Fear of a Gray Planet
Brian Doherty | January 16, 2008, 11:46am
Megan McArdle has a perspicacious piece in the new Atlantic on the likely economic and cultural effects of the aging of America's population. You ought to read it in full, but for a potted summary: likely slowdown in macro economic growth statistics as more Americans' needs shift from goods (where productivity growth is strong) to services (where it isn't).
She gently debunks the somewhat common fear of a huge stock market crash as the aging Boomers start selling off the stocks they've socked their savings in for decades. But she does think that double digit yearly stock market index growth is very unlikely down the line.
The implicit advice to the young? Go into geriatric medicine. Implicit advice to America? We'll need more immigrant service workers. (Paging Kerry Howley.) Implicit rebuke to aging Americans? You maybe shoulda thought about having more kids. (Paging Bryan Caplan.) And expect to see more graying heads in service occupations, as many Boomers didn't save enough to sustain them through their increasing golden years, and they'll have to keep working past standard "retirement" age, and Social Security won't sustain them. Nor will it bankrupt the Republic, in her reading--though Medicare just might.
Read the whole thing. It ends with a pleasing "life will go on, and still be sweet" tone, despite the possibly scary-sounding economic and cultural shifts she discusses.
hale | January 16, 2008, 1:27pm | #
You're not going to like this much, but I suspect religious participation and values plays a bit a role here. The groups in this country that are growing tend to be the ones that are most religiously active.
This is admittedly a pretty cracky, Anton Wilson-esque speculation, but I wonder sometimes if this feat isn't something secular culture could learn to emulate in time.
Part of the root of humanist fear of religion in the modern, Western world is, I suspect, based on a misunderstanding of religious attitudes toward sexuality. There are doubtless religious theorists who actually
are anti-sex, but for the most part, religious sexual morality is simply rooted in a societal structure that is alien to the urban secular humanist - the social structure of the agrarian town, which was for most of history the basic substructure of civilization itself.
Agrarian mores aren't actually anti-sex (as any medieval scholar could explain at length), they just connect sex with reproduction in a way that's
weird to someone raised in contemporary society - particularly in Anglophone countries, where the world of children and family are widely understood to be irreconcilable at a fundamental moral level with the existence of adult sexuality.
A lot of adults today profess not to want kids because they're an economic burden (which they are), or because they "don't like kids"; I suspect that in many cases, the root of the very emotional objection to the raising of offspring is the notion that childbirth represents the boundary between youth and individuality and bland, sexless seniority.
Whereas I don't think there is necessarily a fundamental conflict between family and what urban, secular adults want out of life, only between broad modes of living based on value-sets taken for granted in American society. I would be happy to explain how I believe this shortchanges children as well, but that issue falls outside the scope of this particular speculation, so: another time.
