<Mr. Isshiki doesn't have any problem with working as long as he can. After retiring at age 60, he stayed on at his employer another five years at a reduced salary. Even now, in addition to calisthenics, study programs and extra exercise classes, he still helps write patent applications for engineers at his old company.
"When you have to do something for someone, it gives you an aim," he says. "I want to live like a spinning top -- keep going round till I drop.">
Kerry, as the economists found when the predicted a drop in savings rate as people aged, predictions are not quite as simple as one would think with people. Similarly, many people are starting to realize that the human population is going to drop precipitously over the next century and not just because of AIDS in Africa [a genuine catastrophe] and genocide in Jenin [a lie].
Women are choosing not to have children. For the first time ever, women have good control of fertility - they are not in thrall to lust and nature. They choose freedom, economic well-being and no children. Difficulty in finding a suitable [or even tolerable] breeding partner militates against reproduction too.
Mr Isshiki puts his finger on a human verity = sitting in a retirement home isn't necessarily better than going round and round. Oldies might choose not to sit at home in penury. Plenty of them who have managed their lives so that they enjoy good health in old age will prefer to do great stuff and participate in the spinning world as an active buyer and seller of effort.
Bernie Schwartz of Loral and Globalstar fame is nearing 80 and while his companies' failure suggests a gerontocracy isn't the ideal captaincy of industry, he seems to have a few clues. It's a free market - nobody had to entrust him with their money.
Irwin Jacobs retired at 53 or so, then decided he'd prefer to do something more interesting. So he started QUALCOMM and created many umpty $billions in value for customers of his company, suppliers, employees, shareholders and the citizens [via taxation]. He's nearing 70 and now we shareholders will start collecting dividends [albeit a paltry 5c a share for now, which I suppose will increase each year as is their wont].
Japan is no worry at all. A retired capitalist gerontocracy is a good thing. They ship their Toyota factories and phragmented photon cdma2000 light sabre cyberphone factories to China, India and elsewhere, sell their stuff around the world and enjoy a nice life in the retirement village in Toyama and Kamakura.
Old people are peaceable people. It's the unemployed and unemployable young males in communities who cause havoc and militarism. As human populations age, they'll become more tranquil.
If Japan's population drops to 50 million, so what? Their per capita income will continue to increase. It means that QUALCOMM will sell fewer cyberphones there, so income will drop and the rate of R&D will drop as there'll be less left on the bottom line to fund development and fewer people around to do the work. In Japan anyway.
But overall, the world's population is still booming ahead. So for the next 30 years, barring catastrophe, demand for cyberphones and supply of brainpower is going to increase.
Even when the population starts dropping, the supply of brainpower will continue to increase. That's because, apart from the Flynn Effect [which shows IQs around the world increasing each decade in 20 year olds - by about 5 points or so, which is dramatic stuff in itself], genetic engineering will kick in. Women will be ticking off a menu of desirable characteristics in their offspring like ingredients in a Subway.
"I'll have an ASTM 4 melanin level, 100 micrometre hair diameter,http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/BrianLey.shtml blond hair, 1.80 metres tall, hold the cystic fibrosis and sickle cells, throw in some extra telomeres, three shakes of the IQ powder, forget the memory [we're going to get the Google connection via cdma2000 1xEV-DO], ummm, ditch those oncogenes nature.com Oh, I see you are running a special on that new corneal polarized light filter - I'll take two of those thanks. How many Q is that? Oh, okay, well that's not a bad price, so what else have you got that's new?"
Doctors and a lot of medical industry people will go out of business when our built in defects are eliminated. Dentists will be redundant. Mercury poisoning a madness of the 20th century.
Mqurice |
