WHAT EVER BECAME OF EUROPE?

Aging Europe Finds Its Pension Is Running Out (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, June 29, 2003, NY Times)

[W]hile pension reform is the urgent political issue of the moment in Germany, Austria, France and other countries, many experts see it as a harbinger of things to come, a sign of a demographic shift with important implications not only for the welfare of retirees but also for European societies as a whole. The crucial factor is age.

One study by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, predicts that the median age in the United States in 2050 will be 35.4, only a very slight increase from what it is now. In Europe, by contrast, it is expected to rise to 52.3 from 37.7.

The likely meaning of this "stunning difference," as the British weekly The Economist called the growing demographic disparity between Europe and the United States, is that American power--economic and military--will continue to grow relative to Europe's, which will also decline in comparison with other parts of the world like China, India and Latin America.

With its population not only aging but shrinking as well, Europe seems to face two broad possibilities: either it will have to make up the population shortfall by substantial increases in immigration, which would almost surely create new political tensions in countries where anti-immigrant parties have gained strength in recent years, or it will have to accept being older and smaller and therefore, as some have been warning, less influential in world affairs.

"The European countries are aging in a world that is becoming younger," Mr. Frey said in a telephone interview. "And in a global economy, they're not going to share in the energy and vitality that comes with a younger population." [...]

"In reality, a legal retirement age of 80 is what we should aim at," Erich Streissler, an Austrian economist, wrote in a newspaper article.

It's hard to know whether media like the Times are finally waking up to the most important story of the late 20th Century/early 21st--the death of Europe--or whether this is just a case of their best writer, Richard Bernstein, doing a story he's noticed because he's pretty conservative. Folks have a tendency, perhaps because the implications are so dire, to pooh-pooh these stories and say the decline so far isn't too bad and can be easily reversed. But one of the studies cited in the story and linked below does a nice job of explaining what happens when "negative momentum" takes hold, as it has already in Europe, with ever smaller generations duplicating the infertility of the previous generation.

Can't you just imagine what the streets of Paris will look like when a government tells the French they have to work until they're 80 to get their pensions? Like a nursing home production of Les Miserables...


MORE:
-Europe's Population at a Turning Point (Wolfgang Lutz, Brian C. O'Neill, Sergei Scherbov, Science)

Europe has just entered a critical phase of its demographic evolution. Around the year 2000, the population began to generate "negative momentum": a tendency to decline owing to shrinking cohorts of young people that was brought on by low fertility (birthrate) over the past three decades. Currently, the effect of negative momentum on future population is small. However, each additional decade that fertility remains at its present low level will imply a further decline in the European Union (EU) of 25 to 40 million people, in the absence of offsetting effects from immigration or rising life expectancy. Governments in Europe are beginning to consider a range of policy options to address the negative implications of population decline and rapid aging. Social policies and labor laws aimed at halting the further increase in the mean age of childbearing--which contributes to low fertility--have substantial scope for affecting future demographic trends. They also have an additional health rationale because of the increasing health risks associated with childbearing in older women.

-ALL 10 MILLION EUROPEANS: The last two generations grew up with the idea of the "population explosion". For a century the world has lived with constant upward revision of population forecasts: the only question was if the growth would be fast, or very fast. And the last generation faced the question: how many billions can this planet support? So it is a culture shock, when new projections of global population include scenarios of dramatic population decline - without any meteorite impacts, new epidemics, or famines. Or when a UN report suggests that Europe needs 700 million immigrants to maintain its age structure... Is the future population nightmare not rural Bangladesh, but rural Estonia? (Paul Treanor, March 2003) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2003 5:46 AM