Japan is easily the oldest country with the longest life expectancy. But they aren’t thrilled with the situation.
For a start, how do they do it? Everybody has the national health insurance system, and some people get additional private insurance for serious or chronic conditions to get better care. But lots of ‘rich’ people don’t bother with that.
Because everyone has pretty good health care, equitably provided, and because there’s a relatively healthy food lifestyle (seafood and vegetable diet, small quantities, low obesity), it seems people live pretty well and pretty long.
Though the various crises of a very old society are quite amazing, and very much in the cards for the US and EU:
- The politics is inert and nothing ever changes. Most of the voters are old, as are the politicians. For example, Japan is the only post-WW2 country that still doesn’t have autonomy over their own military. Germany, Italy, even Korea and Vietnam are no longer ‘occupied’, but the Osaka to Tokyo flight is still 2x longer to avoid US military airspace. No nationalist has moved to change that.
- Elderly care is a bigger issue than childcare. Adults quit their jobs, relocate cities, and generally restructure their lives to go care 1-1, 24 hours per day for their 80+ or 90+ year old parents. The aged-care system does some things, but not all things. So the economic cost of the elderly population needs to account for lost work contribution of the working-age population.
- There are of course rather fewer young people around.
- Like government, big corporations are basically hereditary conglomerates run by old people. There are virtually zero upstart reshaping the economic landscape. It’s what foreigners often admire about Son-san of Softbank, or the Rakuten or Recruit founders, but there are very few.
- There aren’t anywhere near as many robots around as it seemed there would be a few years ago. Robots aren’t pickup up the empty dishes at restaurants or self-driving cars or doing self-checkout at stores.