k wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
That is absolutely correct and within 20 years, Japan won't even be a Top 10 economic concern. A lot of other countries are facing the same problem, France, Germany, etc. The baby boom followed by a huge bust in population growth is the root cause. There's simply not enough workers flowing into the system to even take care of the boomers, much less replace or supplant their economic output. Because of this, you're seeing radical changes and investment. Japan is bent on creating robots to offset the problem. Germany is embroiling itself with relaxing its immigration policy. Meanwhile, the US is still clueless.

True, but i believe our birth rate is still steady. There's obviously some question regarding wether those births are going to develop into well trained, educated, productive adults or not, but that's more a question of educational policy in my opinion.

Much of Europe and Japan aren't going to have the option. Good for me, as an american who might want to work in japan, but not great for them. In the US, we have the babies, but I'm not completely optimistic about our ability to turn them into anything useful.

The US has other problems from this phenomenon. For one, we're already seeing the wretching from shifting from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge working economy. Ironically, many books from the 80's predicted the turmoil this would cause, yet people act like it's a big surprise.

The big problem that the US will have because of the baby boom is in financial resources and health care. Both SS and Medicare will be destroyed under the pressure. Current models of hospital, acute care, ambulatory, and disease management are not scalable with the coming population death march. We will likely have a health care 'crisis' as old guard health care resists change until the last minute. I predict that the feds will have to step in and do something, very similarly to the auto industry in the early 80's.

There will also be radical changes in legislature and business economy over the next 20 years as the baby boom lobby exerts its muscle on everything from hiring practices to facilities access to driving and insurance coverage. Unfortunately for the X-ers, we will be left picking up the tab and cleaning up the mess, while Gen-Y will just be entering their 30's and not starting families. Current models suggest that they will also follow Pac Rim and Europe and not marry or have children, which will bring the US in line with their policies, but about 10 years later, when most of the 'lump' will have died off barring any freakish medical advances to prolong this tired generation's legacy of massive resource consumption any further.

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RE: Bloomberg.com: Japan