acquisition of homes and on and on it went.
Now about ten thousand baby boomers are dying each day, and we wonder why there is a slow down in the economies of the world. While the working populations of the developed nations are shrinking.
And nothing is going to change going forward.
Businesses are always studying changes in demographics because people of different ages, gender, marital status, education and so on all have different needs and buying habits. No brain surgery here.
But population changes have huge political and macro economic implications. To put it simply. Societies are getting older. This means higher public expenditures on health care and screwing the younger generation to pay the bills.
And of course, speaking as a senior, spending and travel planning changes over the years. Bus trips through Europe are replaced with cruises with doctors and nurses on board.
So good to get home to Canada with our public health system. My wife just spent two days in hospital in California, where we spent our winter. The bill sent to our insurance company was $53,000 US. Being old is expensive, especially in the US.
And being in our mid-80s, we are seeing friends not only dying but friends dealing with sorrow and depression as their spouses go through the aging process.
We used to have 4-5 workers for every retiree, but the reality is that we are moving to a time when there will be only 1-2 workers for each old person. And that is only half the problem. The other issue is fertility.
In most of the developed societies women are having 1.5 children on average when it requires 2.1 to keep any population stable.
So, the combination of weak fertility and more elderly is a demographic time-bomb.
The answer is immigration of people of colour from the developing world. Not everyone is happy about that solution. You can see how immigration is giving birth to new nationalistic politics around the world.
Say hello to President Trump and his ban on immigrants and Britain leaving the EU with its open borders.
Other things are happening that is making it difficult for the younger generation. Young people facing economic insecurity are living with their parents into their 30s. And that means not marrying, having children or buying a home with all the economic punch associated with families.
Three times I have been to Japan and participated in their own debate about their shrinking population. And there I was a witness to the growth dilemma facing not just Japan but most of the developed world. Fewer stable long-term job opportunities.
Japan used to boast about the life-long jobs provided by their large corporations. Most of those jobs are now short-term forms of contract employment.
And when we look at the so called Arab spring, which was promoted as a revolt against the tyranny of their governments, we discover that it was really a revolt by a generation of young people without jobs.
There was a period of thirty years when I was a small business advocate and close to the governments in power. They were all obsessed with demographics. How much the population was growing and where. And what kind of immigrant skills the economy required.
But more importantly they were concerned with how to keep the size of the working population stable so there was a tax base in place to fund our pension system.
It is a difficult problem, because areas like Atlantic Canada which has more people dying than being born, are not the places where immigrants want to live. They all head to places like Vancouver and Toronto where there are lots of kinfolk.
Demographics can be a source of great internal conflict as well. In travelling to Northern Ireland, I discovered a fear that the large Catholic families will someday outvote the Protestant population.
And in travel to Israel, I witnessed a similar fear that the large Palestinian families will provide a voting threat to the Jewish majority.
And what a debate I witnessed in Australia in the 1990s with politicians declaring that Australia will become Asian because of immigration policies.
And another great demographic story, visiting China on our 30th wedding anniversary and discovering the consequences of their one-child policy.
Well it seems the desire for a boy child led to aborting girls and now there is a serious shortage of marriageable young girls. They do say, however, that there are large numbers of women in other nations looking for husbands?
Population mixing is our future. There is no other answer to the challenges posed by demographics.