New World Same Humans #44
We're living far longer: it's the megatrend that changes everything in the 21st-century.
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Recent weeks have brought news of three effective vaccines. Now, the challenge is roll out. We need to get these vaccines first to those who need them most. That means frontline health workers, and the old.
So much about this virus, and in consequence about this year, has been about management of risk for old people. In that way the pandemic has been a reminder of a central fact about about the human collective in 2020: it is ageing.
The UN says that the global population aged 65 and over is growing faster than any other age group. In 2019, one in 11 worldwide was over 65; by 2050 it will be one in six.
It’s an unprecedented demographic change. And because it will shape our response to everything else, I’ve come to believe that it is the most consequential megatrend reshaping the decades ahead.
So this week, reflections on this megatrend. Specifically, three thought starters on what it means for our journey through life, our politics, and our relationships with one another.
📥 Fast Download: The Megatrend that Changes Everything
⏳ Longer lives will reorder the 21st-century. Across human history, the shape of human societies has been the same. High birth and death rates mean lots of young children, with steadily declining numbers as you move up through the age ranges. But today’s affluent countries overturn that truth. In 2019, Europe has more middle-aged people than children. By 2100, the single largest age group will be those aged over 85. This is one of the most consequential transformations in history. We are yet fully to process or respond to its implications.
🗺️ The lifestages will be remapped. Increased life expectancy is elongating healthy and productive middle age: into the 70s for many, and beyond for rising numbers. In the years ahead, then, we’ll remap the traditional lifestages. Millions aged 55 and over will launch into new second or third acts: startup, new career, creative pursuit. People will lean out of work during their peak childcare years, and come roaring back in their mid-40s. We’ll embrace new models of lifelong learning. Many will need support to craft these new life stories; new businesses will be born in the race to provide it.
🤝 We’ll search for a new settlement between the young and the rest. Stagnant wages and high asset prices have long beset the young. Economic pressure has been intensified by the pandemic, and resentment is growing. Meanwhile, there’s a generational fault line across attitudes to climate change: older people skew more sceptical. There’s nothing new about a world in which young people agitate for change and older people resist it. But the population dynamics here – lots of old people and few young – are new, and that will change the way these conflicts play out. The search for a new settlement will be a key part of the great political project of the age.
👪 We’ll reorient our economies around care for each other. Automation means that in the decades to come, millions will be unable to find a place in the traditional economy. Meanwhile, the swelling ranks of the very old will need care. We should take this chance to embrace new visions of work: as care, companionship, and simply being there for those who need us most.That will mean decoupling traditional economic productivity from economic recognition, via some form of Universal Basic Income. Can we build a world in which productivity is held to be a virtue only of machines, while simply being there for one another is the only true work of humans?
⏳ Longer lives will reorder the 21st-century
This is a classic population pyramid. It shows the distribution of age groups across a human population.
This has been the shape of almost every human society that’s ever existed. High birth and death rates mean lots of young children, with steadily declining numbers as you move up the graph. Above 65, the pyramid dwindles to almost nothing.
But 21st-century affluent societies have overturned this historical truth about populations. This is the equivalent graph for the population of Europe in 2019 and as forecast in 2100, from the EU’s data agency Eurostat.
Two changes are immediately clear. First, Europe’s 2019 population pyramid isn’t a pyramid at all; it is widest at the centre, between the ages of 40 and 55. Second, a momentous demographic shift is still underway, such that by 2100 the largest single population group, by a significant margin, will be those aged over 85.
This, in two graphs, is a representation of one of the most consequential transformations in history. That is, the dramatic elongation of human lives inside 21st-century affluent societies. It’s a shift that touches every part of the future we face, and how we’ll live in it.
Yes, other powerful megatrends are at work when it comes to our shared future: think automation, urbanisation, and climate change. But this demographic shift is fueling a set of fundamental conditions that will shape the response to those megatrends and a million other, smaller changes. They are conditions that relate to the collective, such as population size, the number of working-age people, and the number who cannot work and so must be maintained. But also conditions that relate to the journey that each person will take through life, including the age at which people expect to stop work, and the age at which they expect to die. No wonder the UN calls ageing populations ‘one of the most significant social transformations of the 21st-century.’
The implications are momentous. What’s more, we are yet fully to process or respond to them. When historians come to look back at the 2020s, they may judge that one of the most peculiar aspects of our time was the way our societies – and the ways each of us navigated through our lives – were still ordered by an earlier, now-defunct demographic reality.
We need to find new ways to order our lives, and new realities. Here are three thought-starters.
🗺️ The lifestages will be remapped
Inside affluent societies, a host of forces are eroding the traditions that kept people bound to certain modes of life. Ever-greater consumer choice and the cultural free-for-all that is the internet have both made people more able to construct lifestyles of their own choosing.
But much longer lives are the most powerful – and most often overlooked – force that undermines old thinking on the shape and nature of our journey through life. In the decades ahead millions will remap the traditional lifestages, and shatter old thinking when it comes to the paths through life that are available to us. This change presents a vast opportunity to brands and businesses.
When we think about increased life expectancy, we tend to think about rising numbers of the very old: those aged 85 and over. But it’s often more valuable to consider how increased life expectancy is elongating healthy and productive middle age: into the 70s for many, and even beyond for rising numbers.
That’s a profound shift in the shape of a human life. The old lifestage model – education until 18 or 21, work until 65, retirement – is founded in a mid 20th-century world where few were expected to live much beyond retirement age. Back then, a 55-year-old was often held to be halfway down the long slide towards obsolescence. Today, such a person can reasonably look forward to 20 more years of productivity, if that’s what they want.
In the years ahead, then, we’ll see millions aged 55 and over launching into second and third acts that would once have been thought out of reach. Founding a startup. Retraining as a lawyer. Striking out as a writer or visual artist.
But the implications cascade down through the stages of life, too. Another outdated aspect of our current model? It often asks people to work most intensely in their 30s and 40s, when many are engaged in care for children. But in a world of elongated middle age we become more free to lean out during these years, and come roaring back into our careers in our mid-40s.
Meanwhile, as we proceed through working lives that last six decades in a fast-changing world, the idea that we should end formal education aged 21 becomes absurd. Instead, we need to embrace new models of lifelong learning; it won’t be strange to be a 35-year-old student.
Career exploration in the 20s, a sabbatical for children in the 30s, ascent of the ladder from 40 to 55, and a fresh adventure (startup! creative career!) from 60 onwards. Here are the beginnings of a revised lifestage model for the 21st-century.
But people will need support if they are to craft these new life stories. In the years ahead, smart businesses will step in to provide it.
🤝 We’ll search for a new settlement between the young and the rest
Far higher relative numbers of old people means a shifted centre of gravity in our societies. There are huge economic and cultural implications. And that means huge political implications, too.
In the decades ahead new fault lines will emerge between the generations, as young people find themselves at odds with their elders over questions of economic fairness, social mobility, and action on climate. As these conflicts play out inside populations with historically unprecedented age structures, the quest to resolve them will reshape our politics.
In the Global North, stagnant wages, rising asset prices, and an increasingly automated economy have long been eroding the life chances of young people. That toxic mix has been supercharged by the pandemic. As discussed in New Week Same Humans #13, the OECD says those aged 25 and under are 2.5 times more likely to be without a job because of the pandemic as those between 26 and 64.
Extended lifespans mean old lifecycles of jobs, assets and homes are breaking down. Young people find themselves frozen out and resentment is growing.
Meanwhile, there’s evidence for a deep fault line when it comes to the defining issue of the age: climate change. The Ipsos Global Trends 2020 report showed 53% of 60 to 74-year-olds agree that ‘even the scientists don’t really know what they’re talking about on environmental issues’, against 39% of 16 to 24-year-olds.
There’s nothing new about a world in which young people agitate for economic and cultural change, and older people resist it. But when birth rates fall and life expectancy is elevated into the 80s, as is happening now, the dynamics of that conflict are drastically altered. Back in the 1960s, the boomer generation won their culture war in part simply because they outnumbered their elders. In the decades ahead, many of the 60-year-olds who resist action on climate will be voting for another 30 years. We’ll need to readjust to a world in which its often old people, and not the young, who drive the culture.
In the decades to come, these revised population dynamics will have a profound effect on the way we address key challenges, including wealth redistribution and climate. The search for a new settlement between the dwindling numbers of young and all the rest will be part of the great political project of the age.
👪 We’ll reorient our economies around care for each other
A deep shift is coming via the intersection of ageing societies with another 21st-century megatrend.
We’re building automated economies that can serve human needs while requiring ever-less human input. Meanwhile, the swelling ranks of the very old, those 85 and over, will need care and companionship.
In the decades ahead our growing need to provide care to the elderly will combine with the realities imposed by automation and push us to rethink the meaning of work. We should take this chance to embrace new visions of work: as care, companionship, and simply being there for those who need us most.
Automation means that millions will be unable to find a place within the traditional economy. There will be growing pressure to decouple work from economic recognition via some kind of Universal Basic Income.
That is, and will remain, a contentious idea. But some among those who resist it will be won over by a practical imperative: the swelling numbers of elderly who need care. Inside an automated economy in which millions can’t find traditional work, doesn’t it make sense to pay a living wage to those who care for elderly parents or grandparents, rather than allow the burden of care to fall to the state?
Via this imperative, the decoupling of traditional work from economic recognition will move closer to the mainstream. Such a shift would liberate millions into more meaningful forms of life, in which they are able both to maintain themselves and share their most authentic selves with those around them.
A post-pandemic world in which work is less clustered around a few megacities also helps make this shift more possible. It will allow greater numbers of people to keep one foot in the traditional economy while also staying close to family.
Two powerful megatrends – automation and ageing societies – will combine to produce these new orientations to work, and to the broader economy. It’s possible to imagine a world in which productivity is held to be a virtue only of machines, while simply being there for one another is seen to be the only true work of humans.
We’re a long way from that right now. But in time it may be our dispensation – which see millions of us move far from our families for work, and leave elderly parents in the care of others – that comes to seem strange.
Just a number
Thanks for reading this week.
The new realities emerging as a result of ageing societies are many and complex. Treat these three thought-starters as just that; jumping off points for further analysis. What do they mean for your business? For your career? Your personal journey through the years to come?
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I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,
David.