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Source: Demographics 93

students in the United States twenty-five years later, that is, by the
mid-seventies. The figure was derived simply by putting together two
demographic events that had already happened: the increase in the
number of births and the increase in the percentage of young adults
going to college. The forecast was absolutely correct. Yet practically
every established university pooh-poohed it. Twenty years later, in
1976, I looked at the age figures and predicted that retirement age in
the United States would have to be raised to seventy or eliminated
altogether within ten years. The change came even faster: compulso-
ry retirement at any age was abolished in California a year later, in
1977, and retirement before seventy for the rest of the country two
years later, in 1978. The demographic figures that made this predic-
tion practically certain were well known and published. Yet most so-
called experts—government economists, labor-union economists,
business economists, statisticians—dismissed the forecast as utterly
absurd. “It will never happen” was the all but unanimous response.
The labor unions actually proposed at the time lowering the manda-
tory retirement age to sixty or below.
This unwillingness, or inability, of the experts to accept demo-
graphic realities which do not conform to what they take for granted
gives the entrepreneur his opportunity. The lead times are known. The
events themselves have already happened. But no one accepts them
as reality, let alone as opportunity. Those who defy the conventional
wisdom and accept the facts—indeed, those who go actively looking
for them—can therefore expect to be left alone for quite a long time.
The competitors will accept demographic reality, as a rule, only when
it is already about to be replaced by a new demographic change and
a new demographic reality.

II

Here are some examples of successful exploitation of demograph-
ic changes.
Most of the large American universities dismissed my forecast of 10
to 12 million college students by the 1970s as preposterous. But the
entrepreneurial universities took it seriously: Pace University, in New
York, was one, and Golden Gate University in San Francisco another.
They were just as incredulous at first, but they checked the forecast and
found that it was valid, and in fact the only rational prediction. They