Demographics the mother of all trends...

Demographics the mother of all trends

Demographics is the mother of all trends (or, as someone more eloquently once put it, ('demographics is destiny'). The big demographic shift is ageing. In Europe 25% of the population is already aged 65+. Linked to this is the rise in single person households (46 million in Europe) caused by an increase of widows and widowers, but also caused by more people getting divorced and by people marrying later or not at all (42% of the US workforce is unmarried).

Add a declining fertility rate (below the replacement rate in many developed nations) and you have a recipe for significant socio-economic change. Other linked trends include older parents, more one-parent families, male/female imbalance (eg China) and less traditional family units. In 1950 80% of US households were the traditional 2 parent & kids nuclear family. Now the figure is 47%, while over in Europe there will be14% less nuclear families in 2006 than in 1995. This could all change of course, but it’s in the nature of demographic trends that change is usually slow in any given direction.

The future world is going to very different to what has gone before, just as the nuclear family was different to the preceeding generations so  this new world of profound  changing population dynamics will mean a future that is unrecognisable to what you  can imagine.

Except from Daughters my new book I am working on...