WatchI'm old enough to remember the 1976 bicentennial. Happy times.
The 80 million baby boomers were aged 15 to 30 then.
The Quarter-millennial celebration in 2026 will see this baby boom aged 65 to 80.
I just thought these age numbers were interesting, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why.
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Demograph is a bigger trend than Finance.
It is why, all things considered compared to other big nation states, the USA has an overall brighter future than most of the others.
We could make it an even brighter future if we did not treat kids of the lower economic strata as a hassle to be walled out of the high API K-12 in The Fortresses, but instead as an investment in our future.
But that would involve an attitude of generosity, a bigger challenge in these parts than the demographic itself.
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Bellingham, WA
B.A.C.A.H. says
I disagree with this.
The earth, and every community on the ground, has hard wealth limits. While the physical wealth we need to live and enjoy ourselves -- food, air, water, the myriad of consumer products, the infrastructure we use, and the major private capital investments in transportation and housing that dominate our finances -- impose per-capita wealth limits.
Granted, small entrepots like Hong Kong, Singapore, Holland, Dubai, etc can thrive on the margin as skimmers of wealth as it is being distributed, and a manufacturing base can be developed to create wealth from imported inputs, but all of this is still a zero-sum thing driven and gated by other hard-wealth producers in the system.
This is just a long-winded way to say that I think a shrinking population is more dynamic than an expanding one.
A static or shrinking population means you no longer HAVE to expand infrastructural investment, you can actually just maintain what you have, or even abandon it altogether.
A shrinking population means you can invest more per capita on the next generation. Looking at the wealth of opportunity schoolkids get in Japan and the nordic/germanic European countries, I can just sit and be envious of their beautiful schools and wealth of extracurricular options like music and crafting.
What I got as a Gen Xer between the baby boom and Gen Y really sucked in comparison, and that was pre-Prop 13.
We don't have a shortage of bodies in this country, we have a shortage of minds.
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There is going to be a lot of money in healthcare, that's for sure. My folks are on the older side of that spectrum, glad we got long term care insurance for them. It's going to get really tough without it.
And I don't know what this government is going to do. These liberals can't keep on kicking the can down forever, something will have to give sooner or later.
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Bellingham Bill says
Bellingham Bill says
Hmm, we waste a lot here in the USA, we can do with a whole lot less per capita of the natural resources you are worried about, and still have a quality of life that is very high compared to the rest of the world.
And that includes, the minds of youth. Your shortage is also our potential. If you don't flush it down the toilet on waste and diverting resources to the 1%.