The looming clash of the generations

[Dover]

A demographic 'perfect storm'

LONDON A new intergenerational war is looming in the West. For once, youth could be on the losing side. Western countries need new social policies that address the consequences of demographic and technological change - but the baby boom generation that brought about the social revolution of the 60's and 70's could suffer under such policies, and has the numbers to prevent them from being adopted.

Four issues are coming together to create a "perfect storm": birth rates below replacement level, longer life spans, holes in private pension funds and massive government fiscal deficits. The aging generation has been promised much more than can delivered without dramatically damaging the prospects of future generations. This will be a political battle, a new form of class warfare over scarce resources. Victory for the old guard would hasten the decline of the West.

International demographers attending a meeting in Berlin of the International Statistical Institute warned last Friday that the world was failing to face up to the economic, geopolitical and environmental problems expected to surface because of a rapidly aging, growing population this century. "While the 20th century was the century of population growth, we can already say from a demographic perspective that the 21st century will go into the history books as the century of aging," said Wolfgang Lutz, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
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