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Source: Demographics 95

bank. At the same time, a few savings and loan associations (not an
industry noted for innovation or venturing) realized that older mar-
ried women who had earlier dropped out of the labor force when
their children were small make high-grade employees when brought
back as permanent part-time workers. “Everybody knew” that part-
timers are “temporary,” and that women who have once left the labor
force never come back into it; both were perfectly sensible rules in
earlier times. But demographics made them obsolete. The willing-
ness to accept this fact—and again such willingness stemmed not
from reading statistics but from going out and looking—has given
the savings and loan associations an exceptionally loyal, exception-
ally productive work force, particularly in California.
The success of Club Mediterranée in the travel and resort business
is squarely the result of exploiting demographic changes: the emer-
gence of large numbers of young adults in Europe and the United
States who are affluent and educated but only one generation away
from working-class origins. Still quite unsure of themselves, still not
self-confident as tourists, they are eager to have somebody with the
know-how to organize their vacations, their travel, their fun—and yet
they are not really comfortable either with their working-class parents
or with older, middle-class people. Thus, they are ready-made cus-
tomers for a new and “exotic” version of the old teenage hangout.

III

Analysis of demographic changes begins with population figures.
But absolute population is the least significant number. Age distribu-
tion is far more important, for instance. In the 1960s, it was the rapid
increase in the number of young people in most non-Communist
developed countries that proved significant (the one notable excep-
tion was Great Britain, where the “baby boom” was short-lived). In
the 1980s and even more in the 1990s, it will be the drop in the num-
ber of young people, the steady increase in the number of early mid-
dle-age people (up to forty) and the very rapid increase in the number
of old people (seventy and over). What opportunities do these devel-
opments offer? What are the values and the expectations, the needs
and wants of these various age groups?
The number of traditional college students cannot increase. The
most one can hope for is that it will not fall, that the percentage of