Our Aging Population, and its Consequences

THERE IS A PHENOMENON, which might be called "the aging of the general population" which is going, very soon, to have a profound impact not only on the United States, but on the rest of the world as well. In western Europe and America, the birth rate is way down, as people are getting married later in life and having smaller families, and people are living longer. This may be largely an economic phenomenon, as the standard of living is declining along with the birth rate, while better medicine and health tactics are giving us longer life. That is to say, we may all have more gadgets and trinkets these days, but food, clothing, and shelter are downright harder to come by, and a man can no longer count on supporting a family of four on minimum wage, as he could, unbelievably, in the nineteen fifties, when I was born. My mother often said she doesn't know how young parents do it now. Neither does anyone else. They struggle mightily, is how they do it, working one job after another, longer hours, on lower wages relative to the cost of living. Because of all this, over the next few decades there is going to be an increase in the percentage of the population over the current retirement age of sixty five, in the U.S., Europe, and especially China, where the one kid per family policy has recently been deep sixed, owing to their sudden awareness that it was doing little other than replacing aging retiring workers with fewer and fewer young workers. With all of us retired and sitting on our pension grubbing butts, who is going to do all the work required not only for a growing and prosperous economy, but merely to support our infrastructure, to keep things working? Nobody, that's who. So, either we're going to have to rely ever more heavily on machinery, a catch twenty two, since all machinery must be built, maintained, and eventually replaced, which requires laborers, start making people work longer into their lives, whether they want to or not, by raising the retirement age, eliminate the concept of retirement entirely, or, we're gonna have to get humping, as it were, and drum up a lot more babies to lead the way into a more prosperous future. Yet another solution presents itself, one so horrible that one can scarcely bring one's self to contemplate it: stop growing economically, and return to a simpler, less materialistic lifestyle, nightmarish though that may sound to our materialistic American ears. Whatever our choices, which may include some clever combination of all the above, its going to be a tough roe to hoe, because this problem, like most others, is not going to go away by simply ignoring it, as is our usual custom.