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What does a world with billions of old people look like? Asian countries are searching for answers

The world is aging at an unprecedented rate — and that’s a problem for young and old alike.

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Apartments in Singapore’s Queenstown district will soon offer slip-resistant floors and doorways wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. In Japan, a recently built light railway in the northern city of Toyama has carriages that, when they pull into a station, attach tightly to platforms, ensuring that the elderly don’t trip over gaps. At the Village Landais in southern France, every detail is geared toward helping Alzheimer’s sufferers live as comfortably as possible; groceries at village stores don’t have price labels, doing away with the need for residents to count the costs. (Those costs are covered by government agencies.) The idea is to give residents the experience of shopping without the confusion of transactions. Similar communities for people with dementia have been set up on the outskirts of Amsterdam and the shores of Lake Rotorua in New Zealand.

Collectively, these are vignettes of our shared future — of a world that is aging, and thus changing “in fundamental ways,” as the United Nations put in it in a recent report.

By the middle of this century, the number of people aged 65 and over around the world will total more than 1.6 billion people, up from around 760 million in 2021. In other words, there will be more than twice as many elderly people a generation from now.

“This is not a short-term challenge like famine or drought or war, but it is a long-predicted, natural change in the structure of our societies,” John W. Rowe, an expert on aging at Columbia University and a past president of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics, told Grid.

And it is a change with far-reaching consequences.

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The world’s demographics have already been transformed. Europe is shrinking. China is shrinking, with India, a much younger country, overtaking it this year as the world’s most populous nation.

But what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning.

The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. Extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them.

In all of recorded history, no country has ever been as old as these nations are expected to get.

As a result, experts predict, things many wealthier countries take for granted — like pensions, retirement ages and strict immigration policies — will need overhauls to be sustainable. And today’s wealthier countries will almost inevitably make up a smaller share of global G.D.P., economists say.

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Originally posted by Doug:
Between this and climate change, the logical result would seem to be an ever increasing supply of hot women over the age of 65.

Seems like good news to me.