#16: Humanity's Getting Old
And I'm starting something new
Issue 16 | 25 November, 2023 | 4 minutes reading time
Heyo, Multituders,
It’s the end of November, and that means it’s time for me to pop into your inbox again.
For the last year, I’ve been helping a couple of professors at FLAME University, my alma mater, research ageing and public policy in India. The project was borne of a simple realisation – while India today celebrates having the largest young population in the world, it’s not going to stay this way for long.
Between 2011 and 2036, the proportion of those over 60 will about double from 8.4% of our population to about 15%. The absolute number of those over 60 will triple from 103 million in 2011 to 319 million in 2050. At this point, India will be home to 20% of the world’s 60+ population, more than any other country
Other countries have been facing this problem for far longer. Small towns and villages in Japan have been vanishing as their younger inhabitants move out and older inhabitants die out. Some Italian towns are going the same way; in the Sicilian village of Acquaviva Platani, the birth of a child is such a rare occurrence that bells toll to mark the occasion.
Solving, or even understanding this, is complex. What we’re seeing now is the result of an intricate interplay between falling birth rates, increased longevity due to medical advancements, debates about retirement ages, constantly debated immigration policies, troublesome gender relations and much more.
For East Asian countries like Japan and Korea or Western European countries like Italy and Germany, this is urgent. They’ve got social security and public infrastructure systems funded by (shrinking) tax bases that they desperately need to bolster (fewer working-age people = less income tax for the government).
The likes of India and China have a little more time, but also need to approach this differently. Unlike developed countries, India and China will likely grow old before they grow rich. They won’t have the resources for large-scale pension systems or public healthcare, so they’ll need to find ways of addressing older adults’ needs.
All of which is to say, we’re in for an interesting few decades ahead.
Studying this has already inspired one issue of Multitudes – about governments’ interesting attempts to boost birth rates – but over the next few months, I want to go beyond just quirky factoids. I’ve got a feeling that ageing will be a defining issue of the next century, much like climate change and technological advancement.
To help me wrap my head around this behemoth, I’m launching a newsletter called Our Greying Planet. This isn’t going to replace Multitudes but will run alongside it.
I’m still figuring out what form it’ll take. Maybe some issues will be 800-word musings while others will be deep dives and yet others just a bunch of links. I aim to start with a monthly cycle, with the first issue going out in mid-December. Like with Multitudes (and my two newsletters that preceded it), I’ll let it evolve naturally.
If you want to join in for the journey, you can sign up above. Or if you know of any policy-wonks that might be interested, send this issue along to them with the button below.
Anyway, that’s it for this month. I’ll see you at the end of the year (or in mid-December if you sign up for OGP).
I hope you have a happy end to 2023,
Shantanu
Best wishes :)