The coming era of the elderly

I’ve just returned from a holiday in Japan, and I’ve seen China’s future.

Elderly people. Lots of elderly people.

It wasn’t so noticeable in the big cities, like Kyoto and Tokyo. Or even in mid-size Nagano. But get into small towns and it smacks you in the face. Nearly every shop is staffed by an elderly person.

We went one day to Karuizawa, a mountain resort town in the Japanese Alps about a half-hour train ride from Nagano. The local shopping center was full of elderly people, many clutching small lapdogs.

On another day trip to Kusatsu, a famous hot spring town, the whole train wagon was filled with elderly people.

This is just anecdotal evidence but the figures bear out that Japan has the highest proportion of elderly people in the world. About 22 percent of the population is 65 years old or older.

Now, China is far behind that. But it will catch up. Current figures say 10.9 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people are over age 60. But that proportion will more than triple over the next 50 years to 35.8 percent.

So if Japan looks old now, wait until you see China at mid-century.

Not only will there be a lot of old people, there’ll be huge numbers of very aged, that is, people over age 80. That proportion of China’s population over age 80 will increase from the current 1.8 percent to 6.8 percent.

Think about it. If the total  population stays static (which it won’t but I don’t have the actual projections before me), that would mean there would be some 88 million Chinese over age 80, well over the population of France.

I’ve taken some of these figures from the journal Health Affairs in an article in July/August titled The Health of Aging Populations in China and India. It talks about the burden that aging populations will put on China and India, but that will be a topic for another day.

Comments

[PaZhuLian]

Hey, look at the bright side!

That means there will be hope for lasting peace between China and Japan. Their peoples might still hate each other, but they will be "too old, too tired and too friggin' blind" to fight...

[Keith]

Just the contrary, I think the Chinese will die earlier and at a faster rate as a result of slow long term poisoning from their own food supply and environmental pollution.

[harold]

Maybe a seeing a lot of elderly people is a good sign, not a bad one. (If you go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki you will not see many elderly, even now). Large numbers of young people without employment are associated with high crime and other social ills. Some people even think that overpopulation, especially of young people, is what drove the Japanese on their program of world conquest in the 1930s with such tragic results.

At least the Japanese elderly you see are healthy and can still work and they can be enlisted to help care for the very frail.

Having lot (is 20 percent really a lot?) may well be a small price to pay, if it means halving the global population with absolutely no violence.

If we could all go back to the population levels of 1950 the earth will be much better off.