The Great Demographic Reversal Quotes

“While birth rates have been going down sharply in most of the advanced countries, this has not been so in much of the Indian subcontinent, and particularly not so in Africa. There will be a massive rise in the available working population in these parts of the world. Just as the production of goods was shifted from the West into China over the last three decades, could a similar shift lead to the production of goods moving to the Indian subcontinent and, particularly, to Africa, where the rate of growth of the working population in countries like Nigeria and the Congo will be quite remarkable over the next few decades?”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“Indeed, if one was a cold-hearted economist, whose sole aim was to maximise GDP, or even better GDP per head, then one’s advice on the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic would have been to do absolutely nothing, to ignore it entirely and let it take its course. It primarily affects the elderly; the average age of death so far in the UK has been about 80; and even then the younger deaths are mainly amongst those with other severe medical problems, co-morbidity in the jargon. This is a group largely dependent on others to help with daily living, and thus stopping their carers from producing goods and other services to swell GDP per head.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“We are not aware of any attempt to measure the cost of the reduced quality of life explicitly, for example, in order to undertake a cost/benefit exercise on proposals to deploy greater resources towards research or care for dementia.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“There are, at least, four sets of explanations for such worsening trends in within-country inequality. These are: i. Ineluctable Trends ii. Technological Changes iii. Growing Monopoly Power and Concentrations iv. Globalisation and Demography”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“There are two main databases, the World Bank’s PovcalNet database and the World Inequality Database. Out of the many potential measures of inequality we initially select four, (but they all tend in the same directions), to wit (i) the Gini coefficient,3 Diagram 7.1, for a number of OECD countries, (ii) for a few selected countries the share of income of the top 10 and 1% of the distribution, Tables 7.1 and 7.2, and (iii) the share of wealth for the top 10%, Table 7.3. We show these latter data points for the income inequality data at five-year intervals for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy Japan, China, Brazil, Egypt and India, and the wealth inequality data for four countries, USA, China, France and UK.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“conclusions? It would have been quite a task. Fortunately, a group of Birkbeck economists (Aksoy et al. 2015) have undertaken an econometric and theoretical study of the consequences of such demographic changes. Since we largely accept both the direction of travel, and rough magnitudes, of most of their results, we have simply reproduced their main table (Table 5.2).”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“Juselius and Takats (2016) uncover an empirical relationship—‘a puzzling link between low-frequency inflation and population-age structure : the young and old (dependents) are inflationary whereas the working age population is disinflationary’. They use data from 22 countries between 1955 and 2014, breaking up that time period so they are not biased by periods of high or low inflation. Their analysis shows that 6.5% of the disinflation in the USA from 1975 to 2014 can be accounted for by age structure. The age structure, they argue, ‘is forecastable and will increase inflationary pressures over the coming decades’.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“About 90 per cent of Chinese seniors rely mainly on family support, 7 per cent on residential community-based care services and 3 per cent on nursing homes, according to the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, a consultancy.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“Combining these two trends together means that the life cycle is now distinctly different from that, say, 40 or 50 years ago. In a simplified time line back then, we could divide life up into some four stages (Table 4.6):- Table 4.6The changing life cycle Traditional life-cycle used to be 0–20 20–40 40–60 60–70+ Young Married (Work) with dependent children Working No dependents Retired Nowadays the life cycle has five segments: 0–20 20–30 30–50 50–67 67–80+ Young Single (Working) Married (Work) with dependent children Working with dependent”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“some four stages (Table 4.6):- Table 4.6The changing life cycle Traditional life-cycle used to be 0–20 20–40 40–60 60–70+ Young Married (Work) with dependent children Working No dependents Retired Nowadays the life cycle has five segments: 0–20 20–30 30–50 50–67 67–80+ Young Single (Working) Married (Work) with dependent children Working with dependent”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival