Author: George Magnus
Review: FT
Demography is the senior social science: churchgoers this week will be reminded that Jesus Christ was born in the midst of a census two millennia ago. George Magnus’s The Age of Aging is an account of the great population transitions currently under way around the world. Magnus is a renowned City of London economist, now at UBS, and his new book is a guide for the general reader on how the greying of the world will change everything, everywhere.
Demographic cycles are immensely powerful, and move just fast enough to cause occasional outbursts of panic. The western world intermittently gives in to fears about population extinction and Malthusian famine. The 1930s brought us titles such as The Twilight of Parenthood, while the 1960s gave us The Population Bomb. The new terror for the west is a large, aged population: the popular literature frets that future generations – usually Americans – are already doomed to penury because of the rising costs of medical bills and pension payments.
Magnus’s account avoids the hysteria that often affects this genre. He level-headedly discusses the west’s ageing problem with an explanation of the developing world’s demographic conundrums. For readers who are new to the topic, some of the chapters are useful primers on these crucial issues.
Longer lives and changes in the birth rate have conspired to make the developed world become very old very quickly. Longevity is a blessing for individuals, but the stresses it creates are a real quandary for policymakers. Even if there had been no financial crisis, the developed world would have been lumbered with rising social, healthcare and pension costs.
But demographic problems are not confined to the west. China has a problem with both age and gender; by 2020 it will have the same median age as Australia, while a relative lack of women means as many as 10 per cent of men between 20 and 45 will be unable to find a spouse. China may be old and dysfunctional before it is rich enough to cope.
India, meanwhile, has a race to become educated and find employment in time to claim the demographic dividend which it is now due. In the Middle East and North Africa, a region where the employment rate is currently at 47 per cent, the challenge will be to create enough jobs to cope with a surging young population. Magnus, quite rightly, sees HIV/Aids as having reached a scale where it deserves to be seen as a demographic problem. In Africa, it is the biggest killer, responsible for one in five deaths – twice the death toll from malaria and 10 times that of violence and war. It may stop that continent from exploiting a coming demographic dividend. In Russia, where 1m people are probably already infected, it is exacerbating an already weak population position.
The book is a comprehensive survey, tied together with chapters on how the global balance of power, religion and economics will be altered by this change. Its broad reach, however, is both a strength and a weakness. Magnus is a shrewd and serious commentator; he was among the first to identify the ongoing credit crisis as a “Minsky moment”, named after the economist, Hyman Minsky. It refers to the moment when financial euphoria tips into crisis. But, in producing this book, he has spread himself too thinly.
On a number of occasions, Magnus strays on to fascinating topics, dwelling on them just long enough to pique the reader’s interest before galloping swiftly on to something else. Contentious ideas, such as Gunnar Heinsohn’s hypothesis that particularly young populations are inherently unstable, are reported and dealt with only briefly. He simply reports them, and makes little attempt to add to them.
Given Magnus’s stellar record, some of the reflections on globalisation and economics are disappointing. Writing a book with any reference to the future financial outlook that does not immediately get superseded is a nearly impossible task at the moment, but the discussion of capital flows, in particular, is too short and it seems to come from an age when Northern Rock was still able to fund itself.
Magnus is right that younger people in the developed world will be left with a serious demographic burden, creating what he calls the “Boomerangst” generation. The issue will surely grow as a political issue. But there is a serious philosophical debate on what intergenerational fairness actually means; most recently, it has emerged in the debate about what costs current generations should bear to mitigate climate change.
Magnus has produced an overview of the current state of world demography. It is well-researched and thorough. But it is disappointing, given his calibre, that he has not helped to advance the argument.
