 It's 2020. Everyone admits ours is an era of crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis on our high streets, a climate crisis, a crisis of our economic model, a crisis of political representation and mental health. These are all huge challenges, and that was before COVID-19, but there's another crisis too. As a species, we're getting older, and demographic aging over the next several decades at least could be every bit as challenging as climate change. This year, for the first time in human history, there are more people over the age of 65 than under the age of five. By 2050, there'll be more people over 65 than under the age of 14. This is the crowning achievement of our species. Nowhere else in nature is there an animal as successful as ours where the old outnumber the young. What is more, it's new. In 1900, life expectancy across the planet was 30. Today, that's the age of the average person, and of trends, since the 19th century continue, a child born in the West in 2020 has a more than 50% chance of reaching 105. If you're 20, it's statistically 50, 50, you'll reach 100. If you're 40, that figure's close to 95, and if you're 60 already, well, don't worry, you'll probably reach 90. Such progress isn't premised on some as-yet-impossible technology, but continued iterative improvements and ones we've seen for last century and a half. Today, across the world, there are 6.3 people of working age for every person over 65. Now, the UN claims that figure all fall to 2.41 by 2100. In other words, by the end of this century, there'll be just over two people of working age for each retiree, many of whom will be living into their 90s and requiring unprecedented levels of care. In 1950, just 8% of the planet's population was over 60. By 2050, that'll be 22%, and most concerning of all, four-fifths of those people will be in developing countries. For some, the future of demographic ageing, accompanied by population decline even, has already arrived. Portugal could lose up to half its population by 2060, and in 2015, fewer babies were born in Italy than any year since 1861. But it's worse of all in Eastern Europe, a region which, according to the United Nations, has lost 6% of its population since the early 1990s. Further east, the population of Russia is lower than what it was in 1990. Such shifts aren't restricted to Europe. South Korea's birth replacement rate is just 1.2, meaning that by 2040, it will have a dependency ratio of around 3 to 1. Japan, which had a population of 128 million in 2010, could fall below 85 million by the end of this century. And according to some economists, the historic contraction it's seen in its economy, a 20-year recession, is probably caused by its ageing population. Other much poorer countries in Asia, like Thailand and Vietnam, not to mention China, as a result of its one-child policy, face similar problems. Indeed, over the long-term, the situation may be even more perilous in Asia than in Europe, with the region's rapid development since the 1960s to a significant extent dependent on a one-off demographic dividend, leaving little times creating the kinds of social infrastructure many Europeans took for granted. Indeed, Korea, a wealthy country by most measures, has some of the highest rates of elderly poverty amongst advanced countries, totalling some 45%. In all likelihood, that's the future of Asia when it comes to its ageing population. Even in Africa, which will be unique in the 21st century and seeing its population continue to increase, birth rates are falling precipitously. While the continent's population is set to double by 2050, birth rates are falling as improvements in women's literacy and access to contraception follow a similar path to elsewhere. At the start of the 20th century, the leading causes of death were generally infection, flu, cholera, pneumonia. Today, instead, they're more age-related like cancer, heart disease, and increasingly dementia, which is already the leading cause of death in the UK. Such conditions are incredibly resource-intensive to address, meaning that a growing number of the oldest old who will necessarily suffer from these conditions will require historic increase in spending to health and social care, something which, quite frankly, no major political party is willing to admit. That has implications for business as usual. A 2013 simulation by the Credit Ratings Agency, Sounded & Poor, concluded that simply as a result of ageing populations, 60% of the countries it analyzed would see their credit status reduced to junk within a few decades. This, they claimed, meant things like pensions and elderly care were unsustainable, and the major reforms from increasing the pension age to public sector austerity were urgently needed. A larger study, published three years later, again by Sounded & Poor, revealed less pressing problems, this time concluding that only a quarter of countries were headed for the rocks as people live longer and fertility rates continue to fall. Even in that more optimistic report, the geographical spread of the countries it identified was surprising, with Ukraine, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia all among those set to encounter major problems before the century's midpoint. The prospect of a crisis in elderly care and what it means for public finances extends beyond any one economic model or set of cultural values. What's more, ageing will further depress already anemic levels of economic growth. Since 2008, economies around the world have already struggled, and even before the Covid pandemic, places like Britain, France, Brazil and Mexico hadn't seen their per capita output rise for more than a decade. Yet as demographic ageing hits, it's very likely that malaise won't just continue but intensify. According to a 2016 paper by the Research Division of the US Federal Reserve, demographic ageing will render central banks powerless to raise long-term interest rates. Citing the example of the United States, it concluded that low investment, low interest rates and low output growth are here to stay. The US economy has entered a new normal. While the default policy response in recent decades has been caused for greater immigration, with a few exceptions such as Japan, given demographic ageing will ultimately impact every society on earth, this is clearly inadequate. The call for economic migration to make up for domestic labour shortages will be increasingly met with the response from where? That's not to say it won't happen. Indeed, labour flows, especially to care for the ageing populations of the global north, will become an increasingly important vector of exploitation. In most developed countries, particularly in Europe, lower rates of growth were already rubbing up against higher spending as they dealt with the long shadow of the financial crisis of 2008, and that was before Covid. In the UK, the costs of health and long-term social care, the state pension and other benefits of forecast increase annual spending by 2.5% of GDP every year after 2020. Between 2016 and 2030, Britain's population of over 65 will grow by a third, while its oldest old, those over 85, will almost double. While politicians primarily talk of balancing the books in the context of demographic ageing, as well as an already failing economic model, this is literally never going to happen. At the very moment, a large and constantly growing part of the population requires ever greater resources for their care and well-being, the working age population will shrink. This creates the dual challenge of economic stagnation and the need for more state spending on things like healthcare and pensions. In a market economy, I would argue that circle can't be easily squared. So while the 2017 dementia tax seemed just like an issue of bad politics, it wasn't. Yes, Theresa May was a terrible politician, and yes, she thought she could get away with it. But trying to foist the costs of elderly care onto individuals and not the state will, at some point or other, be the go-to option for the free market right. But as with healthcare, public provision isn't just fairer, it's also more cost-efficient, which is why if we're going to have a massively expanded elderly care system, something which we will have to build in the next decade or two, it makes a lot more sense to build it on the lines of Britain's NHS than America's failing privatised healthcare system. People who want to get rich from elderly care will oppose that, of course. Well, you know what? Beside the challenge of elderly care, raging populations will mean low growth and high deficits for a very long time to come. Along with climate change, it's not just a minor disruption to the status quo, it's an existential threat. Just one more reason to accept that tweaks and tinkering aren't going to see us through the next half century. This video informs part of a broader demographic's focus on Navarro Media, where we look at the issue of demographic ageing, not just through videos and podcasts but also articles on our website navarromedia.com. If you feel that the video has been informative and added value, why not go to navarromedia.com forward slash support, make a one-off payment or maybe even an ongoing subscription? As an organisation, we exist to talk about the big issues of the 21st century, just like demographic ageing and climate change, and we can do that bigger, better, and in a more compelling fashion with your support. I'll see you in 2021.