Broad Framing Global Demographics
Part of the Broad Framing Initiative series
This is the sixth in a series of posts exploring my preference for broadly framing any issue/news story/trend/development in our world. I am on vacation this week.
Demographics, as a subject, is perfect for broad framing, because there are so many ways you can slice it — particularly when the entire world is your playground.
Let me pose some basic descriptions and then show how you can run with them in different directions.
The world is aging
This is true. The global median age (half above that number, half below) was 24 in 1950 and it’s 31 today. It will reach 36 by mid-century. This is profound change.
But that trend hides a profound divergence
The Global North today has a median age in the 40s while the Global South … still in the 20s.
So, naturally, we’re living through a time of transition in which the center of gravity (aka, “cheap labor”) in the global economy lies primarily in the Global South.
That imbalanced equation of Old North + Young South is naturally expressed in South-to-North migration pressures AND rising North anti-immigrant sentiment EVEN AS the North needs an influx of younger labor to both augment that rapidly aging population and mitigate looming demographic collapse (already occurring in countries like Japan, South Korea, and China).
And that profound divergence has triggered a certain historical sequencing of global trade and investment
America came out of WWII super-empowered industrially and demographically — relative to the rest of the (just-destroyed) developed world. It ruled the global economy for a solid quarter century, only to be superseded by industrially/demographically-empowered Japan, which was then superseded by a similarly empowered China, which now shifts much of its trade and investment to demographically-empowered SE Asia. Next up is India on the cusp of a huge demographic dividend, followed by the Middle East and Africa mid-century.
This sequence shifts the global economy’s manufacturing center of gravity over time, in the process transforming demographically younger societies into demographically older ones. It is a one-way street: once you start the demographic transition, you can’t go back.
Once a nation has “completed” its demographic transition, it faces an entirely different set of challenges
Since basically … forever, societies have featured age pyramids that were actually shaped like pyramids.
There was natural attrition over a notional lifespan (going from the “bottom” ages (childhood) to the “top” ones (old age). People got picked off by disease, accidents, war, saber-toothed tigers, and the like.
Here’s how we track that transition for South Korea in my current slide deck:
The classic shape with the persistent potential for a baby boom — if that youngest cohort can be preserved as it ages upward.
Now we see the “liftoff” of that baby boom being achieved and translated into a youth bulge.
That gets us to the desired diamond shape wherein society enjoys a disproportional amount of workers relatives to dependents “below” (kids) and “above” (elders). This is when your economy needs to take advantage of inbound foreign direct investment so as to join global value chains while it can, because …
… a generation or so later you will find your society reshaped into this demographic reality: lots of old people, supported by lesser numbers of workers, followed by ever smaller numbers of future workers. In China, this is called the 4-2-1 problem, as in, one child to support two parents and, beyond them, four grandparents. Not a stable situation and one sure to create inter-generational tensions (no matter how much your society has, in the past, respected its elders!).
Nobody is quite sure how a society survives on this basis. Lots of robots?
How does a nation avoid (or at least slow down) that rapid demographic aging?
Pretty simple: immigration.
Here’s how America basically does it:
We cheat by importing immigrants who skew toward the working ages of 15-to-64, in effect “fattening” our middle working-age ranks. It doesn’t give us a perfect diamond but we remain thicker in the middle than on both the “top” and “bottom.”
That’s how you avoid a demographic collapse — for now.
Immigration is thus a strategic imperative for an otherwise aging superpower
Here’s a telling graphic I just used in my last Sunday Cutdown:
Turns out that when you broad frame demographics, you find that the "rise of the rest” (as in, East Asia) is a time-limited dynamic — so long as you, superpower America, stick to your historical pattern of accepting large number of immigrants.
But does that mean we have to “destroy” America to “save” it?
Now we get into the real fear: America is becoming more like globalization (diverse, multipolar) than globalization is becoming like America (embodied in the spread of our rules and culture and “order”).
It used to be the other way around: globalization meant Westernization and — God forbid! — Americanization (aka, the Great Satan to religious fundamentalists the world over). But that no longer feels true in much of the world, where globalization now feels very Asian and non-European and non-Western in general.
This naturally gives rise to Western protectionism as we feel economically vulnerable and — in the case of the US — shift from an historic “market-making” role (worry about and defend the world system) to a more self-interested “market-playing” role (worry more about ourselves and to hell with that “globalist” system!).
But, when you strip away the fear-threat reaction we are currently indulging, all that really means is that the US and the West in general are no longer the primary integrators of note in the world system: we spent decades enabling the East’s rise and now the East is the primary integrator across the South.
It makes sense economically, and it makes sense demographically — even as it scares us in the West by portending a new era of more intense economic competition among the world’s advanced economies (now, larger in number … damn it!).
But for many Americans, the price of staying competitively engaged with the world is too high in terms of lost identity
Which gets us to this illustration from America’s New Map:
This is America — or more specifically White America — heading into something very different from our historical roots. This is the outcome — the natural outcome — of America’s long-term strategy of “cheating” in demographic terms: avoiding societal aging on par with Europe and Asia by having a high rate of immigration.
This is our demographic deal with the devil: in order to stay relatively young, we sacrifice a more coherent, majority identity for a more complex, diverse, and normalized identity.
What do I mean by normalized?
In a world of North-South integration forced by climate change’s uneven devastation of our planet (much worse at lower latitudes than at higher ones), our Western Hemisphere is inevitably slated for mass poleward migration (predominately South-to-North). That migratory pressure matches the demographic disparity already in the works across the planet.
But here’s the (ironic) deal: America’s long-running commitment to accepting high levels of immigration has set in motion a demographic racial makeover that actually makes us far more “normal” in relation to the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
Our admittedly unprecedented journey from 90% White around the time of my birth (1950) to something closer to 45% White by the time of my death (2050) actually only brings us in line with the rest of our hemisphere where Whites have long been about 45% of the total population.
In effect, then, globalization is “condemning” America to become a mirror of the Americas.
Press 2 for Spanish.
Not so scary when you think about it, and a good sign that we in the Western Hemisphere should be able to manage the North-South integration being forced upon us by the convergence of global economics (current trend toward near-shoring), global demographics (aged North, still-fertile South) and global climate change (harsher at lower latitudes, easier at higher ones).
All of this analysis is offered simply to point out the utility of broad framing demographics: what, at first glance, seems scary and out-of-the-blue is actually the result of all sorts of decisions and actions our nation has taken and/or encouraged around the planet over the decades. And, as for where we’re headed as a result? That’s simply a racial reality more in line with our neighborhood.
In short, (a) we set this future in motion and (b) the changes it forces upon us aren’t really all that odd.
So now’s not the time to go all wobbly over it.
As I say in the book, we Americanos are built for this future.
