Anti-aging will be in the pipeline, if not necessarily on the market yet. The main root causes of most of the core age-related diseases will be basically understood, and interventions which basically work will have been studied in the lab.
Fertility will be below replacement rate globally, and increasingly far below replacement in first-world countries (most of which are already below today). Life expectancy will still be increasing, so the population will still be growing over all (even assuming anti-aging is slow), but slowly and decelerating.
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, the population will have a much higher share of elderly dependents and a lower share of working-age people to support them, pretty much everywhere. This problem already dominates the budgets of first-world governments today: it means large-and-increasing shares of GDP going to retirement/social security and healthcare for old folks (who already consume the large majority of healthcare).
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, taxes will probably go up in most first-world countries. There just isn’t enough spending to cut anywhere else to keep up with growing social security/healthcare obligations, and dramatically reducing those obligations won’t be politically viable with old people only becoming more politically dominant in elections over time. (In theory, dramatically opening up immigration could provide another path, but I wouldn’t call that the most likely outcome.)
China’s per-capita GDP will catch up to current first-world standards, at which point they will not be able to keep up the growth rate of recent decades. That will probably result in some kind of political instability, since the CCP’s popularity is heavily dependent on growth, and also because a richer population is a more powerful population which is just generally harder to control without its assent.
Anti-aging will be in the pipeline, if not necessarily on the market yet. The main root causes of most of the core age-related diseases will be basically understood, and interventions which basically work will have been studied in the lab.
Fertility will be below replacement rate globally, and increasingly far below replacement in first-world countries (most of which are already below today). Life expectancy will still be increasing, so the population will still be growing over all (even assuming anti-aging is slow), but slowly and decelerating.
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, the population will have a much higher share of elderly dependents and a lower share of working-age people to support them, pretty much everywhere. This problem already dominates the budgets of first-world governments today: it means large-and-increasing shares of GDP going to retirement/social security and healthcare for old folks (who already consume the large majority of healthcare).
Conditional on anti-aging not already seeing large-scale adoption, taxes will probably go up in most first-world countries. There just isn’t enough spending to cut anywhere else to keep up with growing social security/healthcare obligations, and dramatically reducing those obligations won’t be politically viable with old people only becoming more politically dominant in elections over time. (In theory, dramatically opening up immigration could provide another path, but I wouldn’t call that the most likely outcome.)
China’s per-capita GDP will catch up to current first-world standards, at which point they will not be able to keep up the growth rate of recent decades. That will probably result in some kind of political instability, since the CCP’s popularity is heavily dependent on growth, and also because a richer population is a more powerful population which is just generally harder to control without its assent.