Walking in a demographic winter wonderland

Why are people averting their eyes from the coming collapse of population growth?

Demographic Winter is an independently produced film describing the consequences of the population collapse of industrialized countries. I have been amazed at the response, or I should say, lack of response to this film. Many of the reviewers either dismissed the thesis of the film, or changed the subject. The lack of serious American attention is surprising, considering that Demographic Winter has been translated in several languages, most recently, Romanian. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed as one of the experts for Part II, as yet to be released.) Commentators Left and Right are wandering through a Demographic Winter Wonderland with their eyes glazed over.

The film argues that falling population will mean a diminished quality of life for the aging generation and for future generations. For instance, pensions, both private and public, have to be paid for. When the retired population is too high relative to the working population, paying the promised pensions becomes an enormous burden. Either the young pay crushing taxes, or the elderly will not get what they expected, or both.

Consumer spending keeps the economy humming and the stock market climbing. When population shrinks, the demand for goods and services of all kinds shrinks. Harry Dent, one of the experts interviewed on the film, is an investment advisor. He discovered the significance of population growth by accident. He had a chart showing birth rates over a hundred year period on his desk next to a chart showing the stock market over the same period. He laid them over each other and realized that the stock market tracks birth rates with about a 40 year lag. That is because people spend the most money in their 40s. They buy the biggest house they’ll ever have; they feed, clothe and educate their children; they buy cars and vacations.

I have been thinking about Harry Dent and his charts while I drive through my San Diego neighborhood. Out of 42 homes, we have 4 foreclosures. Yes, the housing prices ballooned up and people took on mortgages they couldn’t pay. But there is more to the story than the credit crunch: there simply are not enough people at the right age, with enough income, to afford these houses. Because the Baby Boomers didn’t replace themselves, there are not enough people to buy their homes. Falling demand translates into falling home prices.

The Chattering Classes can not bring themselves to take the Demographic Winterthesis seriously. The Left dismisses it as a hysterical racist rant. Kathryn Joyce, writing in the Nation magazine, reports on her conversation with Stephen Mosher. "Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group (cue scary music) Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe's future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes ‘a decline that Europe hasn't experienced since the Black Death.’"

Joyce never refutes Mosher’s argument that population decline precedes economic decline. Instead, she changes the subject to something she wants to talk about: the alleged racism of pro-natalists. "The white Christian West, in this telling, is in danger of forfeiting itself through sheer lack of numbers to an onslaught of Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring."

Oddly enough, the Demographic Winter film makes no mention of race or nationality. In fact, the film emphasizes that the problem of population decline is a worldwide problem. Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker notes that 70 countries now have fertility rates below replacement. The left-wing commentariat would like the film to be about race, so they can dismiss it as unworthy of attention.

Representing the Libertarian Right, we have Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine. He likewise makes no pretense of engaging the actual argument of the film: "I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children?" He wants to talk about how the modern world has given men and women more choices, which is a good thing.

His libertarian instincts blind him to the fact that the Invisible Hand does not always promote the social good. Having children may be optional for individuals, but it is not optional for society as a whole. The principles of individual liberty and personal choice that he holds dear are not self-sustaining. Those ideals will collapse, if the people who hold them do not transmit them to the next generation. In this case, we are not even creating a next generation.

As I mentioned, the producers of Demographic Winter interviewed me to appear in Part II. The producers happen to be Mormons. They told me that they had anticipated more interest in the film from church groups of all kinds. But in fact, only Catholics and their fellow Mormons seem receptive.

This is not entirely surprising, in that these two groups have theological reasons for supporting larger families. But still, churches and all of civil society, ought to take the argument of Demographic Winter seriously.

By: Jennifer Roback Morse, PhD is an economist and the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to bringing hope and encouragement for lifelong married love.

Children want to ban divorce

If they could make the rules for the world, the first thing British kids would do is ban divorce. That is what under-10s said in a poll conducted for the country’s fourth National Kids’ Day. It is the first time divorce has topped the list of things children would like to make rules about if they were king or queen of the world. From other list of items children chose marital splits as the second worst thing in the world -- the first was being fat, which has come up from ninth place in 2006. The very best thing in the world was “good looks”.

Bullying was another big issue for children and behaviour that they would ban. About two-thirds of the 1600 youngsters said they were happy, but 27 were not and a further 7 per cent were not sure. Nearly all had a best friend who was kind, many of them because they were “in love”.

The survey questioned the children about marriage: over 80 per cent thought they would marry when they grew up -- although 17 per cent gave a definite “no” on the subject; 66 per cent wanted to have children -- most stopping at one or two.

Patricia Murchie of Luton First, the group that did the research, remarked on the “pre-teens” concerns about looks and weight, which possibly reflected media images of glamour, and new educational initiatives in nutrition and healthy eating.

~ From the Telegraph (UK), Dec 14

A reform-minded education secretary?

Barack Obama's choice for education secretary offers hope for a change in America's schools.

Would Chicago Public School CEO Arne Duncan make a good secretary of education? There are reasons to wonder if President-elect Barack Obama's nominee is the right candidate for the job. But there are other signs that he may indeed make the grade.

Duncan is one of several innovative, reform-minded, big-city school chiefs. He recognizes the need for local leadership and innovation. And he supports amending federal policy to grant states greater flexibility and autonomy.

Yet given his support for sharp federal spending increases, it's unclear how well Duncan would translate local lessons to the federal level.

What is clear is that Duncan's past work has earned applause from school reformers. He supports charter schools, public school choice, and merit pay for teachers and school leaders. Duncan also supports holding schools accountable for results and maintaining transparency about school performance through public reporting.

In his words, Duncan's mission has been to make Chicago "the premier urban school system in America." And his leadership appears to be making a difference, with Chicago students making gains on a number of outcome measures.

Of course, the big question is what the next education secretary thinks about No Child Left Behind and the federal government's role in education.

Duncan supports NCLB. But as the leader of the nation's third-largest school district, he also has dealt with the challenges of implementing that law. Those of us who are skeptical that Washington can fix our nation's public-school problem should be encouraged by Duncan's support for providing states and school districts with greater flexibility and autonomy.

Testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee in 2006, Duncan spoke approvingly of NCLB's accountability framework. But he noted that Chicago's success depended largely on the opportunity to innovate in how federal goals are met:

"Congress should maintain NCLB's framework of high expectations and accountability. But it should also amend the law to give schools, districts and states the maximum amount of flexibility possible _ particularly districts like ours with a strong track record of academic achievement and tough accountability."

This suggests that Duncan may be open to the proposals like the A-PLUS Acts, which grant states greater autonomy and flexibility in how funds are used if states agree to maintain academic accountability and transparency.

As the leader of a big-city school system, Duncan surely appreciates that it takes leadership on the ground to improve a public-school system. It would be a breath of fresh air if the next secretary recognized the limits of federal power and worked to reform NCLB to empower local leadership.

Duncan's experience in Illinois should also cause him to recognize some of the dangers of federally driven accountability. NCLB's arbitrary deadline that all students be scoring "proficient" on state tests by 2014 has created a perverse incentive for states to weaken state standards to demonstrate artificial progress on state tests. The Land of Lincoln appears to be a leader in the so-called "race to the bottom."

Researchers Paul Peterson and Rick Hess have been tracking national trends in state standards since 2005. They report that Illinois' standards have weakened between 2003 and 2007. Only 8 states had weaker standards than Illinois. Ending perverse federal incentives to lower standards should be a priority for any NCLB reauthorization.

In one key area, Duncan appears to be singing the traditional liberal tune: He supports sharp increases in federal funding for education. In his 2006 congressional testimony, he urged Congress to double funding for NCLB over five years, calling it "the best long-term investment Congress can make."

Unfortunately, the data show that Duncan deserves a failing grade here. Decades of increased federal expenditures have yielded little improvement in student performance. After adjusting for inflation, federal spending per pupil has tripled since the 1970s. But long-term test scores have remained relatively flat.

Since spending on NCLB has already grown by nearly 50 percent since 2001, the next education secretary may have difficulty explaining why pouring another $24 billion into the nation's school systems will provide the answer _ especially in the context of the ballooning budget deficit.

In the days ahead, we will be learning a lot more about Arne Duncan's views on education policy. But it's encouraging that he has demonstrated leadership in local school reform and supports giving states and school districts greater flexibility from federal regulation to encourage innovation.

If he successfully pushes that, he could wind up getting a solid report card from parents across the country.

By:Dan Lips is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. This article appears courtesy of the Heritage Foundation.

The educational reform we need most

Smarter teachers? More parental involvement? More computers? Better assessment? Healthier lunches? Nope. Try harder-working kids.

School reform has become a real yawner. Even in the face of falling test scores, the exodus of the best and brightest teachers and employers’ anguished complaints about school graduates, the topic just seems to cause eyes to roll. The school reform debate is a revolving merry-go-round of predictable topics: hire better teachers, get parents more involved, have longer school years, longer school days, year-round schooling, more computers, more assessment, better teacher education. And round and round the arguments go.

Underlying all the reform talk is the educational blame-game. We don’t have the right teachers; get rid of the teachers’ unions; we’re teaching the wrong stuff, it’s a curriculum problem; we don’t have enough computers and technological support; parents are unsupportive and uninvolved; and that the hearty "money" perennial, the public is stingy and trying to do education on-the-cheap. What is missing from discussions of educational reform is the real problem, the elephant in the school house: the kids.

American children are, by and large, a mess. Their embarrassing academic performance in school (i. e., achievement scores in math and science) is only one indicator among many. In a recent survey, 64 percent admitting to cheating and 30 percent to stealing. Boys (35 percent) a little more than girls (26 percent). The same large-scale survey revealed that one in five has stolen from a friend and 23 percent have robbed from their own family! Well over half of our high school seniors are already sexually active, giving the US the highest rates in the developed world of illegitimate births and sexually transmitted diseases. One primary reason why American businesses have gone overseas is that young Americans don’t have a clue about how to put in a day’s work.

Of course, this is not accurate for all American youth. Approximately 15 percent of our children have used their educational opportunities and achieved some resemblance of mature adulthood. They have some semblance of self-discipline and know how to set goals and even how to achieve them. The great majority, however, are unskilled, unmotivated and unready for the harsh economic realities of the 21st Century which are rapidly closing in on them.

Honey, I spoiled the kids

It is, of course, bad form to blame the children. But, let’s face it. They are the ones who don’t do their homework, who have the work ethic of a slug. They are the one who come to school primarily to socialize with their friends, and whose idea of a tough day is when the batteries on their iPod run out. They are the ones whose idea of teacher harassment is being asked a questions, such as, "How come you’re late for class again?" Or worse, being given homework over the weekend. They are the ones whose deepest sense of human injustice is having the privacy to their lockers violated. They are the ones whose life horizon stretches to that blessed day when they get their own wheels. Or, perhaps, to getting away to college where the real party-hearty time begins.

This is not an allegation that our children are born defective. Or that the genetic material we send off to school is somehow substandard. Our homes and schools have pretty much the same stuff to work with as Finnish or Indian or Taiwanese homes and schools. Then why the glaring differences?

The problem is our children are addicted to pleasure. They have become the new Lotus Eaters. Over the last forty years, young Americans have drifted along in a corrupting culture that has made few demands on them. They wallow in a wrap-around world of instant gratification. They have no chores or work at home and no parents teaching them how to self-discipline themselves and how to work. Once they reach the age of, say, twelve or grow over five feet tall, teachers have little or no authority over them. Since school failure has so few consequences, kids can sink to whatever level they choose and still hang around in school to be with their friends.

Americans have evolved a unique children-raising process, based on the pleasure-principle. Parents are eager dispensers of happiness and strain to be their children’s best friends. Teachers have been reduced to nurturing guides, devoid of real clout. This youth culture of low expectations simply isn’t working. Children aren’t built for pleasure. They are built for challenges and growth.

If one thinks that the 21^st Century will, indeed, bring on the Age of Aquarius and that America will be leading the world into a renewed Land of Milk and Honey, we can keep on fueling our kids’ pleasure addictions. If we think that the Post WWII era was a unique period of prosperity and now the rest of the world is aggressively competing with us for their share of the pie, then we need to rethink what we are doing with our children.

Parenting vacation time over

If there is one truism about our species, it is that human beings are adaptable to our surroundings. Our cultural surroundings are, however, made, and, as such, they can be unmade. History is filled with accounts of nations picking themselves off the floor and regaining greatness. We can make the culture our children need in order to grow and flourish. The places to start the cultural change are the home and the school.

Parents have to return from their prolonged vacation. We can’t outsource the raising of our children to their peer group, social agencies, or the media. This means a change in parental behavior and a change of goals. It means eyes off the TV and the golf ball and onto the world of our children. We need to reengage with our children on a very basic level, as in "I’m in charge until you are ready to go out on your own."

Once upon a time, before our romantic, progressive ideas about human nature starting dictating our parenting policies, the word "training" was synonymous with being a parent. We looked upon children as young animals needing to be trained how to think and behave. This cultural wisdom was everywhere in phrases like, "As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines." Practically, it means parents demonstrating, correcting, encouraging and, yes, punishing. Figuratively and literally, it means being "hands-on" parents.

Schools need a similar sharp change in direction. It goes without saying that parents should have the opportunity to be able to select the type of school they believe is best for their particular children. Little will change in our schools until the public school behemoth is forced by competition to improve. However, almost all schools need a shift in direction. Instead of catering to "where the student is," schools should focus on where the student should be. If educators are not ready to identify what a graduate should know (that is, a serious, no-nonsense curriculum) and, more importantly, what kind of person he or she be, then they don’t deserve the name "educator." But clear goals are not enough. We have to return the teacher’s authority that is central to education. No more toothless teachers or Jon Stewart wannabees masquerading as educators.

We need schools that have a strong culture, a culture have clear expectations for how people should behave. This means sensible rules and clear consequences. These in turn guide behavior. If some students cannot yet exist within a school culture, then they should be removed and placed in another, one with a stronger carrot-and-stick culture. If the handful of hardcore resisters need an educational Devil’s Island, then so be it. Teachers and administrators and school board members cannot continue to allow undisciplined, attention-getters to set the educational tone of a school.

Clearly, Americans are heading into rough economic waters. The relaxed spirit of the 1980s and 90s, which has lead to our passive, but indulgent child raising must go. We must pry our children from their pleasure addictions and get them ready for the new realities. If history has taught us anything it is that it is cruel to the pleasure-addicted.

Kevin Ryan founded the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, where he is professor emeritus. He has written and edited 20 books. He has appeared recently on CBS's "This Morning", ABC's "Good Morning America", "The O’Reilly Factor", CNN and the Public Broadcasting System speaking on character education. He can be reached at kryan@bu.edu

Gays angered by Pope’s stand on ecology

If we don't trash the physical environment, do we have a right to trash the moral environment?

If nominations for the best bright idea of 2008 are still open, I’m voting for Pope Benedict XVI’s  “ecology of man”. It goes without saying that this will not pass unchallenged. His intriguing suggestion surfaced in a speech to his staff a couple of days before Christmas -- and instantly the gay lobby had conniptions.

An Anglican priest in London, Giles Fraser, founder of the pro-gay Inclusive Church movement, told the London Times: “I thought the Christmas angels said, ‘Fear not’. Instead, the Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet. And that’s just absurd. As always, this sort of religious homophobia will be an alibi for all those who would do gay people harm.”

What did the Pope actually say?

He was discrete, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines. He said that the Church had a duty to “protect Man from destroying himself”. The Church “ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself” by gender-bending. True, it was a critique of homosexuality, but it was not based on the yuck factor or even primarily on the Bible.

He did not intend to insult gays, either. Even the gay Australian writer David Marr acknowledged that. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, he scolded his over-sensitive buddies: “But poofs who love the planet more than themselves should acknowledge the pontiff was onto something here: not just saving homosexuals from their ‘own destruction’ but announcing a new role for the church defending ‘the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us’”.

Marr’s reaction suggests that the notion that man is part of the ecological web could be fruitful and persuasive. It could, in fact, lead to a better understanding of why homosexuality is wrong and a violation of human dignity.

But to grasp why, you have to read the original text,not just scraps from jaded Vatican journos. These were not just off-the-cuff remarks. Instead, they represent a consistent theme in Benedict’s teaching: that because nature has been created by God, it is rational, orderly and ultimately comprehensible. Hence it is possible to carry on a rational dialogue with people like David Marr.

This is an idea that Benedict visits again and again, and it is very similar to his critique of Islam in his Regensburg address a couple of years ago. In that controversial speech he declared that "The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby."

In his Christmas speech, Benedict plays the same tune. Human bodies, having been created by God, are evidence for an authentic sexual morality: “The fact that the earth, the cosmos, mirror the Creator Spirit, clearly means that their rational structures which, transcending the mathematical order, become almost palpable in our experience, bear within themselves an ethical orientation.” If the biology of male and female sexuality are complementary, there must be an ultimate reason for it. A rational person searches for that reason and draws ethical conclusions.

He also appeals to a principle that now seems self-evident, at least in the Western world: that we trash the environment at our peril. Why? Because “the earth is not simply our possession which we can plunder according to our interests and desires. It is rather a gift of the Creator who has designed its intrinsic laws and with this has given us the basic directions for us to adhere as stewards of his creation.”

Man, even though he has a spiritual element, is part of this ecology. He may not – he cannot – reshape himself without risking his own destruction, just as abusing the atmosphere, the earth or the sea could lead to catastrophe.

“When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysics. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him.”

Admittedly, this will not be easy for supporters of homosexuality to accept. What they feel is that biology is less important than the longings of the heart, or the desire to conquer and manipulate nature. They are unwitting disciples of Francis Bacon, the English Renaissance philosopher who argued that the destiny of science and technology was to remake and triumph over nature. In his recent encyclical Spe Salvi, Benedict treated Bacon as an important figure, whose naïve enthusiasm for scientific progress ended up justifying the terrifying and destructive potential of modern technology. Not long ago Bacon was worshipped as a visionary thinker, but contemporary philosophers are less complimentary. They regard him as a forerunner of Western science’s continuing legacy of alienation, exploitation, and ecological oppression. Someday, the Pope hints, we will realise that the gay culture is just an extension of this.

The inescapable fact of human existence is that we are both rational and animal. As W.B. Yeats put it in one of his great poems, we live “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”. Even if our reason transcends it, we are as much part of the ecology as beetles and sea gulls. We can no more defy the laws of nature than they can.

Will the Pope's brief words, just a couple of dense paragraphs actually, convince people that homosexuality is “unnatural”? Absolutely not. But they could spark a realisation that it is inconsistent to demand respect for the laws of ecology with the single exception of man himself. When that philosophy was adopted by the Industrial Revolution, it turned forests into deserts, fields into wastelands and seas into stagnant ponds. Benedict wants us to see that the Sexual Revolution could do much the same.

By: Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet

An indulgence of adult desires

Surrogate motherhood isn't about forming families; it is about satisfying adult desires.

Nothing like the Christmas season to remind us how selfish and adult-centred we should be.

No, you’re right. That doesn’t sound very good.

I have been struggling for a while now to come up with a good logical reason why I dislike stories about surrogate motherhood like this one (requires free registration to the New York Times website). In “Her Body, My Baby,” New York City writer/socialite Alex Kuczynski tells the often heart-wrenching story of how she went from wanting a baby to having a baby. It’s a journey most people go through reasonably straightforwardly but in her case it involved no end of medical complications, ultimately resolved by cutting-edge science, tens of thousands of dollars, and a spare womb inside a 43-year-old Pennsylvania substitute schoolteacher.

You should read the article for yourself, when you’re in the mood and have a good cup of coffee handy. It is very long but also very detailed, and remarkably honest for a woman famous for having written a book about plastic surgery.

I should state at the outset that I sympathize with Ms. Kuczynski’s desire to be a mother and with the pain her own inability to carry a child to term therefore caused her. I also wish to keep an open mind about the surrogate mother, Cathy, and her expressed desire to be “needed in a profound, unique way.” I admit I don’t get it (pregnancy and childbirth for the pure altruistic fun of it?), but I accept it as presented. And most importantly, I do not want to imply that Max, Ms. Kuczynski’s son, did not deserve to live. His conduct is blameless. And he’s here now, so let’s leave him out of the story. But it is possible to approve of an end and still disapprove of the means.

The question here is, why does surrogate motherhood make many of us recoil? Even so-called “gestational surrogacy,” where the surrogate mother did not contribute her egg to the equation, which is the sort Ms. Kuczynski had. In this kind of assisted pregnancy the child that emerges from the surrogate mother is the biological offspring of the parents who will raise him. He has no genetic connection to his “host mother”. The woman who carries him and nurtures him in utero and goes through the pain of childbirth for him must give him up – for, after all, he is not hers.

There’s something very wrong about that. The question is, what?

Yes, the objective is to produce a child, which is good. Yes, all people involved participate voluntarily, which is good. Yes, the surrogate mother, who agreed to the arrangement, is well looked after medically and is compensated financially for her services. It does not sound like exploitation. But it is.

When the prospective parents look for a suitable candidate, they look at her reproductive history, her health, her family situation, and all manner of personal details. Even if you agree to put yourself on the rent-a-womb block, the fact remains that selecting a candidate based on her breeding record is, at the very least, crass objectifying. I’m re-reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin these days, and I can’t help seeing images of potential buyers examining the “merchandise” by looking into its mouth. Yes, its.

“Whoa, honey! Check out the size of that uterus!”

Not very dignified.

Sometimes I envy religious folks. They seem to have such a clearer view of what’s right and what’s not. For instance, the Vatican just released Dignitas Personae, a set of guidelines for the modern bio-ethics age. It reasserts that “any form of surrogate motherhood” is “illicit”.

The reasons are outlined in an earlier document, Donum Vitae:

“Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

Basically, the Church appears to think that the only morally licit way to produce children is via the conjugal act between man and wife. Who knew the crusty old moralists were so keen on the fun part?

It’s all fine and good to be against offending the dignity of a child. And certainly one can object, with current techniques, to how assisted reproduction treats the other children: the discarded “superfluous” embryos, those left behind in the Petri dishes, the ones frozen and never thawed, and the ones conceived with donor gametes who will never know their genetic history. It’s also quite fine to promote conjugal fidelity and happy, fruitful marriages. But surrogacy doesn’t have to involve unfaithfulness or unhappiness. And it’s not quite enough to explain my reaction against surrogate motherhood.

No. What bothers me most about it is that it is part of a wider culture that promotes and aggressively encourages anything that lets adults indulge their every whim and fancy. On any given day, countless women go for an abortion while countless others go through invasive assisted reproductive techniques while other women wait to have their uterus chosen to carry someone else’s precious embryo or their ovaries plucked so they can sell their eggs. The only moral standard here is that whatever I want is right, and must be mine. It is not possible to build a coherently decent society on such a basis.

Methinks it’s also not a very grown-up way to behave.

By: Brigitte Pellerin is a writer and broadcaster based in Ottawa.

Photo Credit: karindalziel via Flickr

Titanic China has an appointment with an iceberg

The headlines proclaim China's growing financial power. But its ageing population may scupper its ambitions.

China Rises, the blog of Beijing correspondent of McClatchy Newspapers, Tim Johnson, has a post on China's Ageing Population that points to a 30 second dynamic graphic that shows the ageing bulge moving through the population over time from 1950 to 2050. By then 31 percent of the population, or some 400 million people, will be aged over 60.

China Rises says the graphic "will give you a quicker idea of the changes looming on the horizon for China" – the declining ratio of the working age population to retirees. To appreciate the change consider that in 1950 the ageing population comprised around 6 percent of the total while those of working age made up slightly less than 50 percent of the total. By the 50 year mark (2000), the aged stood at just under 10 percent of the total while the working population stood at just under 60 percent. However, by 2050 the working age population will be at just under 50 percent of the total, compared with 31 percent of the ageing population.

This change is the result of two things: improved mortality rates (folks are living longer thanks to better healthcare) and the one-child family policy.

Let’s do the maths. In 1950 there were roughly 8.3 working age people to every person over 60. But by 2050 there will 1.6 working people to every aged person. The future family structure in China will be four grandparents, two adult children, and one very hard-working grandchild. Scary stuff, indeed.

These changes are going to place a huge strain on the Chinese economic and social system. In fact, an American doctor, Joseph Flaherty, who studied the situation with the help of Chinese colleagues, wrote in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society last year that: "Few countries in the world have faced such challenges, at the level of a potential crisis, for their elderly as China is beginning to face".

First is the issue of how China will fund the pension system necessary to take care of all these retirees – 400 million people is larger than the current combined populations of the United States and Canada. With such a small working age population, it’s not going to be easy to feed, clothe and house the elderly. The West was fortunate: Europe and the US first became rich, and then they grew old. Most people in China, however, will grow old before they grow rich.

Second, a large aged population is going to place incredible pressure on an already overburdened healthcare system. Retirement villages and nursing homes have not been a strong feature of Chinese culture because, even today, many Chinese take it as a family responsibility to care for elderly relatives. But in the future there will be increasing demands for these services to be outsourced. Additionally, more medicines for the ailments of ageing populations will be required.

While Western companies involved in the management of retirement villages and nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies may be rubbing their hands with glee, the rest of us might want to pause to consider the unthinkable.

Suppose the working age population, who have grown up without siblings, indulged by their doting parents and grandparents, opt not to take care of their ageing relatives in the future. After all, who says the West has a monopoly on granny-dumping? Cultural conditions that demanded people take care of the old and infirmare already weakening in today’s China. Thanks to 60 years of Communism, many people see it as the State’s obligation to care for the poor, the elderly and the sick, rather than their own.

Will the State be able to take up the slack? How can it, if fewer people are paying taxes?

And, as China’s median age rises, it might even face rising labour shortages in the future that would exacerbate its economic problems. The country may find it harder to attract foreign investment and its huge cache of foreign reserves will soon be whittled away as it spend its way through crisis after crisis.

In my experience, many crises occur because people, corporations or governments fail to take evasive action even when they are clearly heading straight at an iceberg. Consider the current global financial crisis. There was ample warning. Had regulators done their job properly or financial institutions followed sound principles of financial management it would not have happened.

China is clearly on a collision course with the iceberg of demographic winter. It’s time for its leaders to stop shuffling the deck chairs. The one-child family policy is one article of faith that the Chinese Government should reconsider. It would be best to do so sooner rather than later.

By: Constance Kong is the pen name of a Shanghai-based business consultant.