The world is aging at an unprecedented rate — and that’s a problem for young and old alike.
January 30, 2023
Overview
Apartments in Singapore’s Queenstown district will soon offer slip-resistant floors and doorways wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. In Japan, a recently built light railway in the northern city of Toyama has carriages that, when they pull into a station, attach tightly to platforms, ensuring that the elderly don’t trip over gaps. At the Village Landais in southern France, every detail is geared toward helping Alzheimer’s sufferers live as comfortably as possible; groceries at village stores don’t have price labels, doing away with the need for residents to count the costs. (Those costs are covered by government agencies.) The idea is to give residents the experience of shopping without the confusion of transactions. Similar communities for people with dementia have been set up on the outskirts of Amsterdam and the shores of Lake Rotorua in New Zealand.
Collectively, these are vignettes of our shared future — of a world that is aging, and thus changing “in fundamental ways,” as the United Nations put in it in a recent report.
By the middle of this century, the number of people aged 65 and over around the world will total more than 1.6 billion people, up from around 760 million in 2021. In other words, there will be more than twice as many elderly people a generation from now.
“This is not a short-term challenge like famine or drought or war, but it is a long-predicted, natural change in the structure of our societies,” John W. Rowe, an expert on aging at Columbia University and a past president of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics, told Grid.
And it is a change with far-reaching consequences.
“The fundamental institutions of our societies — and by that I mean work, retirement, education, healthcare, housing, transport — were not designed to support the population age distribution of our future society,” Rowe explained. “They need to be re-engineered in order to adapt.”
An aging world: where the “grayest” are
To understand what this “future society” might look like, Grid spoke with demographers and health experts to see how shifting demographics were playing out in different parts of the world. While aging poses a collective challenge, interviews and a survey of the data show that the problems of aging, and the way societies are dealing with it, vary greatly.
Back in 1980, the U.N.’s list of top 10 “grayest” places was dominated by Europe; Sweden topped the list, with 16 percent of its population aged 65 or over. Germany, Austria, the U.K. and Norway were close behind.
Last year, Japan led the world, with a much higher percentage: Nearly a third of its citizens are aged 65 or over. By 2050, Hong Kong is expected to top the chart, with more than 40 percent of its people in that age bracket. Meanwhile, the percentages of elderly residents will rise dramatically. In the 1980s, the elderly made up a quarter of the population in those top-ten “grayest” nations; at midcentury, the comparable figure will be one third.
“I think the world is just now catching up to (the way demographics are changing), and it’s becoming a global concern because we seem to be at a tipping point,” Joshua W. Walker, the head of the New York-based Japan Society, told Grid.
That tipping point has the potential to fundamentally remake our world. Take the question of pensions. As things stand, public expenditure on pensions in advanced and emerging economies is forecast to climb to an average of 9.6 percent of total economic output by 2050, up from around 7 percent in the 1970s and 8 percent in 2010. That’s an increase of hundreds of billions of dollars, and it will have a profound bearing on government spending on everything else — from infrastructure to education to healthcare and more.
The good news, several experts told Grid, is that tackling these and other challenges is possible. There is a mountain of studies, reports and proposals to deal with global demographic shifts. “After all, we’ve known about these changes for decades,” Rowe explained.
The bad news: The world hasn’t been paying enough attention. In many ways, the experts say, there is a comparison to be drawn with global warming — that other colossal human challenge, long talked about, long ignored and still lacking the concerted action needed to solve the problem.
“There are analogies with climate change,” Paul Irving, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, told Grid. Irving was previously the founding chairman of the institute’s Center for the Future of Aging.
“We tend to deal with the urgencies immediately in front of us, and oftentimes we are looking, frankly, in the rearview mirror instead of at what’s coming. And demographic shift has been a long time coming, we knew it would come, and we are now in the midst of it.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
Not long ago, demographers worried about a global population explosion. The fear was that skyrocketing birth rates would leave billions of people poor and hungry and competing for scarce resources. In many parts of the world, that concern still holds true. But more and more countries are now confronting the opposite challenge: Their populations are shrinking, and they are growing older. And unless current trends are reversed, within a generation, the number of elderly people on earth will challenge governments’ ability to care for them. In some countries, the challenge is already here.