Today one fifth of Florida's population is over age 65. By 2020 America as a whole will be like Florida. Yet by 2015 a full quarter of all Japanese will be over 65. There are more than 11,000 Japanese over 100 years old even today. In an important sense, they are right.
Japan needs to be more efficient in the financial arena, because it is ageing.
The third ongoing global revolution is in manufacturing and in manufacturing technology. Production of goods and services is increasingly global, in industries ranging from automobiles to aircraft. It is also increasingly automated, streamlined, and quality-conscious, due to creative process innovations pioneered in many cases by Japanese firms. For the firms of both our nations, this revolution should mean new opportunities in each other's markets, provided that a free, fair, and stable system of trade relations can be preserved. Taken together, the three global revolutions of the past decade have greatly increased the prospective gains from economic interdependence and strategic partnership, both within individual nations and around the world.