I wrote the first version of this article more than a decade ago saying, that “with more than 70 million baby boomers set to pass the age-65 threshold over the next 20 years, the United States is facing the costs of supporting an aging population. This is the main reason that federal budget deficits going forward will be so huge; we can’t afford current Medicare expenditures for so many more people.”
I then compared the percentage of the U.S. population age 65 and over with that of other developed countries. Here’s what the numbers were in 2013 as compared to 2023:
2013 2023 % change
Australia 13.2% 17.2% 30%
France 16.6% 21.8% 31%
Japan 22.1% 29.3% 33%
UK 16.1% 19.2% 19%
US 12.8% 17.4% 36%
All the developed world is getting older, with the United States doing so at a bit higher rate than comparable countries and the United Kingdom at a significantly lower rate. But we’re still younger than this small sample of countries, except for Australia.
The relative age of a nation depends on three major factors: birthrate, longevity, and immigration (or emigration). We fare relatively poorly on longevity. The reason we have stayed young relative to our cohort is that we have had significantly more immigration than these other nations over the last decade. This has also kept our birthrate a bit higher because immigrants, at least in the United States, tend to have more children than native-born Americans.
Here are some life expectancy statistics:
At Birth Add’l. Years Past Age 65 (women) Add’l. Years Past Age 65 (men)
Australia 83.2 22.9 20.3
France 82.2 21.8 18.3
Japan 84.0 25 20
UK 82.1 20.8 18.3
US 77.4 20.2 17.5
Of these countries, the United States is the only one whose longevity has declined over the last decade. Though our overall life expectancy is significantly lower than that of the other countries in our comparison group, life expectancy at age 65 is only slightly lower, except for that of Japan, especially for women. Japanese women at age 65, on average, can expect to live almost five years longer than American women at the same age.
Birthrate is generally measured as the average number of births per woman, with 2.1 being the so-called “replacement rate” that would keep a population static. Here are the current numbers for our sample countries:
Australia 1.63
France 1.79
Japan 1.26
UK 1.57
US 1.66
As you can see, these are all relatively close except for Japan, which has an extremely low birthrate. Combined with its low rate of immigration, Japan is facing some severe demographic challenges. (I discuss this in my Risking Old Age In America blog.)
Immigration has kept the U.S. population growing despite our low birthrate from 316 million in 2013 to 335 million in 2023, a growth of about 6 percent. Here are the immigration rates for our comparison countries:
Number (millions) Percent
Australia 4.1 18%
Japan 1.0 0.8%
UK 2.2 3.4%
US 6.5 2.1%
These numbers are actually a bit difficult to come by. They are not readily available for France and the United Kingdom is an interesting case in point. It actually had 6.8 million immigrants during the decade between 2013 and 2023 but due to out migration it had a much smaller growth in its immigrant population. This may have been due to Brexit making it much more difficult for immigrants from the European Union to live and work in the United Kingdom, so this may change in future decades.
Nevertheless, the trends are clear. Australia is welcoming a huge number of newcomers which probably is a major reason that though it was slightly older than the United States in 2013 it is a bit younger in 2023. Japan accepts very few immigrants which is contributing to the severe aging of its population. The United States is in the middle, but with the current anti-immigrant sentiment that helped elect Donald Trump we may be moving in the direction of Japan.
These numbers are important because demography is destiny. The relative sizes of any country’s older and working-age populations has a lot to do with the vibrancy of its economy and its ability to support those who are dependent on others, whether children or retirees.
(One question these numbers pose, at least for me, is that if the United States had a net inflow of immigrants of just 6.5 million and a birthrate well below the replacement rate, how did the U.S. population grow by 19 million from 2013 to 2023. I believe the answer had to do with the relative sizes of the different age cohorts in the United States. We have very few members of the silent generation, a lot of baby boomers, and a lot of millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996. Though the silent generation is passing on, their numbers are small. The baby boomers are not dying in large numbers yet and the millennials are having a lot of babies. Even if they’re not having so many per person, there are so many of them, that a relatively high number of babies are being born, at least as compared to the number of deaths each year in the United States. As a result, the population continues to grow at a slow rate, at least for now.)