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How Will an Aging Population Vote?
As America’s voters get older, will our politics change?
In Japan, a leading diaper manufacturer recently said that it would stop making diapers for babies and focus on making adult diapers instead. This isn’t very surprising if you know about the demographic trends in Japan. It’s a country where people live a long time, and the birth rate is quite low. More than a quarter of the population is above age 65, and the median age is 48 and rising.
The demographic shifts in Japan aren’t just affecting the diaper industry. The country has made all sorts of adjustments to account for the fact that people are getting older. There are big changes: for example, Japan is trying to figure out how to provide retirement and healthcare benefits to older people as its base of working-age taxpayers shrinks. And there are little ones: the country has installed places to rest your cane on trains and next to urinals, and companies are busily developing robots to keep lonely elders company.
Japan is an unusually old society, but it probably won’t be unusual for long. The world is getting older, and most wealthy societies will probably end up where Japan is in a few decades. The median age of people around the globe was 20 in the early 1970s; now it’s 30. In most industrialized societies, it is somewhere in the 40s.
