"We have maybe five years before gerontocratic lock-in becomes permanent."

Writer and think tanker Jeff Giesea understands the significance of the demographic time bomb.

Our cities aren’t ready for this.

I got a bit of a jolt when I read Jeff Giesea’s recent post Boomer caregiving will wreck our politics, with the subhead “We have maybe five years to escape gerontocratic capture.” I have been writing about this issue five years ago when I was at the Mother Nature Network, but all my posts said we had 10 years to solve it, and nothing has been done.

Giesea has a 73-year-old friend, Steve (my age), and describes how this gives him “a window into the caregiving tsunami hitting society as boomers age into their 70s and 80s. Here’s what I’m realizing: it’s going to wreck our politics. We are not prepared — emotionally, politically, financially — for what it means to care for tens of millions of aging boomers while also trying to invest in the future for our children.”

Giesea looks at the same population pyramids I have used and notes that “The coming caregiving wave is a macro force that will reshape the labor market, housing, budgets, immigration, taxes, and even the cultural and emotional landscape of American life.”

In her last years, after a terrible fall, my late mother was cared for by a flying squad of young Filipino women admitted to Canada under a caregiver immigration program; if the head caregiver needed a day off, she had a relative or friend who could fill in. Giesea wonders, “What happens when the Venezuelan woman caring for your mom with Alzheimer’s gets deported?”

Giesea continues:

Here’s my prediction: In the 2030s, boomer caregiving will frame every other issue. And it will prolong the transition to a post-boomer world.

The political outcome I’m most worried about is gerontocratic capture, a structural inability to invest in the future. I fear we’ll delude ourselves that we can “do it all” and pile on ever more debt, setting ourselves up for financial implosion just as boomers die, leaving the rest of us with Weimar levels of instability.

He concludes:

“We need to start making tough decisions now, not in ten years when it’s a full-blown crisis. We have maybe five years before gerontocratic lock-in becomes permanent.”

Giesea wrote an earlier post also worth reading, in which he notes, “The hard truth is that the postwar American model is unsustainable and must be reformed. We need to internalize this.”

The boomer reckoning no one's ready for

Five or so years ago, I pitched a book about this subject to my publisher, who politely rejected it, suggesting that nobody wants to read about this subject. I think he was probably wrong; my most popular post ever repeats the key points.

The demographic time bomb is about to detonate

Here’s a bit of the book pitch again; I am republishing it because it is so close to Giesea’s. Perhaps if enough people keep making this point, something might actually address the problem instead of ignoring it. Again, this was written five years ago, so subtract five from all the predictions.

The coming crises caused by aging baby boomers like me

What has to be done, right now, is prepare for the inevitable, the serious ageing of the baby boom generation They are not there yet, and do not really think about the problem much, because they do not actually believe that it is going to happen to them; a recent study shows that almost everyone thinks they are 20 percent younger than they really are. Getting old doesn’t happen until it happens, and these days, for most people who are not in dire poverty, that happens in their late seventies and into the eighties. That doesn’t start for a couple of years and doesn’t really explode for another ten.

So what will really happen?

What goes first and when

Baby boomers today are what gerontologists are now calling the “young-old”, and which others call the “new middle age”. 75 percent of baby boomers live in nice houses in nice suburbs, drive private cars to work or play, don’t much like paying taxes, and think that they can keep living this way forever.

They can’t. In about 2026, the first baby boomers will hit 80, when they become the “old-old.” They then are joined by 10,000 other boomers every day, until by 2029 the entire baby boomer cohort is over 65 and compose a whopping 20 percent of the population, with well over half being old-old.

The Canadian demographer David Foot wrote that “demographics can explain two-thirds of everything.” That may have been an underestimation. If you look a decade down the road, what you have are pretty close to still 70 million baby boomers, most of whom are going to keep going for another twenty years, going through the “great boomer die-off,” which runs pretty much to 2050. In the meantime, we have a series of related crises, any one of which would be a serious problem.

The most obvious is the housing crisis, with millions over-housed, thinking that they can “age in place.” But this isn’t a matter of whether they can get in and out of the tub or up the stairs. The real problem is “how do I get out of this place”- the ability to drive is one of the first things to go, and most do not live in walkable communities, they are car dependent. Some will try to sell, downsize and move, but where to? Fully half will have too much money for subsidised housing and not enough for retirement housing. One study from Harvard concluded:

We project that by 2029 there will be 14.4 million middle-income seniors, 60 percent of whom will have mobility limitations and 20 percent of whom will have high health care and functional needs. While many of these seniors will likely need the level of care provided in seniors housing, we project that 54 percent of seniors will not have sufficient financial resources to pay for it.

• There is a transportation crisis, where we won’t be able to cope with the number of people who can’t drive. Currently seniors transportation services can cost as much as fifty bucks a ride; Imagine when untold millions are trying to get around.

• There will be a health care crisis, because older people account for half of health care spending now, and the proportion will continue to grow.

• There will be an urban design crisis, where sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate the numbers of older pedestrians, the mobility devices, the walkers, where every intersection will turn into a death zone.

• Coincidentally (although some blame the boomers and would say it’s no coincidence at all) a decade from now is also about the deadline the IPCC says we have to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent or we will have a temperature rise of over 1.5 degrees C and possibly run into serious runaway climate crisis. To keep the temperature rise below 1.5, we have to make radical changes in the way we live, the way we get around, and what we consume.

• To top it all off, we have a crisis of governance, with baby boomers voting to elect conservative and populist governments who promise to keep things the way they are, who won’t do anything about climate change, who won’t raise the taxes needed to fix what we have, let alone plan for the future. We have baby boomers who fight every bike lane or transit line because it might slow down their driving or remove their parking. Who don’t think about how they will get around when they are old-old and can’t drive anymore. Who don’t think about who will care for them when all the drawbridges are pulled up. This is why some have called them a generation of sociopaths.

This is our crisis scenario, about a decade from now when we have 70 million seriously ageing baby boomers, mostly alone, trapped in their suburban homes that they cannot afford to keep cool or dry because of a rapidly changing climate, possibly in the middle of an intergenerational political war.

And if you are not depressed enough: Another old post where you have to subtract five years because it is all closer than you think.