The future looks very gray

Thats true in Greece and Spain,where the young are taking to the streets partly because state pension commitments have become so heavy they are suffocating the economy and depriving the seniors grandchildren of any chance of a job. Likewise in the US,where,notwithstanding the national self-image as a laissez-faire land,the budget battle is really a fight about the old: programmes for the elderly constitute almost half of non-interest government spending,about 1.6 trillion in 2010,of a 3.3 trillion total. That figure will swell as the baby boomers retire.

According to a paper by political economist Nicholas Eberstadt,who has done extensive research on the issue,costs associated with population ageing are estimated to account for about half the public-debt run-up of the OECD economies over the past 20 years.

The demographic squeeze may be contributing to one of todays biggest dangers in international finance: the threat of sovereign default. Ali Alichi,an economist at the IMF,argues that old folks may be less willing to repay sovereign debt. According to Alichi,As the number of older voters relative to younger ones increases around the globe,the creditworthiness of borrowing countries could decline.

This demographic crunch has transformed the way a lot of us think about the relationship between economic growth and population growth. Not so long ago,the conventional wisdom was neo-Malthusian 8211; one of the keys to prosperity was having fewer children. Now,that thinking has been turned upside down.

Former Treasury Secretary Robert E Rubin cited the USs favourable demographics relative to Europe,Japan and even to China and Korea as one of the principal reasons to believe that the country has sunny economic prospects.

President Dmitri A Medvedev is so worried about Russias shrinking citizenry that families that have a third child can get plots of land up to 1,500 square metres.

Even China,the most brutal apostle of population control,now fears it will get old before it gets rich. Meanwhile,India,whose fertility was once seen as its national curse,is touted as a rising investment prospect thanks to its demographic dividend.

One solution to the demographic dilemma is immigration. But absorbing immigrants can be tough. And thats true not just for the traumatised Norwegians,but also in US. Moreover,immigration is a zero sum game that cant work for everyone forever: as the worlds poor countries get richer,their citizens have less reason to emigrate 8211; and they begin to suffer their own demographic squeeze.

Eberstadt points out that this is true not only of one-child China,but also of the economically prospering Indian south,where fertility levels are at,or already below,replacement levels.

The other answer is to persuade families to have more children. So far,thats something no developed country has figured out. As women get richer,better educated and more autonomous,they have fewer babies. Most middle class families in the West need a mothers wage to survive,and women in industrial and postindustrial societies cant bring their babies to work in the way their peasant great-grandmothers could.

As countries awaken to the demographic squeeze,their first instinct is often fiercely conservative. As well as giving families incentives to have a third child,the Russian Kremlin is restricting abortion. But there isnt much evidence that a return to patriarchy will bolster fertility. After all,some of the societies where the birthrates are plummeting the fastest Japan or Italyare the ones where women have made the least social and economic progress.

Yet there is one political movement that has long campaigned for societies to find a better way for women to be both workers and mothers: feminism. As graying countries become more dysfunctional to fix our economies in the long term,what we should probably be talking about is maternity and paternity leave and workplace day care.CHRYSTIA FREELAND