DEATH SPIRAL:

Old dogs, new tricks?: Debating population policy is no longer taboo (The Economist, 5/13/04)

IF GERMANY'S body politic is good at one thing, it is getting into a tizzy. Last week, the excitement was over the damage the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens might suffer from a new immigration law. This week, the question is whether Hans Eichel, the finance minister, will have to go if the government borrows more money to cover huge tax shortfalls. Yet if you think Germany, in a year with more than a dozen elections, is all about short-term politics, think again. At last, Germany's chattering classes are facing up to the country's biggest long-term challenge: an ageing population. “In Germany, 2004 is the year of demography,” says James Vaupel, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock.

After half a century of obscurity, population issues are resurfacing in headlines, bestseller lists and talk shows. When in April the Berlin Institute for World Population and Global Development, a think-tank, issued a study saying which regions will suffer from a shrinking population, it was amazed by the media interest. And Germany's bestselling book is “Das Methusalem-Komplott” (The Methuselah conspiracy), an anti-ageism tirade by Frank Schirrmacher, a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Both publications paint a bleak picture. Some regions are in a death spiral of sorts, says Reiner Klingholz, one of the authors of the study—and others may share that fate in years to come: their population is imploding, not just because of a lack of babies but because young, qualified people are moving away, making many regions even less attractive for job-creating investments. Mr Schirrmacher fears a clash of the generations and wants a cultural revolution to rethink what it means to be old.

It means you're easy pickins.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2004 2:56 PM