Steecky Thoughts #6: Capitalising on future trends [4 min]

A blog by @ooak
It's a place for me to give birth to my thoughts. Meta thoughts about "Steemit", external thoughts about life and experiences. My aim is to bring value to people, entertain the audience and craft my writing skills all at the same time. I will write short to medium size blogs because I believe that today more than ever time is money and attention is hard to get.

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Above is a graph presents the growth of population aged 60+ years old by year. You can see that in the next 34 years we should expect a massive increase of population aged 60+.

The exact numbers are: in 2015 there were 901 million people aged 60+, which was an increase of 48% from the start of the millennium (607 Million). By 2030 it is projected to grow by 56% to 1.4 billion and by 2050 to double and reach 2.1 billion.

Why does it matter so much you ask? Well this massive growth of the elderly population comes with a slow rate of births all across the globe (check the picture below). Those two trends combined increases global "dependency ratio". The ratio is calculated by dividing the populations who isn't in the labor force (below 18 and above 65+) to the population who is (between 18-65). It's used to measure the pressure on the productive population, as it subsidizes the non productive population.

The effects of those two trends and high "dependency ratio" are:

• High taxes: less working population that needs to subsidize the non productive population (pensions, healthcare expenditures etc.) will naturally will cause an increase in government taxes, as the government can't deal with the rising costs of ageing.
• A fall of productivity and growth as a result of high taxes. Incentives to work and invest will go down.
• Inflation of wages: shortage of workers will cause it.
• Economic growth slowdown: more capital will go into pension savings resulting in less capital for productive investments.

The above effect will be seen and felt in the next decades.

Why are you trying to paint this grim picture of the future?

Should I kill my grandparents?

Or should I birth more children?

These questions are probably popping in your mind. So the answers are in order:

• Because we can take advantage of this trends.
• No.
• Yes of course, children bring joy to the world.

Now, for a more serious answer: Business decisions, life decisions can take advantages on trends. I'm at the age where I need to decide what I want to do with my life. What will be my profession? my desires in life?
If you are young or at the age where you need to decide your path in life, you may want to take advantage of those trends.

Examples how to capitalize on the ageing of the world population problem:

• Hi-tech medical solutions of monitoring elderly at their own housing.
• The demand for retirement facilities will grow.
• Learn professions that deal with healthcare such as doctor, nurse, healthcare systems management or elder care specialist. The demand for these jobs will sky rocket as the population ages.
• Medical tourism will increase. As medical procedures will raise so will patient try and find cheaper places to perform them.

These are some examples, I'm sure you can find out more ways to capitalize on the ageing trend.

In this blog I wanted to show you how can data and trends can actually give you a glimpse of the future. Once you had seen the future and where we are going you can use it for your interests.

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Shower thought: Will we find a technology that will help us to live healthy and productive life to +120 years old?

@ooak signing out…


#steemit #steem #blog #writing #trends #money #business