Fabric

We are on the cusp of a seismic reshuffling of the world’s population that will move forward to affect the world’s economies, societies and governments over the next few years, and then move with increasing momentum over the rest of this century. We have a less-than-replacement fertility rate in the developed world. with Korea having the lowest fertility rate of the bunch. It will soon see its population decline. China’s is already declining, with projections for it to be half of what it is today by the end of the century. At the same time, the demographic tide is rising in most of the developing world. India is projected to have double the population in its cities by 2050. If you have been to Mumbai recently, think of what it will look like with another Mumbai layered on the one now. The economic problems are immediately evident. Labor shortages on the one hand, more mouths to feed and rampant unemployment on the other. Less evident are how this spills over to social issues, like the fraying of the implied social contract between those of working age and and the aged as that ratio increases. These stresses have issues for governments. The minority will be toiling away while the larger bulge in the retired cohort will have the largest voting block. And military power will drop — unless people are replaced in warfare, which is a topic for another time. There is one effect we are already seeing that spans all of this: migration. This has come to mind because of the recent riots in Great Britain. Of course we can look closer to home for this, pegged to a news story on the U.S. - Mexican border any week you choose. There are two themes that come from this for the nature of countries and societies. One is shorter term there is the ant-immigation movement centered on "stealing jobs". This is short-term, and possibly more apparent than real, because some jobs are going wanting and because when the wok force finally is in decline, there will be more and more jobs that simply can't be filled. The other is longer-term and social/cultural: The clash of cultures. If poorly managed this will create social tenstions that will pull on the fabric of the society. If you have been looking at my LinkedIn over the past while, I am interested in the the decline of civilization from a systems perspective. See this post: https://lnkd.in/eQAuFbYc To get a sense of where the impact of demographics can land us, check out what happened to the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean Greece, and the Akkadian Empire. Illustration is the population pyramid for China in 2053, from the United Nations via populationpyramid.net