Part of the problem with the "aging population" doomsday scenario is that it makes a number of assumptions which don't really make sense.
One is that the demographic time bomb is permanent. Unless birthrates are falling to the point of extinction, at some point the population is going to rise again. The problem seems more of a cyclical one - how can we cover the years in which there is an older population needing more support from a younger one. When the baby-boomers generation is gone, the problems may well go away too; the question is - how long is the tunnel, and if cyclical, what kind of period do we need to face.
It is true that life expectancy has been rising (along with the more informative median age for death), but it has been rising over the last hundred years, and it is now approaching a plateau where - while more people may live longer - they will only live longer to a certain age.
If the population is in permanent decline, then we are facing a different order of problem, and it is primarily biological rather than purely economic. It is called extinction, and managing that is a qualitatively different problem! That may yet be the case - recent studies have increasingly shown a steadily declining sperm count in industrialised countries, almost certainly due to environmental factors. If this cannot be reversed, or the factors identified, then no attempts at bolstering populations by immigration is going to help in the long term, as immigrants will in turn be effected by the environmental hazards. Locally, problems raised about the biological side-effects of the new incinerator may well be significant here, on the environment, both land and sea life (if waste products from the chimney fall into the sea, and penetrate that food chain).
I am not so convinced that this is happening. At the moment, there is a declining birth rate, because birth rate is defined by way of the ratio of births per year over the total population, times a thousand. Naturally, even if the number of births is static, if the median age of death goes up, then the birth rate will decline, because it is a statistical artifact.
What we have at the moment is the result of an increase in the median death rate, and the outcome of the post-war baby boom. This means that for a time there will be an increase in the numbers of people above a certain age dependant for public services upon the working population - the "dependency ratio" - the number of people that each working person has to support.
But this is also not the whole picture. The increase in people living longer, according to a Canadian report, has little to do with the increase in medical costs
While aging is one factor driving up the health care tab, it plays a relatively small role... According to the report, the biggest factors pushing up costs are new drugs and diagnostic tools. The report found that population aging will continue to add less than one percentage point each year to public health care spending, even with a spike in boomers approaching old age.
What is a certain fact is that increasing immigration to sort out problems is a non-starter. For a start, the age of the immigrants would be a necessary factor, and no politician has really considered any laws to ensure that most of the immigrants, are, for instance, under 30. Secondly, the immigrants themselves will get old, so the effect of increased immigration will be another bulge coming through the system, only solvable by further increases, until a leveling off is reached which would be way above the present population. It is like the half-life of drugs. If you take a particular medicine - for example, a thyroid drug - the half life is the period of time it will take until only half of the drug is left in your system. Of course, by then you will have taken at least one more dose, so you now have half the original concentration, plus the extra taken, and its half life in turn, so that the maximum in your system will be far greater than the single dose. Increased immigration to deal with demographic problems works very much like that.
What we really need is to look at cyclical effects, and how we can cope with them. After all, we find, on a smaller scale, from one year to another, that the the same kind of cyclical effect occurs with schools, when a bulge ripples through the system over a number of years, but then is gone. Our organisations are not really well constructed to adjust flexibly to these effects, as we think in terms of static and fixed systems, often huge ones, rather than modular and flexible ones, to solve problems. What can both deliver solutions now, and be redeployed or modified flexibly as events change? That is a challenge for the next Imagine Jersey!
Links:
Age and Health Care
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/longevity/story.html?id=1ec491a3-87ee-49b8-af15-7d197ed6abb9
One is that the demographic time bomb is permanent. Unless birthrates are falling to the point of extinction, at some point the population is going to rise again. The problem seems more of a cyclical one - how can we cover the years in which there is an older population needing more support from a younger one. When the baby-boomers generation is gone, the problems may well go away too; the question is - how long is the tunnel, and if cyclical, what kind of period do we need to face.
It is true that life expectancy has been rising (along with the more informative median age for death), but it has been rising over the last hundred years, and it is now approaching a plateau where - while more people may live longer - they will only live longer to a certain age.
If the population is in permanent decline, then we are facing a different order of problem, and it is primarily biological rather than purely economic. It is called extinction, and managing that is a qualitatively different problem! That may yet be the case - recent studies have increasingly shown a steadily declining sperm count in industrialised countries, almost certainly due to environmental factors. If this cannot be reversed, or the factors identified, then no attempts at bolstering populations by immigration is going to help in the long term, as immigrants will in turn be effected by the environmental hazards. Locally, problems raised about the biological side-effects of the new incinerator may well be significant here, on the environment, both land and sea life (if waste products from the chimney fall into the sea, and penetrate that food chain).
I am not so convinced that this is happening. At the moment, there is a declining birth rate, because birth rate is defined by way of the ratio of births per year over the total population, times a thousand. Naturally, even if the number of births is static, if the median age of death goes up, then the birth rate will decline, because it is a statistical artifact.
What we have at the moment is the result of an increase in the median death rate, and the outcome of the post-war baby boom. This means that for a time there will be an increase in the numbers of people above a certain age dependant for public services upon the working population - the "dependency ratio" - the number of people that each working person has to support.
But this is also not the whole picture. The increase in people living longer, according to a Canadian report, has little to do with the increase in medical costs
While aging is one factor driving up the health care tab, it plays a relatively small role... According to the report, the biggest factors pushing up costs are new drugs and diagnostic tools. The report found that population aging will continue to add less than one percentage point each year to public health care spending, even with a spike in boomers approaching old age.
What is a certain fact is that increasing immigration to sort out problems is a non-starter. For a start, the age of the immigrants would be a necessary factor, and no politician has really considered any laws to ensure that most of the immigrants, are, for instance, under 30. Secondly, the immigrants themselves will get old, so the effect of increased immigration will be another bulge coming through the system, only solvable by further increases, until a leveling off is reached which would be way above the present population. It is like the half-life of drugs. If you take a particular medicine - for example, a thyroid drug - the half life is the period of time it will take until only half of the drug is left in your system. Of course, by then you will have taken at least one more dose, so you now have half the original concentration, plus the extra taken, and its half life in turn, so that the maximum in your system will be far greater than the single dose. Increased immigration to deal with demographic problems works very much like that.
What we really need is to look at cyclical effects, and how we can cope with them. After all, we find, on a smaller scale, from one year to another, that the the same kind of cyclical effect occurs with schools, when a bulge ripples through the system over a number of years, but then is gone. Our organisations are not really well constructed to adjust flexibly to these effects, as we think in terms of static and fixed systems, often huge ones, rather than modular and flexible ones, to solve problems. What can both deliver solutions now, and be redeployed or modified flexibly as events change? That is a challenge for the next Imagine Jersey!
Links:
Age and Health Care
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/longevity/story.html?id=1ec491a3-87ee-49b8-af15-7d197ed6abb9
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