In the Year 2525 Ageism is Still Alive (With Apologies to Zagar & Evans)
Those of us born in the 1950s no doubt might recall the one hit wonder released in 1969 ‘In the Year 2525’, a song reflective of the 60’s generation uncertainty about the present and even more so the future. This song came back to us in writing this month’s newsletter as we contemplated a range of demographic research and media articles discussing a potentially challenging future world brought about by declining world populations. This data made us reflect that ageing and older age may be even a more contested future space than we are currently experiencing and in a flippant sense if the song was to be rewritten within today’s world, we’d be ensuring the ageing issue got a run in the lyrics.
Despite the frustration with current negative business attitudes to ageing, at encourAGEEQUALITY we’ve remained optimistic about a gradual turnaround in thinking about age and ageing. Believing that with demographic ageing on the rise, longevity being spoken of as a hallmark of our immediate future and excitement about the potential of the rapidly growing ‘silver economy’, our thinking has been that time and events will soften current negative attitudes towards older workers and somehow our world will become more tolerant of difference. There is also the hope that in tackling the meaning of ageing today, our kids as they become older, will be able to laugh at ‘ageism’ as an early 21st century historical artefact and lead lives where no one cares how old they might be.
However, as stated, some recent readings in demographics have shaken this ‘rose coloured’ view of the future. The major impact on our thinking is no longer seeing the demographic ageing phenomenon as a stand-alone event, but one occurring within the broader context of an anticipated future decline in global populations. Our fear is that rather than ageing becoming a less contested social, economic and political space over time, the reverse might occur, with ageing becoming an even more problematic issue in the future. To avoid this, requires urgent political action. NOW.
A Future Demographic Glimpse
A newly released book by the demographers Spears and Geruso powerfully brought this thought home. According to demographic experts, our global population will peak between 2060 and the 2080s and based on existing birthrates, sometime after this humanity will begin to depopulate. This does not mean stabilising at a number near present numbers but continuously declining decade by decade such that within 300 hundred years a peak population of 10 billion could fall below 2 billion.
You may think ‘so what’ as it’s unlikely many of us are going to be around in 2080 to worry about the future. Others may believe this will be good for environmental restoration or food and water management. However, there are massive implications of an exponentially decreasing population on living standards, economic growth, government revenue generation, public infrastructure management, innovation delivery or environmental protection. Not to forget what obligations those of us now living believe we owe those yet to be born of the enjoyment of similar or better lifestyles that many of us are privileged to now experience. This is why attitudes to ageing and older people may continue to be a seriously contested social issue. Governments potentially faced with significant revenue and cost pressures driven by a world of collapsing birth rates will be forced to determine where their policy priorities need to focus – encouraging increased birthrates, managing an ageing population or walking a precarious tightrope between the two extremes.
Based on current practice, wage earners of the future will be expected to carry the tax burden to fund government services. And as we know now, most wage earners are the younger within society. Yet demographic projections indicate this will be an ongoing shrinking population cohort. Thus, a major consequence of the potential lack of a robust young demographic to support the economy and an ageing population will be governments struggling to maintain current living standards. The clear risk is future generations will be poorer and have lower levels of opportunity than we currently enjoy. If we think the issue of intergenerational inequity is a major issue now, the future suggests this problem will only intensify. This will be great for the media but not for those focused on strengthening social cohesion.
Spears and Geruso explain the populous world we currently inhabit on the scale of humanity’s hundred-thousand-year history is new, with one of every five people who have ever lived being born in the 225 years since 1800. And just as quickly as we have gotten to this situation it’s about to be over. The book’s authors contend for as long as reliable records exist, and for at least several hundred years since the 1800s, the average number of births per woman has been falling, generation by generation. ABS data reveals Australia mirrors this global trend with birthrates virtually halving in over 60 years from 3.5 per woman in the late 1950s to 1.48 births in 2024. A recent Sydney Morning Herald news article notes current demographic trends suggest that by 2100, the population of several major economies will have halved.
Further, another recent Financial Times article explored how demographic change is in the process of transforming the global economy with graphic detail about the near-term impacts of depopulation particularly in Europe and East Asia. The article detailed how researchers have coined the term ‘slow euthanasia’ to describe how demographic decline is undermining both local production and the demand for goods and services.
According to forecasts by international organisations, this article pointed out, by 2060 demographic factors will significantly slow down the growth of living standards in many wealthy countries. In Japan by 70%, in the UK and South Korea by 40%, and in Germany by 80%, whilst in Italy and Greece an absolute fall in living standards is possible. More optimistically, the forecast for the USA is that the depopulation effect will be almost unnoticeable.
A 2020 report by Australia’s CSIRO on potential future living standards presented the potential of them improving despite depopulation risks, based on our willingness to urgently invest in economic reforms that drive productivity and growth improvement opportunities. Major investments in technology and worker skills were highlighted as critical infrastructure investments. A failure to drive these changes they warn could see living standards sink to bleak levels over the next four decades in a potential mirroring of the European and East Asia scenario projections.
Ageing and the Seneca Effect: A Recipe for Disaster
If this was not sobering reading, then along comes Dr Joe Coughlin, the Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Age Lab writing a prescient piece on the perils of governments and business doing little to adapt to the demographic current flowing beneath our existing world. He warns of impending crisis.
His premise is that whilst demography is the most predictable force shaping markets, politics, and society because cohorts move through society in ways that can be forecast decades in advance, the institutions and industries built on earlier demographic realities appear to suddenly collapse once certain population thresholds are crossed. Coughlin borrows the Seneca Effect concept from systems theorists to make his point. The Seneca Effect notes that systems that deteriorate gradually can collapse quickly once certain thresholds are crossed. This concept is named after the Roman philosopher Seneca who once observed that “increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
Coughlin argues most decision-makers build on what has always worked or what is seen as the core business. Systemic momentum is created by institutions continuing to rely on historical business development assumptions to guide their decision-making. Industries constructed during periods of population growth assume a steady flow of new consumers and workers. Infrastructure embeds those assumptions. Capital investments reinforce them. Entire operating models are built around them.
Yet all the time companies continue to invest in ‘business as usual’ decisions, the underlying and changing demographic signal is visible. Consequently, existing systems may continue to function normally for years or decades despite the underlying changes in demographic arithmetic. Thus, institutional responses continue until the arithmetic can no longer support them and the result can look less like gradual decline than sudden disruption.
Coughlin uses Japan as a case-study. He points out that for decades, falling fertility and urban migration steadily reduced populations in rural towns – a well-known demographic trend. However, the institutional consequences such as school closures, disappearing local businesses, and municipal fiscal crises, arrived rapidly once communities fell below critical population thresholds. And we are seeing signs of similar trends happening in Australia. The federal government’s Centre for Population reports that internal migration has driven populations down in the past five years in key industrial areas, identifying Mount Isa, Whyalla, Broken Hill and Port Pirie as highly exposed regions. Ageing populations in these areas are compounding the losses from internal migration. These towns face serious revitalisation challenges with the decline in local industry.
Coughlin’s lesson for business leaders is essentially wake up. Demographic change rarely produces sudden shocks. Rather, the business risk is that slow demographic change can quietly alter the viability of systems and investments built for different population realities. And it also seems, the longer no action is taken to adapt to demographic change, the more reactionary, complex and expensive, solution decision-making becomes.
The Need for Transformative Action Now
So, what can be done to minimise the potential for ageing and older age to become a more contested issue in the future? And why the urgency? Whilst the future always seems far away, the passage of fifty years is less than a milli-second relative to the time our earth has existed. When thinking about the issue, reflect on how little progress we have made in changing attitudes to ageing and older people in the past 50 years in Australia. We have known about the impacts of ageing populations from the late 1980s. Since then, federal governments have published six Intergenerational Reports and a National Inquiry into Employment Discrimination. Lots of analysis has been produced, but tangible policy outcomes creating changing attitudes towards age and ageing have been almost non-existent. In the meantime, the demographic Seneca scenario has continued to build momentum.
A further Intergenerational Report is due later this year with, according to our Federal Treasurer a big focus on driving intergenerational equity. Any suggestion in the upcoming Report that just working longer and putting our faith in AI technology to address the impacts of demographic change will no longer cut it. We are now at the stage where the issue of demographic management requires commitment to a fundamental social transformation. We no longer have the luxury of letting fifty years let alone five years slip by with minimal change to our current attitudes to ageing with a rapidly approaching declining population phenomenon.
Global experts, a recent article in Time highlighted, are beginning to explore how this transformation might unfold. In a refreshing and novel premise, relative to the existing negative attitudes to ageing and older people, these experts are starting with the position that older people are not an economic or social burden, but an untapped source of talent, experience and social glue. These experts acknowledge the existing fundamental institutions of education, work and retirement as they currently operate will not be fit for purpose to support a population with the age distribution we are going to have. They recognise the need for more creative and flexible thinking in these areas to overturn the traditional norm of learning, work and retirement continuing to hold sway.
Aligned with this thinking, the Financial Times article highlights other demography specialists arguing that society needs a large-scale shift towards older workers, similar to how conditions were created for the active involvement of women in the labour market in past decades. The main obstacle, these specialists identify, is not at face-value the above-mentioned traditional norm surrounding work structure, but a more prosaic employer prejudice to hiring older people.
Coughlin, also is challenging governments and organisations to examine whether the assumptions, strategies, and capital investments they are investing in might be sitting on a demographic foundation that's already shifted.
There is a clear case for change in managing current attitudes to age and ageing within the context of impending population decline. The question is how best this should be done. Will it be best to leave it to individual institutions as a largely bottom-up change approach or be better guided by a federal government policy led programme? We were fascinated by the Federal Government Treasurer Jim Chalmers discussion with Nobel-prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz, where he observed ‘about every 40 years, or so, we build ourselves a new economy and we’re now due for one’. The veiled takeaway is that the neoliberal economic era has run of out of steam with persistent issues of low growth, stagnant productivity, low wage growth, increasing inequality and the rise of political populism.
Certainly, over the past decades, we have seen the rise of short-term transactional business behaviour with its narrow focus on profit maximisation and anti-competitive practice. The argument is hard to make that the corporate sector has been a leader in driving social change, despite evidence that opportunities such as gender equality and improving diversity and inclusion have a demonstrated business upside. If, after forty years, women are still fighting for equality, it is hard to envisage business spearheading initiatives to eliminate ageism, embrace older workers and age inclusive workforces anytime soon.
We are of the view federal governments will be the major catalyst in shaping the ageing agenda and encouraging new and positive attitudes towards people of all ages, particularly if they create a modern new economic structure reflecting the reality we’re living longer and that longevity is a positive contributor to our world. Government will provide the incentive to compel the business sector to overcome its antipathy to ageing within the workforce.
The great thing is encourAGEEQUALITY is not the only organisation spruiking for major change. We’re happy to stand with EveryAge Counts and COTA (Council of the Ageing) in their active pursuit of changing attitudes to ageing. We’re with the recent COTA report examining the state of Australia from an older person perspective. We support their recommendation for a 10-year plan for Australia’s ageing population to be created with clear and measurable actions across government, business and civil society including a special focus on tackling ageism and age discrimination.
Our own perspective is such an initiative will require a kick start through the creation of a specific new focus within the Government Cabinet structure. We believe to drive change in attitudes to ageing the appointment of a Minister for Longevity during the current parliamentary term is critical. This role will be responsible for addressing employment discrimination, the economic dimensions of longevity, increasing the labour force participation of older Australians and developing creative policy solutions to changing the traditional education, work, retirement thinking paradigm. We acknowledge this recommendation formed part of a suite of recommendations resulting from the 2016 Australian Human Rights Commission “Willing to Work: National Inquiry into Employment Discrimination Against Older Australians and Australians with Disability. The lapse of ten years in reinforcing this recommendation confirms how little the issue and impacts of ageing has been a political priority for governments of all persuasions.
A major first step of this new Cabinet role will be to establish a compelling case for social and business change to provide a foundation for transforming attitudes to ageing. To get this ball rolling, we advocate a Public Inquiry into the impacts of ageing on all aspects of Australia’s economic performance, similar to that currently being undertaken within the UK. Our expectation of this Inquiry will be development of policies necessary to adapt to this future and identification of the broader behavioural changes that may be required.
Finally, while this Inquiry is being undertaken, we would amend the relevant existing legislation to require mandatory reporting on age management trends within private and public organisations with over 100 employees. We contend the compulsory capturing of organisation age-based data will provide transparency and the required incentive for organisations to begin changing their behaviours towards ageing and embracing the benefits of multi-generational and age-inclusive workforces.
Having been born at a time where our own births have contributed to an ever-growing world population, imagining what the world will be like when populations begin to decline is challenging. Quite possibly, some of the fears expressed in this newsletter might be completely unfounded. Human behaviour always has the capacity to surprise. However, a future where ageing and older age is a more difficult political and economic issue than it is now, would be a terrible reflection on all our current leaders, decision-makers and opinion-shapers. The ability to prevent this outcome is well within our existing ability to shape the future. Whatever our position in the world, we are all decision-makers when it comes to determining attitudes to ageing. We are inspired by the recent words of the chairman of COTA, Christopher Pyne, the ex-Liberal politician who observed:
“The true test of a mature nation is not how it treats its people at their peak, but how it values them across the whole of life. And when we build systems that work as we age, we build a society that works better for everyone.”
We do not have a moment to lose in building the society that works better for everyone. The twin currents of declining birthrates and increasing longevity flow ever stronger beneath our everyday world. Minimising any future risk of ageing becoming a more contested space requires a positive systemic transformation to the view of older people as valuable social and economic assets. Such a transformation needs everyone irrespective of age to equally share the load in making the change, in the process rebuilding the notion of ‘a one for all’ community rather than continuing to amplify difference through an ongoing focus on perceived generational disadvantage. Only then, do issues of age become irrelevant.
References
Spears, D & Geruso, M. (2025). After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People. The Bodley Head. London.
Financial Times. (2026). ‘Five ways demographics are transforming the global economy.’ (March 6)
Coughlin, J. (2026). ‘Your Next Crisis Has a Name: The Demographic Seneca Effect’. LinkedIn (March 11)
Sydney Morning Herald. (2026). ‘Solving depopulation needs more than baby steps.’ (March 17)
Nine News. (2020). ‘What living in Australia could look like by 2060, according to nation's top scientists’ (Sept. 7). https://www.9news.com.au/national/australia-quality-of-life-csiro-outlook-report-2060-government-economy-social-housing-climate-policies/bb04df5c-0591-4dfc-b0e4-605560763157
The Monthly. (2026). ‘The Treasurer and the Economist.’ (February 26).
Time. (2026). ‘The New Old Age: The Golden Years Are Getting an Upgrade” (January 26).
Sun Herald. (2026).’In key regions for Albanese’s future vision, populations are diminishing.’ (April 5).
COTA. (2026). State of the Older Nation 2025 Report
