Ageing: The Future Lies Ahead

The Economist this week has a special section on ageing, heavy with factoids you kinda sorta maybe knew, but well assembled and presented. It opens, however, on a note of questionable confidence:

This is a slow-moving but relentless development that in time will have vast economic, social and political consequences. ...And there is no escape: barring huge natural or man-made disasters, demographic changes are much more certain than other long-term predictions (for example, of climate change). Every one of the 2 billion people who will be over 60 in 2050 has already been born.

I guess I'd have to concede the narrow point, about the 2 billion having already been born. But the general tone of confidence strikes me as unwarranted. The fact is that in this as in any other human endeavor, we know next to nothing about what the future may hold. As the survey implicitly concedes, we have no idea how exactly societies will deal with the politics of pension funds or, correspondingly of the nature of the work force. Among topics barely mentioned in the survey, we can only guess what we will see in the future by way of population movements or birth rates.

I grant that the comparison is not exact, but does anyone remember the hand-wringing in the 50s about the "inevitable" Asian population bomb, coupled with the suffering and privation that would necessarily ensue. Sure, in retrospect it is easy enough to see where our guesses went wrong--easy enough, even, to think of plausible reasons why they went wrong. The point is that the obvious is often obvious only in retrospect. In my saner moods I remind myself that I haven't any idea what the future may look like--and tht that is about the only thing about which I can be sure.