Heart and Soul

Demographics: The Population Hourglass

Is the Church Ready for the Boomer Boom?

Your future is older, browner, and more feminine than you might have realized. That will make for some major lifestyle changes ("Welcome home, Mom!") and lots of huge opportunities for business.

From: Fast Company/Issue 103 March 2006 Page 56 By: Andrew Zolli

It's the futurist's first rule: You can't understand the future without demographics. The composition of a society--whether its citizens are old or young, prosperous or declining, rural or urban--shapes every aspect of civic life, from politics, economics, and culture to the kinds of products, services, and businesses that are likely to succeed or fail. Demographics isn't destiny, but it's close. Our leaders, as a rule, completely miss the boat on demographics and how it informs their own organizations, customers, and constituencies. And it's not hard to see why: Most executives aren't trained to make sense of demographic forecasts (there are no courses on demographics at Harvard Business School or Wharton, for example), and the field itself does little to raise its own profile. Demographers frequently come across like accountants--without all that sex appeal.

But that doesn't mean exciting and important things aren't happening. The United States of 2016 will find itself in the throes of demographic shifts that will upend our political, economic, and technological priorities and redefine our markets. From our age distribution to the color of our skin, we will look dramatically different.

To get a sense of what lies ahead, consider a simple demographic tool: the "population pyramid." Imagine that we took all of the people in a given population and stacked them up by age, putting all the infants at the bottom and all the centenarians up top. For most stable, peacetime societies, the resulting figure would look like a pyramid, with the youngest people at the base and the oldest people up at the tip. And indeed, that is exactly what you see today in a place like India--a perfectly sloped pyramid with lots and lots of babies at the bottom and a handful of the ancient. By contrast, in what passes for a demographic joke (given our fondness for Fritos and Cinnabon), the current U.S. pyramid looks like an overweight contestant on The Biggest Loser, with the giant baby boom billowing out from its midsection.

Starting in the next decade, however, our flabby pyramid is quickly going to slim down. It will assume the form of an hourglass, with the largest number of older people in our society's history, the quasi-retired baby boomers, up top, and the largest generation of young people since the boomers--the millennials, or echo boomers--at the bottom. The beleaguered generation-Xers will form the "pinched waist" in the middle.

The hourglass society will bring an avalanche of new social challenges, cultural norms, and business opportunities. With a huge increase in the number of older consumers, entirely new entertainment, culture, and news markets will open up--film, television, books, and Internet sites pitched more to the Matlock set than to the Eminem crowd. Also, older people tend to vote more frequently, and they will wield significant political clout: We could see a multidecade "boomerocracy" or, as one gen-Xer put it archly over cocktails, "TRBN: terminal rule by boomer narcissists."

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Will we be ready with new kinds of churches, new forms of spiritual exercises, new approaches to serving and a second to third to fourth career? With people living so much longer and healthier lives we need to be ready to channel the richest, best trained, most spiritually ready group of people in history to do something important and interesting for God and country.

posted by Gary Sweeten @ Thursday, July 20, 2006