A broken clock is right twice a day. Such is the case with the New York Times.

Once known as the “Gray Lady” of US journalism, the NYT, along with the DC-based “Pravda on the Potomac” (sometimes called The Washington Post), are the oracles of erudition for the smart set that passes for American cognoscenti: the chattering class.

The NYT hit a home run last week with a devastatingly consequential piece on global demography.

It helps that this analysis of the demographic conundrum and where it is headed appears front and centre in the establishment press. Because when something makes the NYT, the chattering class – the regime’s echo chamber of academics, bureaucrats and techno-nerds – read about it. Maybe now they can understand that the path to extinction lies before us. It is no longer a doom-and-gloom right-wing conspiracy theory (after all, it was in the NYT). Remember the Hunter Biden laptop? A Russian disinformation op before the election, now the real thing. But I digress.  

Written by NYT regular Lauren Leatherby, “How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World” includes some salient points:

• By 2050, the populations of today’s top thirty-eight economies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, will be about 40 percent aged 65 and over. More than every third person will be elderly. Just look at Japan. Dynamism is fading. Things are slowing down.
• This is without historical precedent.
• As a result, everything will change, especially what we know today as retirement, pensions, markets, labour forces and more. Future Social Security recipients beware.

Consider the UN World Population Prospects facts and projections:

In 1990 the top ten countries with the largest share of their population being of working age were Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Russia, United States, France, China, Thailand and the UK. Apart from Thailand, all were Global North economies.

Today, those top ten countries are South Korea, Brazil, Colombia, China, Thailand, Iran, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Only China and South Korea are of the Global North. Both are rapidly ageing societies with decreasing populations. South Korea has the dubious distinction of the world’s lowest fertility rate (0.77), and as far as we can tell, China’s is almost as bad (1.1).

Tremendous shift

In just over a quarter-century (by 2050), the countries with the highest percentage of their population being of working age will be South Africa, Myanmar, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan, Kenya, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia. None of today’s Global North powerhouses are represented. Thinking of the Global South as the lesser developed world will change, because if workforce size is any indication, the bulk of the globe’s industrial capacity will be there. They just need the capital, infrastructure and brainpower to make it happen, and that usually materialises when large numbers of young people are available to work.

With the Global South on track to have an overwhelming majority of the planet’s labour force, a profound shift is underway, and that spells enormous opportunity for those regions we’ve long discounted as the third world.

Philip O’Keefe of the Aging Asia Research Hub at the ARC Center of Excellence in Population Aging Research lays it out: “Demography is the raw material. The dividend is the interaction of the raw material and good policies.”