[extropy-chat] [>Htech] [FoRK] "The global baby bust" (fwd from deafbox at hotmail.com) (fwd from eugen at leitl.org)

Sat Jan 15 23:29:47 UTC 2005

----- Forwarded message from Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> -----

From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 00:19:20 +0100
To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [>Htech] [FoRK] "The global baby bust" (fwd from deafbox at hotmail.com)
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i
Reply-To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com

----- Forwarded message from Russell Turpin <deafbox at hotmail.com> -----

From: "Russell Turpin" <deafbox at hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 17:14:47 +0000
To: fork at xent.com
Subject: [FoRK] "The global baby bust"

Interesting article on current demographic trends:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83307-p0/phillip-longman/the-global-baby-bust.html

_______________________________________________
FoRK mailing list
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

----- End forwarded message -----

The Global Baby Bust
By Phillip Longman

>From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004
Summary: Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing
the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their
populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem
of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling
birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too
steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if
enacted before it's too late.

Phillip Longman is Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of
the forthcoming The Empty Cradle (Basic Books, 2004), from which this article
is adapted.

THE WRONG READING

You awaken to news of a morning traffic jam. Leaving home early for a
doctor's appointment, you nonetheless arrive too late to find parking. After
waiting two hours for a 15-minute consultation, you wait again to have your
prescription filled. All the while, you worry about the work you've missed
because so many other people would line up to take your job. Returning home
to the evening news, you watch throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in
the Middle East, and a feature on disappearing farmland in the Midwest. A
telemarketer calls for the third time, telling you, "We need your help to
save the rain forest." As you set the alarm clock for the morning, one
neighbor's car alarm goes off and another's air conditioner starts to whine.

So goes a day in the life of an average American. It is thus hardly
surprising that many Americans think overpopulation is one of the world's
most pressing problems. To be sure, the typical Westerner enjoys an
unprecedented amount of private space. Compared to their parents, most now
live in larger homes occupied by fewer children. They drive ever-larger
automobiles, in which they can eat, smoke, or listen to the radio in splendid
isolation. Food is so abundant that obesity has become a leading cause of
death.

Still, both day-to-day experience and the media frequently suggest that the
quality of life enjoyed in the United States and Europe is under threat by
population growth. Sprawling suburban development is making traffic worse,
driving taxes up, and reducing opportunities to enjoy nature. Televised
images of developing-world famine, war, and environmental degradation prompt
some to wonder, "Why do these people have so many kids?" Immigrants and other
people's children wind up competing for jobs, access to health care, parking
spaces, favorite fishing holes, hiking paths, and spots at the beach. No
wonder that, when asked how long it will take for world population to double,
nearly half of all Americans say 20 years or less.

Yet a closer look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world
population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s.
And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the
absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet
could well start to decline within the lifetime of today's children.
Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start
to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and
the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover,
the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other
underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even
sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.

FREE FALLING

The root cause of these trends is falling birthrates. Today, the average
woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in
1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its
population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could
easily lose the equivalent of the current population of what was once East
Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already
contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population,
meanwhile, is expected to peak as early as 2005, and then to fall by as much
as one-third over the next 50 years -- a decline equivalent, the demographer
Hideo Ibe has noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the
plague.

Although many factors are at work, the changing economics of family life is
the prime factor in discouraging childbearing. In nations rich and poor,
under all forms of government, as more and more of the world's population
moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to
their parents, and as women acquire economic opportunities and reproductive
control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise.

In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born
this year through age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture, exceeds
$200,000 -- not including college. And the cost in forgone wages can easily
exceed $1 million, even for families with modest earning power. Meanwhile,
although Social Security and private pension plans depend critically on the
human capital created by parents, they offer the same benefits, and often
more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family.

Now the developing world, as it becomes more urban and industrialized, is
experiencing the same demographic transition, but at a faster pace. Today,
when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images
of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through
border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so
dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United
States. It took 50 years for the American median age to rise just five years,
from 30 to 35. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age,
according to UN projections, will increase by 20 years, leaving half the
population over 42. Meanwhile, the median American age in 2050 is expected to
be 39.7.

Those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the
Middle East create a similarly misleading impression. Fertility rates are
falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a
result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate. For
example, by mid-century, Algeria will see its median age increase from 21.7
to 40, according to UN projections. Postrevolutionary Iran has seen its
fertility rate plummet by nearly two-thirds and will accordingly have more
seniors than children by 2030.

Countries such as France and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before
they grew old. Today, most developing countries are growing old before they
get rich. China's low fertility means that its labor force will start
shrinking by 2020, and 30 percent of China's population could be over 60 by
mid-century. More worrisome, China's social security system, which covers
only a fraction of the population, already has debts exceeding 145 percent of
its GDP. Making demographics there even worse, the spreading use of
ultrasound and other techniques for determining the sex of fetuses is, as in
India and many other parts of the world, leading to much higher abortion
rates for females than for males. In China, the ratio of male to female
births is now 117 to 100 -- which implies that roughly one out of six males
in today's new generation will not succeed in reproducing.

All told, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world's
total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid
population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045,
according to the latest UN projections, the world's fertility rate as a whole
will have fallen below replacement levels.

REPAYING THE DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND

What impact will these trends have on the global economy and balance of
power? Consider first the positive possibilities. Slower world population
growth offers many benefits, some of which have already been realized. Many
economists believe, for example, that falling birthrates made possible the
great economic boom that occurred in Japan and then in many other Asian
nations beginning in the 1960s. As the relative number of children declined,
so did the burden of their dependency, thereby freeing up more resources for
investment and adult consumption. In East Asia, the working-age population
grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population between 1965 and
1990, freeing up a huge reserve of female labor and other social resources
that would otherwise have been committed to raising children. Similarly,
China's rapid industrialization today is being aided by a dramatic decline in
the relative number of dependent children.

Over the next decade, the Middle East could benefit from a similar
"demographic dividend." Birthrates fell in every single Middle Eastern
country during the 1990s, often dramatically. The resulting "middle aging" of
the region will lower the overall dependency ratio over the next 10 to 20
years, freeing up more resources for infrastructure and industrial
development. The appeal of radicalism could also diminish as young adults
make up less of the population and Middle Eastern societies become
increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with such practical
issues as health care and retirement savings. Just as population aging in the
West during the 1980s was accompanied by the disappearance of youthful
indigenous terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and the Weather
Underground, falling birthrates in the Middle East could well produce
societies far less prone to political violence.

Declining fertility rates at first bring a "demographic dividend." That
dividend has to be repaid, however, if the trend continues. Although at first
the fact that there are fewer children to feed, clothe, and educate leaves
more for adults to enjoy, soon enough, if fertility falls beneath replacement
levels, the number of productive workers drops as well, and the number of
dependent elderly increase. And these older citizens consume far more
resources than children do. Even after considering the cost of education, a
typical child in the United States consumes 28 percent less than the typical
working-age adult, whereas elders consume 27 percent more, mostly in
health-related expenses.

Largely because of this imbalance, population aging, once it begins creating
more seniors than workers, puts severe strains on government budgets. In
Germany, for example, public spending on pensions, even after accounting for
a reduction in future benefits written into current law, is expected to swell
from an already staggering 10.3 percent of GDP to 15.4 percent by 2040 --
even as the number of workers available to support each retiree shrinks from
2.6 to 1.4. Meanwhile, the cost of government health-care benefits for the
elderly is expected to rise from today's 3.8 percent of GDP to 8.4 percent by
2040.

Population aging also depresses the growth of government revenues. Population
growth is a major source of economic growth: more people create more demand
for the products capitalists sell, and more supply of the labor capitalists
buy. Economists may be able to construct models of how economies could grow
amid a shrinking population, but in the real world, it has never happened. A
nation's GDP is literally the sum of its labor force times average output per
worker. Thus a decline in the number of workers implies a decline in an
economy's growth potential. When the size of the work force falls, economic
growth can occur only if productivity increases enough to compensate. And
these increases would have to be substantial to offset the impact of aging.
Italy, for example, expects its working-age population to plunge 41 percent
by 2050 -- meaning that output per worker would have to increase by at least
that amount just to keep Italy's economic growth rate from falling below
zero. With a shrinking labor supply, Europe's future economic growth will
therefore depend entirely on getting more out of each remaining worker (many
of them unskilled, recently arrived immigrants), even as it has to tax them
at higher and higher rates to pay for old-age pensions and health care.

Theoretically, raising the retirement age could help to ease the burden of
unfunded old-age benefits. But declining fitness among the general population
is making this tactic less feasible. In the United States, for example, the
dramatic increases in obesity and sedentary lifestyles are already causing
disability rates to rise among the population 59 and younger. Researchers
estimate that this trend will cause a 10-20 percent increase in the demand
for nursing homes over what would otherwise occur from mere population aging,
and a 10-15 percent increase in Medicare expenditures on top of the program's
already exploding costs. Meanwhile, despite the much ballyhooed "longevity
revolution," life expectancy among the elderly in the United States is hardly
improving. Indeed, due to changing lifestyle factors, life expectancy among
American women aged 65 was actually lower in 2002 than it was in 1990,
according to the Social Security Administration.

The same declines in population fitness can now be seen in many other nations
and are likely to overwhelm any public health benefits achieved through
medical technology. According to the International Association for the Study
of Obesity, an "alarming rise in obesity presents a pan-European epidemic." A
full 35 percent of Italian children are now overweight. In the case of
European men, the percentage who are overweight or obese ranges from over 40
percent in France to 70 percent in Germany. And as Western lifestyles spread
throughout the developing world so do Western ways of dying. According to the
World Health Organization, half of all deaths in places such as Mexico,
China, and the Middle East are now caused by noncommunicable diseases related
to Western lifestyle, such as cancers and heart attacks induced by smoking
and obesity.

GLOBAL AGING AND GLOBAL POWER

Current population trends are likely to have another major impact: they will
make military actions increasingly difficult for most nations. One reason for
this change will be psychological. In countries where parents generally have
only one or two children, every soldier becomes a "Private Ryan" -- a soldier
whose loss would mean overwhelming devastation to his or her family. In the
later years of the Soviet Union, for example, collapsing birthrates in the
Russian core meant that by 1990, the number of Russians aged 15-24 had shrunk
by 5.2 million from 25 years before. Given their few sons, it is hardly
surprising that Russian mothers for the first time in the nation's history
organized an antiwar movement, and that Soviet society decided that its
casualties in Afghanistan were unacceptable.

Another reason for the shift will be financial. Today, Americans consider the
United States as the world's sole remaining superpower, which it is. As the
cost of pensions and health care consume more and more of the nation's
wealth, however, and as the labor force stops growing, it will become more
and more difficult for Washington to sustain current levels of military
spending or the number of men and women in uniform. Even within the U.S.
military budget, the competition between guns and canes is already intense.
The Pentagon today spends 84 cents on pensions for every dollar it spends on
basic pay. Indeed, except during wartime, pensions are already one of the
Pentagon's largest budget categories. In 2000, the cost of military pensions
amounted to 12 times what the military spent on ammunition, nearly 5 times
what the Navy spent on new ships, and more than 5 times what the Air Force
spent on new planes and missiles.

Of course, the U.S. military is also more technically sophisticated than ever
before, meaning that national power today is much less dependent on the
ability to raise large armies. But the technologies the United States
currently uses to project its power -- laser-guided bombs, stealth aircraft,
navigation assisted by the space-based Global Positioning System, nuclear
aircraft carriers -- are all products of the sort of expensive research and
development that the United States will have difficulty affording if the cost
of old-age entitlements continues to rise.

The same point applies to the U.S. ability to sustain, or increase, its
levels of foreign aid. Although the United States faces less population aging
than any other industrialized nation, the extremely high cost of its health
care system, combined with its underfunded pension system, means that it
still faces staggering liabilities. According to the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the imbalance between what the U.S. federal government will
collect in future taxes under current law and what it has promised to pay in
future benefits now exceeds 500 percent of GDP. To close that gap, the IMF
warns, "would require an immediate and permanent 60 percent hike in the
federal income tax yield, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare
benefits." Neither is likely. Accordingly, in another 20 years, the United
States will be no more able to afford the role of world policeman than Europe
or Japan can today. Nor will China be able to assume the job, since it will
soon start to suffer from the kind of hyper-aging that Japan is already
experiencing.

AGING AND THE PACE OF PROGRESS

Even if there are fewer workers available to support each retiree in the
future, won't technology be able to make up the difference? Perhaps. But
there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that population aging itself
works to depress the rate of technological and organizational innovation.
Cross-country comparisons imply, for example, that after the proportion of
elders increases in a society beyond a certain point, the level of
entrepreneurship and inventiveness begins to drop. In 2002, Babson College
and the London School of Business released their latest index of
entrepreneurial activity. It shows that there is a distinct correlation
between countries with a high ratio of workers to retirees and those with a
high degree of entrepreneurship. Conversely, in countries in which a large
share of the population is retired, the amount of new business formation is
low. So, for example, two of the most entrepreneurial countries today are
India and China, where there are currently roughly five people of working age
for every person of retirement age. Meanwhile, Japan and France are among the
least entrepreneurial countries on earth and have among the lowest ratios of
workers to retirees.

This correlation could be explained by many different factors. Both common
sense and a vast literature in finance and psychology support the claim that
as one approaches retirement age, one usually becomes more reluctant to take
career or financial risks. It is not surprising, therefore, that aging
countries such as Italy, France, and Japan are marked by exceptionally low
rates of job turnover and by exceptionally conservative use of capital.
Because prudence requires that older investors take fewer risks with their
investments, it also stands to reason that as populations age, investor
preference shifts toward safe bonds and bank deposits and away from
speculative stocks and venture funds. As populations age further, ever-higher
shares of citizens begin cashing out their investments and spending down
their savings.

Also to be considered are the huge public deficits projected to be run by
major industrialized countries over the next several decades. Because of the
mounting costs of pensions and health care, government spending on research
and development, as well as on education, will likely drop. Moreover, massive
government borrowing could easily crowd out financial capital that would
otherwise be available to the private sector for investment in new
technology. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has recently
calculated that the cost of public benefits to the elderly will consume a
dramatically rising share of GDP in industrialized countries. In the United
States, such benefits currently consume 9.4 percent of GDP. But if current
trends continue, this figure will top 20 percent by 2040. And in countries
such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, somewhere between a quarter
and a third of all national output will be consumed by old-age pensions and
health care programs before today's 30-year-olds reach retirement age.

Theoretically, a highly efficient, global financial market could lend
financial resources from rich, old countries that are short on labor to
young, poor countries that are short on capital, and make the whole world
better off. But for this to happen, old countries would have to contain their
deficits and invest their savings in places that are themselves either on the
threshold of hyper-aging (China, India, Mexico) or highly destabilized by
religious fanaticism, disease, and war (most of the Middle East, sub-Saharan
Africa, Indonesia), or both. And who exactly would buy the products produced
by these investments? Japan, South Korea, and other recently industrialized
countries relied on massive exports to the United States and Europe to
develop. But if the population of Europe and Japan drops, while the
population of the United States ages considerably, where will the demand come
from to support development in places such as the Middle East and sub-Saharan
Africa?

Population aging is also likely to create huge legacy costs for employers.
This is particularly true in the United States, where health and pension
benefits are largely provided by the private sector. General Motors (GM) now
has 2.5 retirees on its pension rolls for every active worker and an unfunded
pension debt of $19.2 billion. Honoring its legacy costs to retirees now adds
$1,800 to the cost of every vehicle GM makes, according to a 2003 estimate by
Morgan Stanley. Just between 2001 and 2002, the U.S. government's projected
short-term liability for bailing out failing private pension plans increased
from $11 billion to $35 billion, with huge defaults expected from the steel
and airline industries.

An aging work force may also be less able or inclined to take advantage of
new technology. This trend seems to be part of the cause for Japan's
declining rates of productivity growth in the 1990s. Before that decade, the
aging of Japan's highly educated work force was a weak but positive force in
increasing the nation's productivity, according to studies. Older workers
learned by doing, developing specialized knowledge and craft skills and the
famous company spirit that made Japan an unrivaled manufacturing power. But
by the 1990s, the continued aging of Japan's work force became a cause of the
country's declining competitiveness.

Population aging works against innovation in another way as well. As
population growth dwindles, so does the need to increase the supply of just
about everything, save health care. That means there is less incentive to
find ways of making a gallon of gas go farther, or of increasing the capacity
of existing infrastructure. Population growth is the mother of necessity.
Without it, why bother to innovate? An aging society may have an urgent need
to gain more output from each remaining worker, but without growing markets,
individual firms have little incentive to learn how to do more with less --
and with a dwindling supply of human capital, they have fewer ideas to draw
on.

IMPORTING HUMAN CAPITAL

f high-tech isn't the answer, what about immigration? It turns out that
importing new, younger workers is at best only a partial solution. To be
sure, the United States and other developed nations derive many benefits from
their imported human capital. Immigration, however, does less than one might
think to ease the challenges of population aging. One reason is that most
immigrants arrive not as babies but with a third or so of their lives already
behind them -- and then go on to become elderly themselves. In the short
term, therefore, immigrants can help to increase the ratio of workers to
retirees, but in the long term, they add much less youth to the population
than would newborn children.

Indeed, according to a study by the UN Population Division, if the United
States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time,
it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through
2050. At that point, however, the U.S. population would total 1.1 billion, 73
percent of whom would be immigrants who had arrived in this country since
1995 or their descendants.

Just housing such a massive influx would require the equivalent of building
another New York City every 10 months. And even if the homes could be built,
it is unclear how long the United States and other developed nations can
sustain even current rates of immigration. One reason, of course, is
heightened security concerns. Another is the prospect of a cultural backlash
against immigrants, the chances of which increase as native birthrates
decline. In the 1920s, when widespread apprehension about declining native
fertility found voice in books such as Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy," the U.S. political system responded by
shutting off immigration. Germany, Sweden, and France did the same in the
1970s as the reality of population decline among their native born started to
set in.

Another constraint on immigration to the United States involves supply.
Birthrates, having already fallen well below replacement levels in Europe and
Asia, are now plummeting throughout Latin America as well, which suggests
that the United States' last major source of imported labor will dry up. This
could occur long before Latin nations actually stop growing -- as the example
of Puerto Rico shows. When most Americans think of Puerto Rico, they think of
a sunny, over-crowded island that sends millions of immigrants to the West
Side of New York City or to Florida. Yet with a fertility rate well below
replacement level and a median age of 31.8 years, Puerto Rico no longer
provides a net flow of immigrants to the mainland, despite an open border and
a lower standard of living. Evidently, Puerto Rico now produces enough jobs
to keep up with its slowing rate of population growth, and the allure of the
mainland has thus largely vanished.

For its part, sub-Saharan Africa still produces many potential immigrants to
the United States, as do the Middle East and parts of South Asia. But to
attract immigrants from these regions, the United States will have to compete
with Europe, which is closer geographically and currently has a more acute
need for imported labor. Europe also offers higher wages for unskilled work,
more generous social benefits, and large, already established populations of
immigrants from these areas.

Even if the United States could compete with Europe for immigrants, it is by
no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in
the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the
rest of the world, and war and disease have made mortality rates there
extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show
fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well
be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve.
Although the course of the AIDS epidemic through sub-Saharan Africa remains
uncertain, the CIA projects that AIDS and related diseases could kill as many
as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.

A FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM

Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment
in which the "fittest," or most successful, individuals are those who have
few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under
urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to
their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people
who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce
themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.

So where will the children of the future come from? The answer may be from
people who are at odds with the modern environment -- either those who don't
understand the new rules of the game, which make large families an economic
and social liability, or those who, out of religious or chauvinistic
conviction, reject the game altogether.

Today there is a strong correlation between religious conviction and high
fertility. In the United States, for example, fully 47 percent of people who
attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more
children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church.
In Utah, where 69 percent of all residents are registered members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fertility rates are the highest
in the nation. Utah annually produces 90 children for every 1,000 women of
childbearing age. By comparison, Vermont -- the only state to send a
socialist to Congress and the first to embrace gay civil unions -- produces
only 49.

Does this mean that the future belongs to those who believe they are (or who
are in fact) commanded by a higher power to procreate? Based on current
trends, the answer appears to be yes. Once, demographers believed that some
law of human nature would prevent fertility rates from remaining below
replacement level within any healthy population for more than brief periods.
After all, don't we all carry the genes of our Neolithic ancestors, who one
way or another managed to produce enough babies to sustain the race? Today,
however, it has become clear that no law of nature ensures that human beings,
living in free, developed societies, will create enough children to reproduce
themselves. Japanese fertility rates have been below replacement levels since
the mid-1950s, and the last time Europeans produced enough children to
reproduce themselves was the mid-1970s. Yet modern institutions have yet to
adapt to this new reality.

Current demographic trends work against modernity in another way as well. Not
only is the spread of urbanization and industrialization itself a major cause
of falling fertility, it is also a major cause of so-called diseases of
affluence, such as overeating, lack of exercise, and substance abuse, which
leave a higher and higher percentage of the population stricken by chronic
medical conditions. Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an
evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons or Muslims, or
members of emerging sects and national movements that emphasize high
birthrates and anti-materialism.

SECULAR SOLUTIONS

How can secular societies avoid population loss and decline? The problem is
not that most people in these societies have lost interest in children. Among
childless Americans aged 41 years and older in 2003, for example, 76 percent
say they wish they had had children, up from 70 percent in 1990. In 2000,
40-year-old women in the United States and in every European nation told
surveys that they had produced fewer children than they intended. Indeed, if
European women now in their 40s had been able to produce their ideal number
of children, the continent would face no prospect of population loss.

The problem, then, is not one of desire. The problem is that even as modern
societies demand more and more investment in human capital, this demand
threatens its own supply. The clear tendency of economic development is
toward a more knowledge-based, networked economy in which decision-making and
responsibility are increasingly necessary at lower levels. In such economies,
however, children often remain economically dependent on their parents well
into their own childbearing years because it takes that long to acquire the
panoply of technical skills, credentials, social understanding, and personal
maturity that more and more jobs now require. For the same reason, many
couples discover that by the time they feel they can afford children, they
can no longer produce them, or must settle for just one or two.

Meanwhile, even as aging societies become more and more dependent on the
human capital parents provide, parents themselves get to keep less and less
of the wealth they create by investing in their children. Employers make use
of the skills parents endow their children with but offer parents no
compensation. Governments also depend on parents to provide the next
generation of taxpayers, but, with rare exception, give parents no greater
benefits in old age than non-parents.

To change this pattern, secular societies need to rethink how they go about
educating young adults and integrating them into the work force, so that
tensions between work and family are reduced. Education should be a lifetime
pursuit, rather than crammed into one's prime reproductive years. There
should also be many more opportunities for part-time and flex-time
employment, and such work should offer full health and pension benefits, as
well as meaningful career paths.

Governments must also relieve parents from having to pay into social security
systems. By raising and educating their children, parents have already
contributed hugely (in the form of human capital) to these systems. The cost
of their contribution, in both direct expenses and forgone wages, is often
measured in the millions. Requiring parents also then to contribute to
payroll taxes is not only unfair, but imprudent for societies that are
already consuming more human capital than they produce.

To cope with the diseases of affluence that make older workers less
productive, rich societies must make greater efforts to promote public
health. For example, why not offer reduced health care premiums to those who
quit smoking, lose weight, or can demonstrate regular attendance in exercise
programs? Why not do more to discourage sprawling, automobile-dependent
patterns of development, which have adverse health effects including
pollution, high rates of auto injuries and death, sedentary lifestyles, and
social isolation? Modern, high-tech medicine, even for those who can afford
it, does little to promote productive aging because by the time most people
come to need it, their bodies have already been damaged by stress, indulgent
habits, environmental dangers, and injuries. For all they spend on health
care, Americans enjoy no greater life expectancy than the citizens of Costa
Rica, where per capita health expenditure is less than $300.

In his 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned, "The
battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo
famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Fortunately, Ehrlich's
prediction proved wrong. But having averted the danger of overpopulation, the
world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population. We
are, in one sense, lucky to have this problem and not its opposite. But that
doesn't make the problem any less serious, or the solutions any less
necessary.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20050116/1ef13bc1/attachment.bin>