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Source: Demographics 89

Demographics have major impact on what will be bought, by
whom, and in what quantities. American teenagers, for instance, buy
a good many pairs of cheap shoes a year; they buy for fashion, not
durability, and their purses are limited. The same people, ten years
later, will buy very few pairs of shoes a year—a sixth as many as they
bought when they were seventeen—but they will buy them for com-
fort and durability first and for fashion second. People in their sixties
and seventies in the developed countries—that is, people in their early
retirement years—form the prime travel and vacation market. Ten
years later the same people are customers for retirement communi-
ties, nursing homes, and extended (and expensive) medical care.
Two-earner families have more money than they have time, and spend
accordingly. People who have acquired extensive schooling in their
younger years, especially professional or technical schooling, will,
ten to twenty years later, become customers for advanced profession-
al training.
But people with extensive schooling are also available primarily
for employment as knowledge workers. Even without competition
from low-wage countries with tremendous surpluses of young people
trained only for unskilled or semi-skilled manual jobs—the surge of
young people in the Third World countries resulting from the drop in
infant mortality after 1955—the industrially developed countries of
the West and of Japan would have had to automate. Demographics
alone, the combined effects of the sharp drop in birth rates and of the
“educational explosion”—makes it near-certain that traditional man-
ual blue-collar employment in manufacturing in developed countries,
by the year 2010, cannot be more than one-third or less than what it
was in 1970. (Though manufacturing production, as a result of
automation, may be three to four times what it was then.)
All this is so obvious that no one, one should think, needs to be
reminded of the importance of demographics. And indeed businessmen,
economists, and politicians have always acknowledged the critical
importance of population trends, movements, and dynamics. But they
also believed that they did not have to pay attention to demographics in
their day-to-day decisions. Population changes—whether in birth rates
or mortality rates, in educational attainment, in labor force composition
and participation, or in the location and movement of people—were
thought to occur so slowly and over such long time spans as to be of lit-
tle practical concern. Great demographic catastrophes such as the Black
Death in Europe in the fourteenth century were admitted to