worldview. from 12 to one every weekday. become quite friendly with ted fishman of the years. we talked about his previous book. shock of gray. don't delighted to be here. talking about the book. .. >> when i wrote "china inc.," i would go to china to the businesses that you need to go to understand china which are the big power cities, and it just struck me over and over again how flush with youth they are. and then you'd come home back to your american city, and you'd fly in, and the city you used to think was bustling seems a little slower, and then the employment statistics in the u.s., in europe, elsewhere in east asia tell you there's a huge employment problem with older workers. they're not old people, but they're older workers, 50 plus. and i was wondering whether the youth that was pouring into the cities, you know, on the trails of a trillion or maybe now it's $2 trillion of foreign capital flowing into china to attract young people to chinese cities to work in factories that serve the world had something twood disenfranchisement of older workers elsewhere in the world. and i was interest inside this question, was there a kind of mass massive form of age arbitrage going on around the world because they had these age-related expensions, long vacations, higher salaries, big benefit packages that the world's capital was trying finds to shed that. and china seemed to be that place. it was so successful at attracting young people to the cities. you know, maybe now it's 200 million people have come off the chinese countryside into chinese cities, and you go into a chinese factory, and be i was hundreds of chinese factories, the thing that seems like the most essential bit of employment information in the hr office is whether you're under 25. >> how can china stay young with a one-child policy? they are manufacturing themselves to a grayer society. >> yeah. well, china right now is one of the world's youngest places, but it's -- ironically, it's one of the world's most rapidly aging. so demographers do talk about this one statistic which is the dependency ratio, how many people are working as compared to how many people need support from those working people. and then there's how many people are working for older people who need support. china is one of the lowest in the world, it's 1 to 12 which means there are 12 workers for every person who needs support. it's a little bit more than a generation into the one child per family policy. so the birthrate in china's been driven very, very low which is the thing that makes your country age the fastest, and china is now a very rapidly aging country. sometime this century, you know, it'll go from that 1 to 12 ratio to having about 30% of its population over 60, a huge and very, very rapid change, far faster than japan went through the change. it's about four times the rate of change. >> this whip saw ratio, though s is not going to be unusual as we will see it play out in many countries. you mentioned japan, but spain is another and lot of others. >> yeah. it seems to be almost a determine fistic thing. often the places we think of as flush with youth, you know, developing countries are really quite rapidly aging. mexico will be an older country demographically than the united states about two-thirds into this century if everything goes as we expect it to. um, and i was just at this event in aspen, the aspen environmental forum, and the head of the u.n. population division was there, and she went through the's new numbers which were just -- the u.n.'s new numbers. about 40% of the world is far below or enough below fertility, replacement fertility which means families are small enough to put them on this aging curve, about 40% are roughly at the replacement, and just under 20% are going. so this means that 40% of the world is on its way to where japan is today, where older places like spain is today. 40% we don't know and then all of the world's growth, population growth will come from just about 18% of the world's population. >> and japan has the eye-popping statistic of being the first modern nation to shrink unrelated to war or disease. that's an amazing thing. >> yeah. it is amazing. it's amazing when you're there because young people talk about it. you know, if your a young person -- if you're a young person in an aging japan, you feel like you have to do everything you can to separate yourself socially from this aging country. tokyo's huge. here we are in chicago, our metro area has around nine million people, tokyo has close to 40 million people. so there is a downtown chicago for every kind of age group in tokyo. there's a downtown chicago for people 16 and under. [laughter] and in the book i talk about, you know, the kind of radical fashion statements that young people have in be japan to separate themselves from anything that has to do, and it's like several standard deviations beyond lady gaga. [laughter] and then there's the downtown chicago for the people over 70. you know, and it's a long walking mall where all of the curves have been smoothed, where the street is smoothed, where the shopkeepers have been briefed to be patient as people recount their change. [laughter] it's the only mcdonald's in japan where you can bring your own sandwich. [laughter] because if you can't let people bring their own sandwich, nobody goes. [laughter] but now they go, and they sit, and they sit, and they sit. [laughter] and, you know, this is what can happen as a place ages is you get these radical shifts. now, it happened in japan, i think, for the same reasons that are surprising elsewhere in the countries that really aggressively assert that they are pro-family, you know, that family means everything as part of our values. so in east asia, in southern europe these are the places that when you talk to people, they say, you know, we put family first, family is always first, every weekend is with family, we reserve sundays for family. but the places that are the most pro-family also put the most burden on the women in the families. so when women have an out from those burdens either as daughter or daughter-in-law through education, through the accessibility of birth control, through the job market, they tend to take them in any way they can. so japan did this very early in a surprising way. following world war ii, the japanese were worried that mixed marriages between the japanese and the gis would create a mongrel race, so they allowed for abortion laws. and when those abortion laws went into effect, japanese women took advantage of that possibility for themselves, and the japanese baby boom unlike every other baby boom post-world war ii, it only lasted four years. and that's why japan is ahead of the world demographically in terms of aging, because its baby boom is so much shorter. >> i guess the thing that strikes me as really scary about japan is the way they don't have any immigrants. and in this country if you go around and look at who's taking care of our elderly, it is lots of immigrants. and we're importing nurses and doctors and everything in between. and in japan they don't import anybody. they rely on their family members, and this is crushing the whole situation even more. >> yeah, that's exactly so. um, they do have robots. and part of the japanese robot industry is designed exactly to serve the lack of younger people who would otherwise if ill -- fill in these care jobs. so there's lots of robots that will feed an older person at the table. and they have all kinds of household systems that monitor people. um, but the immigrant situation in japan is peculiar because politically you can't be pro-immigrant. in fact, politically you have to be very anti-immigrant. but when you drill down into the companies and you walk into a japanese factory or into the japanese fields, you see a kind of stealthy immigration that's there. they have a trainee program that allows people to be there, i think it's five years. and they incentivize them if you learn japanese after three years, the government will give you or the company a payout. and they bring in first ethnic japanese from other places. so you see these people that look sort of japanese and sort of don't, they've got red hair, and they speak portuguese, but their part of japan's previous attempts to ameliorate its threat. when japanese families were too big and sons of large families had to move to brazil, to peru, to the united states to alleviate the demographic pressures of that time. but you also see indonesians, filipinos. you know, jerome, i lived in indonesia for some time, and i speak the language, so when we were out in the fields north of tokyo, i saw all of these dmawcial hanging on a line, and i said, oh, are there end news yangs here? and the gentleman who was our guide who has fields there, and he also has giant fields in mongolia, he said, yes, we do. and we got out and talked to some of the indonesian girls who are there. and they said, oh, yeah, the japanese guys are really interested in us. [laughter] >> one of the things about your book is demographics are so interesting, and what's going on there you can really get drunk on the numbers. and the trends and the wonkiness of all of this. but in your book you go to great lengths to personalize all this and to tell stories about people, your family, all sorts of individuals who are experiencing what it's like to live really long lives. how did you balance the wonkiness and the personal story telling here? >> oh, thank you. well, that's exactly what i'm after, you know? i do believe we often are in a position where we live these big, global trends, you know? like the emergence of china or the demographic shift, and we only read about them in the vocabulary of numbers. but these are the trends that we are changing ourselves, you know, from the ground up. so in my own family, you know, i like to think about my dinner table at a big holiday gathering. you know, when i was a kid, you know, thanksgiving had this giant, rowdy table of 20 kids or, you know, depending on who showed up that year, and then this small, sad table of really old people over 50. [laughter] >> they ate on the china, and everything was nice and clean. >> right. and they were talking about their ibm stock. [laughter] and we were having a lot of fun stealing each other's food and running around the table. now when i go to thanksgiving, there's this really fun table of young people over 50 -- [laughter] and there's this small table of the children of the family. and when i go around the country and i say how many people have this -- why don't we do this test right now. how many people in the audience have fewer siblings than their parents had siblings, raise your hands. okay. i don't know if camera caught that, but about two-thirds of the hands went up. if i said how many of you your parents had fewer siblings than your grandparents had siblings, raise your hand. okay. that didn't work so well. [laughter] that was about half. must be a lot of immigrant families in the room. but that's the story, that's the story of the world. you know, we're all in this kind of shrinking pyramid. and, you know, once you start thinking about is this, you see it changing the way your family works, in your workplace, you know, your boss is east trying to -- either trying to shed the older workers, depending on the knowledge. you see it in politics here in the city, you know, is the city going to -- in chicago or any city in america, is it going to continue to attract young people in a world that is not producing more young people? you know, the proportion of young people staying very constant. and you see it in geopolitics. the arab spring, for example, we see huge squares of people in foreign lands filled with young people, and then americans start to get nervous. and i wanted to get to the bottom of that by talking about the people who are living the change at every step, you know? from your own life all the way to geopolitics. >> and it's interesting that, um, i mean, people are living longer, so even though there are places that are shrinking, the number of years humans are living on the planet is going up exponentially. it's kind of crazy. >> i don't know if they're going up exponentially. [laughter] but they are going up impressively. so americans have added, you know, between one and a half and two and a half year of life every decade for the last 120 years. that's huge. and, you know, one of the things i think that's really hard to understand about an aging world is that it's also a growing world. you know? so as the places where we all live are on this aging trajectory, the world's still going to add around seven, i mean, three billion people to the seven billion already on the planet. i learned this weekend that the u.n. projects that the clock will turn on seven billion people on halloween. [laughter] and it seems like a frightening scenario, but, you know, we have three billion to go, and one of the reasons for this is that we add years of life. it's not just that we're adding people, but we're adding years of life. so if you take the cohort that lives on the planet now and you compare them to a seven billion people who might have lived at the time of the caesars, there weren't seven billion people then, but the difference in life span is so long that we are now living around 280 billion more years than we would have if we were all living in the time of is caesars. when you think about that, 280 billion additional years and life span is still growing. sometimes you wonder whether we need another planet to support it all. >> and while we're living so much longer, it's, it's an amazing thing to think about. reading about the woman who gave -- [inaudible] the money. she's 100 years old, she's still doing pilates. [laughter] and, you know, one of the statistics in your book was if a couple lives over 63, the odds are one of them will live to 90 or beyond? >> that's right. that's right. and i'm going to live to 63, but i think the odds are that my wife will live to 90. [laughter] yeah, these are the statistics we all have to live with. you know, one of the things that really strikes me about this aging dynamic is, first of all, it's the best news the world's ever had. we are not going to give back this gift of extra life. you know, we're living twice as long as our forebearers did for nearly all of human history. and we're living that long for good reasons, because we have better health, because we're educated, because we're literate. literacy is one of the greatest life-giving things the world has because it gives you access to information about how to live long. and those are all fantastic things. but, you know, just to prove the challenges of an aging world -- i lost track of the question. >> um -- [laughter] well, i was, oh, i just asked about, um, basically, you know, older -- how, you know, you end up doing pilates at 100 and things like that. >> oh, yeah. i was just in aspen where i was a speaker, and there are all of these women running around, you know, really young women with really perky breasts who have had plastic surgery done to make their faces look old. [laughter] maybe there's a new longevity chic going around. [laughter] but then you think about who's there in aspen, you know, and you need money to live ins aspen. usually it comes later in life. but people with hip replacements, with knee replacements, with cataract surgery, they're hitting the slopes in their 60s, 70s and even 80s. and it's pretty amazing. and, you know, as medicine gets democratized, this is also going to be a fact. the tragedy is that we have all of these active years at our disposal, but the workplace doesn't want to see them as valuable. you know, there's a big disconnect between when you're old in life and when you're old as a worker, and that's one of the tragedies that i explore in the book and how to overcome that. >> and different countries have different solutions it seems like. there's a lot of countries that do employ people older. japan, people stick with their jobs until they're older, but other -- europe, people get out. >> yeah. so, you're right. there's very, very big differences. japan, people do retire. they retire in large numbers around 60, but they retire with too little money to live on because they're going to live longer than anyone else in the world, and they're fearful of this, so they look for ways to reenter the work force. and because there's a dearth of younger people, employers are anxious to employ them. but it happens like this. you work in your japanese company, and i was at a really wonderful japanese company that makes auto parts for nissan cars that some of us drive. and you get to 60, you retire, you get your lump sum retirement payment, you get all kinds of thank yous. you go home, you sit at home. japanese men when they retire, they're called rotten garbage or stinky leaves by their wives. [laughter] because their wives have very busy social lives, and they kind of languish at home, they get a call, how would you like your old job back? and the guy goes, oh, yeah, i'd really like my old job back. and then they say, well, great, we'll have you, but you're going to make half your pay. you have your pension, and with your pay you'll be close to even, and the workers take it. japan has, um, of the g20 japan has the highest older work force participation of any country. um, korea actually has a little bit higher. >> that is a sneaky good deal for the company. >> it is a really -- and it's happening everywhere in the world. and this is the conversion of the work force to the contingent work force, especially in developed countries. for the first time ever, jerome, 50% of the world's work force is contingent labor which means people who most likely have lost their salaried jobs come baa in as contract -- come back in as contract workers, and in an aging work force this is what older people want and desire. they want to work longer, they need to work longer, but it's not always on the terms that they want. and employers in order to compete are willing to have great workers who are older at half the wage. >> you've got a section in the book on rockford, and rockford is really trying to compete and make itself viable again. it's got one of the gigantickest unemployment rates in the country, and they're really trying to noodle this whole competition thing. they've got some older people, but they're bringing in be immigrants, they're bringing in people who are former refugees, i think there's a burmese population in rockford now. >> that's right. i think there's 1600 burmese in rockford, midwest's best burmese restaurant. [laughter] well, rockford is emblematic of a kind of city that's all over the industrial world now. the mid-sized city that really couldn't keep up with the tides of globalization. it had a robust economy filled with companies that took advantage of the deal that the rest of the world offered them. they could move jobs out, hire low-cost, energetic workers unencumbered by age-related expenses elsewhere in the world. sometimes it's the american south, sometimes it's the south of china, but they leave places like rockford. and when the jobs leave rockford, young people don't like to stay in that kind of town either. so they go to other metropolises. maybe there are thriving other size places, very often bigger places like chicago or minneapolis. and then the town begins to feel old. and in rockford the majority white population there which is more than 70% of the population will tell you whenever you talk to them that rockford is an abling town -- aging town. the problem is we have to reverse our aging. and they elected a young mayor in his early 30s to turn this around. he ran on the platform of rejuvenating the town. but underneath the surface what thos