Italy’s love for life? Apparently, it's gone. Italians are now the least happy people in Western Europe.

Italians are older, poorer, and more in debt, contributing to their unhappiness. Italians' average age is 42, and they’re not having kids (there is a 0% growth rate). This year, Italy dropped three places to 20^th on the Human Development Index. The unemployment rate (7%) is high for a World 1 country. Italians have 106% public debt in proportion to their GDP (the sixth highest in the world). Even Italian staples aren’t selling well: sales of pasta and bread were down in 2007.

The Italian economy has relied on small, family-owned businesses that use cheap labor and produce high-quality products. But with competition from countries like China, these firms aren’t prospering in a globalized economy.

The nation seems angst-ridden and unsure how or whether to change. One Italian has devoted his entire blog to his country’s demise. At one level, it seems like Italy is just in a funk, but will it be able to get out? And, more importantly, is this what is going to happen to all aging World 1 countries? Or is Italy an outlier, while most of World 1 will adapt to new global realities?

Image: José Goulão (Flickr)

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© 2007 Jupiterimages CorporationThe US media turned its glare this week on the normally unexciting Social Security office in Washington, where Kathleen Casey-Kirschling was signing up for retirement benefits. Casey-Kirschling is, as far as anyone knows, the first US baby boomer, thanks to her birth a few seconds after midnight on January 1, 1946--and, as the nation’s reporters gloomily predicted, potentially one of the last beneficiaries of a golden age of American retirement.

Casey-Kirschling’s own comment--“I’m thrilled to think that after all these years, I’m getting paid back the money I put in”--may never be echoed by younger members of her own generation, let alone by Generation X-ers or Millennials. Eighty million retiring boomers might drive both Medicare and Social Security into debt well before 2020. Meanwhile, most American companies have stopped the defined-benefit pension plans that provided safety nets for earlier generations of retirees.

But is the future really so grim? In one of a three-brief series about boomer retirement published by our Global Lifestyles multiclient project (GL-2006-6: Boomers in Retirement—A Financial Forecast), we reported that boomers are actually about 50% better off today, in absolute terms, than their parents were at the same ages, by the yardstick of assets and income. And when incomes are adjusted to account for the smaller average size of boomer households, they are 65% better off.

However, as boomers age we found that they are likely to diverge into three distinct tiers: about 20% who will be very well off in retirement (including a segment who will be very, very well off: the top 1% of boomers hold more wealth than the bottom 80%); a middle tier of about 50% of boomers who will muddle through on savings, retirement accounts, and home equity; and a vulnerable 25% or so who face seniorhood with few assets--and more exposure to the vagaries of Social Security that Casey-Kirschling has so neatly sidestepped. Many in this last group could see declines in their standard of living once they stop working.

Which is exactly why so many boomers intend to continue working--76%, according to a Merrill Lynch survey. The business implications of this surge in older workers are fascinating, as we detail in another brief (GL-2006-19: Boomers in Retirement—A Lifestyle Forecast). For one thing, older boomer workers are much more likely than average workers to become entrepreneurs or temporary employees. Many companies could find themselves with two large, divergent groups of employees: senior boomers and 20-something millennials, potentially with little in common.

In short, boomers look set to reshape the US workforce yet once more before they exit the national stage. Now if they could only do the same for healthcare….

Just as I am working on a Global Lifestyles research brief on the emergence of "superslums" globally, word comes from the United Nations Population Fund that urbanization globally, particularly in Worlds 2 and 3, is accelerating and that future population growth will take place overwhelmingly in towns and cities, which will increase in both size and number, while the number of rural inhabitants declines. And the urban growth won't only be in megacities such as Mexico City, Mumbai, and Shanghai, but increasingly in towns and cities of 500,000 or less--which are sprouting rapidly in areas such as inland China and the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. Even in the US, new slums are emerging in unexpected places, such as the outskirts of Palm Springs.

As these cities grow and spread quickly, and as the rural poor and those living in urban cores move to these cities in search of new work and better living conditions, the rate of growth is far outstripping any ability to build sustainable, quality living environments--even if the will exists to do so. Such will itself is a rarity. The result is rapid emergence of new slums, and the convergence of many into superslums that ring and connect the urban environments that feed them.

As highlighted by the UN report, Cairo provides a case in point. Its population has doubled in the past 30 years, and much of this growth has taken place in 60-odd "informal areas" comprised of temporary housing, sometimes built in toxic wastelands. If Cairo's informal areas are anything like their global counterparts, they are places where black market economies reign, poor health conditions persist, and governmental control is practically nonexistent. The 1,200 informal areas mapped in Egypt overall contain almost a quarter of the country's inhabitants.

The implications of this data are taking shape even as these cities grow. Fundamentally, the next century or more globally will be shaped by the needs, creations, crises, and impacts of Asian and African megacities and life in their attendant superslums. Supply chains will be shaped by them, attitudes toward brands will be shaped by the experiences of sometimes radicalized youth that inhabit them, innovative product and service design will emerge from the needs of the consumers who live there, and resource flows will be controlled by their spread. Not much of an impact then, is it?

(Image: Social Technologies) 

The demographic challenges facing Europe are well-known, as aging and birthrates below the replacement level change the face of the EU. An article in Spiegel Online caught my eye because it tells a slightly different story, recounting how Germany is seeing a mini-baby boom nine months after it hosted the 2006 World Cup. 
As one doctor stated in the Spiegel Online article, “With many people the excitement they felt during the matches seems to have lasted and been employed in other ways after the final whistle.”

According to the article, registrations for prenatal classes are on the rise. A doctor at one hospital in Kassel, Germany anticipates a 10-15% increase in births.

Now, while this may just be a blip and have little effect on the long-term demographics of Europe, this phenomenon reminded me of some useful lessons to consider when thinking about the future:

The future is not just more of today—Demographics are among the most stable trends, but as this article reminds us things can and do change. Thinking about the future means not only looking at the most probably directions or outcomes, but also examining trigger events, countertrends, and discontinuities that could cause lower-probability change to emerge.

Consider unintended consequences—Thinking about the future means thinking broadly and connecting the dots between unrelated bits of information. It requires creativity, in combination with rigorous analysis. It means we need to think about the second and third-order impacts and implications as we consider different possible futures. The idea that the World Cup may have sparked this mini-baby boom reminds us to think beyond the obvious.

Don’t underestimate the power of people—When we think about the future it’s easy today to focus on new technologies. Technology is tangible, getting cheaper and spreading to every corner of the earth, and there’s no shortage of people who are willing to tell you where they think it is going. What’s harder to track and understand is people and what they need and want, but this task is a critical part of studying the future, and we’re happy to see more of our clients asking us to help them understand how consumer values are changing and even intersecting with technological change. This article about Germany reminded me that people are the real changemakers.

So…who’s next? Well, if there’s anything to this sport-induced baby boom thing China could be in for it…they’re hosting the FIFA Women’s World Cup this summer and then the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008.

(Image: Social Technologies) 

There is no doubting the global population is aging. From 2000 to 2050, the median age of the global population is projected to rise by 10 years, to 36.8 years, according to the UN. In Europe, the situation is more pronounced. European Commission data putsthe fertility rate for the EU-15 at 1.48 children per woman in 2003.  Replacement rate, or the rate at which births outpace deaths, is 2.1.  European legislators are well aware that the aging trend has major economic implications, including rising pension obligations paired with a shrinking tax base.

This last issue has now collided with, if you'll pardon the pun, a strange bedfellow in the question of whether or not European policies on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) are pro-growth. Setting aside the political or moral issues around the technology, researchers at Sheffield University in the UK have concluded that while it could cost around £13,000 to provide a full cycle of IVF treatment to parents unable to conceive on their own, a child born of that IVF treatment would contribute approximately £160,000 in taxes and insurance payments to the UK economy over a lifetime--a net gain to the government of £147,000 per additional child these policies would add to the population.

In its coverage of this perhaps cold-sounding proposal, the BBC points out that national governments currently look to migration as a means of getting a boost in populations. However, these migrants don't provide the same "net gain" in revenue as they may, in some cases, come with additional family members who require more public services and social support--something that may be less likely with a domestic birth to a family requesting IVF, the researchers imply.

This may simply be an academic argument for the time being--research that bolsters the British government's interest in increasing IVF treatment and providing more liberal social benefits to encourage families. However, it shows the new areas into which social policy and economic policy will increasingly tread as the aging crunch erodes the ability of governments  to maintain the social compact with its citizens and remain competitive. Somewhere out there, Aldous Huxley may be perking up an ear as this discussion evolves.

(Image: sxc.hu)