The Ageing Population: no historical evidence of impact on productivity or creativity

Complaints about the graying of the population sometimes imply an inevitable loss of economic dynamism. But I know of no historical evidence that either the productivity or the creativity of a society is determined by the age structure of its population.

The interaction between demographic and economic change is so much more complex than the simplistic doomsday scenario implies. Some interesting – and not always optimistic – efforts to grapple with it can be found in an open-access special issue of Population and Development Review, recently published by the Population Council in honor of its retiring editor, Paul Demeny.

via The Economy and the Economics of Everyday Life – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.