The New York Times, October 20th, 2010

YOU MAY KNOW that the world’s population is aging —
that the number of older people is expanding faster than the number of
young — but you probably don’t realize how fast this is happening. Right
now, the world is evenly divided between those under 28 and those over
28. By midcentury, the median age will have risen to 40. Demographers
also use another measure, in addition to median age, to determine
whether populations are aging: “elder share.” If the share, or
proportion, of people over 60 (or sometimes 65) is growing, the
population is aging. By that yardstick too, the world is quickly
becoming older. Pick any age cohort above the median age of 28 and
you’ll find its share of the global population rising faster than that
of any segment below the median. By 2018, 65-year-olds, for example,
will outnumber those under 5 — a historic first. In 2050, developed
countries are on track to have half as many people under 15 as they do
over 60. In short, the age mix of the world is turning upside down and
at unprecedented rates.

This means profound change in nearly every important relationship we
have — as family members, neighbors, citizens of nations and the world.
Aging populations also alter how business is done everywhere. The
globalization of the economy is accelerating because the world is
rapidly aging, and at the same time the pace of global aging is
quickened by the speed and scope of globalization. These intertwined
dynamics also bear on the international competition for wealth and
power. The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of
poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose
their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise amass
wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older
countries lose work to younger countries.

To see this process at work, look at China.
In its march to prosperity, the country has encouraged hundreds of
millions of its young people to move into cities. Chinese metropolises —
some, like Beijing, ancient but newly sprawling, others, like Shenzen,
built from scratch — are where the factories are. Foxconn Technology
Group, for example, the giant electronics manufacturer that builds
components for Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple in gigantic plants in
Shenzen and elsewhere in urban China, will soon employ enough people to
fill 60 percent of the jobs in Manhattan. Foxconn has close to 920,000
workers, nearly all of whom are under 25; in August, the company
announced plans to add 400,000 more workers in the next year. But
China’s is a kind of Dorian Gray economy, its young and footloose global
identity hiding a grayer reality. By and large, older workers have been
excluded from its remade, globalized economy. They are left behind in
their rural villages, or they are pushed from their urban homes into the
ghettos of dour apartment blocks on the urban edge to make room for the
new apartments and offices occupied by younger urbanites and the
companies eager to hire them. Discrimination — “age apartheid” might be a
better term — is one way to describe what’s going on here: no country
sorts its population more ruthlessly by age.

The problem for China is that it is rapidly approaching the point after
which it will no longer be the relatively young country we see today. In
2015, China’s working population below the age of 65 will begin to
shrink. Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will be rising to 300
million by 2050, a threefold increase. Richard Jackson, the director of
the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
notes that China will be older than the United States within a
generation, making it the first big national population to age before it
joins the ranks of developed countries. One of China’s biggest fears,
expressed repeatedly in public pronouncements, is that it will grow old
before it grows rich.

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