Agequake : riding the demographic rollercoaster shaking business, finance and our world.
Paul Wallace Nicholas Brealey Publishing. 2001

Over a long time now, companies and public bodies have been made aware of the raw facts of demographic change. Virtually anyone with a professional connection with market- or policy-planning surely by now knows the rough shape of demographic things to come. After so many books, articles, lectures, reports, forecasts, seminars… it has been a hard subject to miss.

But is it an easy subject to get right? We very much think not. Yes, it is true that shifts and bulges in the national age pyramid can with reasonable (but, incidentally, imperfect) accuracy be measured and anticipated. But there is that tricky business of the dialogue, the friction, the electricity between an ageing society and all the other socio-economic features of our age. The measurement of the impact of increased longevity cannot be a piece of simple arithmetic. For example, ageing population + worsening dependency ratios + limits to taxability = inevitable turmoil in national pensions. In the wider truth, all manner of other factors - rising incomes, stronger asset values, better health, flexible working/retirement regimes - interact with enhanced longevity to make the future complex, compound, comparable with no other, earlier time.

Paul Wallace is a former economics editor of the UK's The Independent. All the more pity, therefore, that he writes with all the tabloid excitability of a Kansas City cub. The theme he picks for his book is perfectly serviceable; and he wants to give it real dramatic oomph. But making logic is not the same as making lists. In the particular way he piles fact on fact, idea on idea, comment on comment, you can just hear him backing his rollercoaster into a cul-de-sac. Take these quotes :-

"As for housing, so for business. The demographic rollercoaster is soaring for some sectors, plunging for other. Business strategies everywhere are having to adapt to the shifting age structure of the population".

Or :-

"The average age of Australians fell by three years between 1950 and 1970; that of Canadians dropped to 25.5 in 1965. Cue the Beach Boys and quintessential youth movies like Easy Rider and The Graduate".

Or :-

"Pension reform has moved to the top of the policy pile. The temptation is to leave it to the politicians. The precise workings of pensions are forbiddingly abstruse and actual payments a long way off for most working people. Don't fall for the temptation. It's vital to keep tracks of what politicians are plotting. On past form, you can be sure that they will obfuscate their true intentions towards a vital part of your wealth".

All this frothy populism and all this quick-fire, home-spun, hurry-while-stocks-last wisdom makes for downright unreadability. As all these quotes suggest, the author seems to have no fixed idea about who his audience actually is and what it might be that he is trying to say to them. In the language of literary criticism, there is an utterly chaotic "point-of-view".

Worse, for all the demographic data on display, the analysis is relentlessly monochrome and non-dynamic. Worse still, it cannot resist occasional flights of hyperbole. It is as if only dramatically awful scenarios of the future are strong enough to make Wallace's turn-of-the millennium prediction of demo-revolution seem imminent and true. Pensions systems may buckle under the strain; economic growth may falter in the least demographically favoured countries; inter-generational conflicts may erupt. Yes, yes, yes. But so much of this has become a really quite dreary forecasting vernacular. Many of Wallace's anxieties about just how demographic change may toss our entire social order off the rails have been around for twenty years. Can we not do a bit better? Start the story anew? Have it catch up with new times, new developments, new emphases?

For example, the UK's treasury has come to take the view that the "agequake", can, in all its financial implications, be safely absorbed within the national accounts over the stretch of the next generation. Concern about weak dependency ratios (ie that we will have too many pensioners and too few workers) is just not cutting the same policy-making ice that it once did. The Treasury's Red Book in 2001 takes - rightly or wrongly - a generally relaxed view about demographically-inspired tensions within economic policy.

This may, as we say, be right or wrong in the event. But it is surely unimaginable that any rollercoaster rides at the same speed or in the same direction (up or down) all the time. By the year 2006, disposable income in the UK will have doubled against 1980. Asset values - as all those proponents of the theory of "mass affluence" now tell us - will meanwhile continue to swell. The point is that the threat to stability and good socio-economic order notionally contained within the "demographic timebomb" may well be being defrayed, reduced, altered all the while. Here is an issue which, from time to time, will simply need new legs, new teeth, new brains.

No less a figure than William Rees Mogg has apparently called this "a very important book". This is going much too far. Yes, Agequake (how we hate that title) contains some good stuff and some may find virtue in the author's obvious enthusiasm. But, for a massively complicated subject like this, we want detachment, a sense of intellectual history, some good old-fashioned perspicuity. And these things - and good writing with them - are just not here in sufficient measure.