Opinion – Ross Douthat: Aging could be as defining a challenge of the 21st century as the climate crisis

There are two types of people in the world: those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate change and those who know it will be low births, declining populations, the aging of the world.

To start a column like this is to become hostage to luck. If I’m wrong, he could be snubbed or mocked in future reports reporting New York under water and Texas uninhabitable.

But it’s important that the odd people more obsessed with demography than climate keep hammering, because whatever the true balance of risk between the two is, the relative is shifting. Over the past 15 years, some of the worst-case scenarios for climate change have become less likely than before. At the same time, various forces, notably the Covid crisis, have reduced birth rates faster, pushing the age of old age forward rapidly.

The latest evidence is news out of China last week that the population has declined for the first time since the Great Leap Forward more than 60 years ago. A downward trend was long predicted, but until recently it was not expected to arrive until the 2030s – yet here it is, with the Chinese birth rate reaching an all-time low in 2022.

This means that, just as China is emerging as a quasi-superpower, it is looking into a bleak future where it ages and stagnates before it finishes getting rich.

Meanwhile, variations of that shadow now loom over most wealthy and many middle-income nations — threatening general sclerosis, a loss of dynamism and innovation, and a stalemate struggle between a bloated retiree population and overworked youth. (The mass protests in France against Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 were a preview of that future.)

So it’s worth thinking about some rules for the age of demographic decay—trends to look out for, principles that will separate winners and losers, guidelines for those seeking dynamism in a stagnant world.

Rule 1: The rich world will need a redistribution from the old to the young

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen many instances of technocrats being proven wrong in their assumptions — from the widespread belief that we needed to cut the deficit almost immediately after the financial crisis to reckless optimism about the effects of free trade with China.

But in an aging world the technocratic desire to reform the rights of the elderly will become ever more essential and right – provided the savings can be used to make it easier for young people to start a family, start a business, own a home. And countries that find a way to successfully make that transfer will end up far ahead of those that simply sink into gerontocracy.

Rule 2: Innovation is not enough; the challenge will be implementation and adoption

If you want to thrive in an aging world, you need technological advances. But, as economist Eli Dourado noted in a recent article on the effects of new artificial intelligence technology, the big bottlenecks aren’t always in the invention itself—they’re in testing, in infrastructure, in deployment, in regulatory hurdles.

And since aging and established societies may be more inclined to leave new inventions on the shelf, eliminating these bottlenecks can become the innovator’s main challenge.

Rule 3: Land warfare will go against population limits

You can see this dynamic already in the Ukrainian War. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization efforts are not what they presumably would be if his empire had more young people. Ukraine, with lower birth rates than Russia, will face a deepening demographic crisis if the war drags on for years.

The same issue applies to Taiwan and other hot spots: even where strategic ambitions militate in favor of war, the pain of every casualty will be dramatically compounded.

Rule 4: In the realm of the elderly, a little more youth and vitality will go a long way.

This is true internationally: countries that manage to maintain or increase their birth rates at close to replacement level will have a long-term advantage over countries that plunge into South Korean-style fertility at half replacement level.

And it will be true within societies as well: to predict which states and cities will be most dynamic in the US, which religious traditions and ideologies are most influential, look for places and groups that are friendlier not only to young people, but also to young people with children. . (Also, expect to have a lot more Amish neighbors.)

Rule 5: The African diaspora will reshape the world

The faster aging takes place in the rich and middle-income world, the more important is the fact that Africa’s population is still on track to reach 2.5 billion in 2050 and reach 4 billion in 2100.

The movement of a mere fraction of that population is likely to be the most significant global transformation of the 21st century. And the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand and destabilization and backlash on the other will help decide whether the era of demographic decline will end in revitalization or collapse.