Aging boom: What’s next?
The world is getting really old, really fast. And while many economically developed countries (Japan, Italy, Germany) are ahead of us, the United States is not immune to the aging boom. Our new demography could mean big changes over the next few decades.
Here’s a look at some demographic milestones between now and 2060
2022: About 333 million people call America home. Of those, some 56.4 million are age 65 or older. The older crowd includes 6.8 million people who are at least 85 years old, and 100,000 who are centenarians: 100 or older. Median age is about 38.
2028: About 14.9% of all people living in the United States come from another country. This ties two other peaks (1850 and 1910) for the biggest share of foreign-born residents in American history. On average, new arrivals are younger than the native-born population.
2030: Population is 355.1 million. All of the surviving baby boomer generation are now of retirement age, and the overall number of Americans age 65 and up is 73.1 million, or about 21% of the population. Also, for the first time, immigration, not native-born births, is the biggest driver for our population growth. Many economically developed countries with tighter immigration rules are starting to see their populations shrink.
2034: Older Americans (ages 65 and up) now outnumber children (18 and younger).
2035: The number of Americans who are 85 or older reaches 11.8 million, meaning the 85-plus crowd has nearly doubled over the past 15 years.
2040: Population hits 373.5 million, including 80.8 million who are 65 or older. About 12 million Americans have some form of dementia, nearly double the number from 2020.
2045: Fewer than half (49.7%) of all Americans are non-Hispanic White, a demographic fact that California and several other states reached decades earlier but which represents a first for the overall U.S. population. About 49 million Americans have diabetes.
2050: Population is 388.9 million and growing less than half of 1% per year. The ratio of active American workers to Social Security beneficiaries is about 2.6 to 1, down from roughly 3.7 to 1 in 1970.
2058: Population hits 400 million. Median age is about 43.
2060: In a country that now includes 404.5 million people, oldsters far outnumber youngsters. In all, nearly one in four (94.7 million) Americans is 65 or older while about one in five (80.1 million) is 18 or younger. Of those older people, 19 million are 85 or older and 590,000 are at least 100. About 1.8% of all people living in America were born in another country.
Births Reached Very Low Levels in Late 2020 and Early 2021…
The chart below is from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office and displays year-over-year changes in births in each two-month period from January 2020 through June 2021. For example, the number for the first two months of 2020 is -3%, indicating that there were 3% fewer births in those months than in the first two months of 2019. The biggest declines shown in the Figure occurred in late 2020 and early 2021.
The timing of these declines suggests that California’s COVID-19 emergency — which escalated in March 2020, 8 to 11 months earlier — might have reduced conceptions substantially, consistent with the first explanation listed above (effects of COVID-19 on conceptions). Both the year-over-year decline and the decline relative to the pre-pandemic baseline in 2019 were much smaller in March-June 2021 than in January-February 2021, suggesting that this effect could be transitory.
Sources: California Department of Finance, U..S. Census, The Associated Press