As we look to the future, the situation has changed. Due to the significantly higher number of people reaching retirement age and the fewer numbers of working age people to replace them, Social Security in this century must shift its emphasis away from early retirement and towards enabling people to work longer. Our domestic institutions are threatened by this newfound longevity. This is especially true due to new information concerning the mapping of the human genome, information that may increase human life expectancy to 120 by 2050. If this turns out to be the case, our social welfare systems will be in grave jeopardy.
Life expectancy is only half of the problem.
The other half arises out of people having fewer children than their parents did. Fertility rates have been plummeting throughout most of the past three decades in the advanced economies, a trend that shows no sign of reversing. A population requires a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain stability. That means that each couple would have at least two children so that they would be replacing themselves. This has not been the case for some time in Japan and Italy, which will be the first to feel the effects of depopulation.