Last week, one of the stories that most caught my attention in the sort of random but uniquely fulfilling way one can get from browsing newspapers was an item from Italy that said, with more than 7 million of the country’s 60 million people over age 75, some are turning to small, cute-looking robots to attend to older adults. Looking forward to coming breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, some experts there are already predicting that this will produce a revolution in caring for this cohort.
“We all have to look for all the possible solutions, in this case technological,” Loredana Ligabue, the president of Not Only Elderly, an Italian advocacy group for family caregivers, told the New York Times.
Another story that seized my interest in this same unexpected manner a week or so before was the news out of the U.S. state of Arkansas that lawmakers there, as in a few other states, were rolling back child labor protections to make it easier to employ children under age 16.
Later, as I wondered what could connect such seemingly disparate topics—the one about a socially costly and hard-to-manage surfeit of older adults and the other, the urgent need felt by some to employ minors, even in dangerous industrial settings—an answer arrived in the name of a country that has been much in the news itself lately due to mass street demonstrations against changes in government policy toward people whose age places them between the extremes of young and old: France.
This European nation, which has long been admired as something of a lifestyle superpower, has been locked in an explosive social and political crisis over a modest adjustment to its retirement age, from 62 to 64—a figure still to the envy of many others, notably including Americans. For decades, the trend in France had moved in the other direction, meaning devoting less time to work, starting with the push decades ago by former President François Mitterrand to whittle away at the 40-hour workweek, which culminated with the voluntary adoption of a 35-hour workweek in 1988.
So what does France have to do with the desperate turn to robots in Italy or children in sweatshops in the United States? Like almost all wealthy Western countries (and not a few rich, non-Western ones, too), France is suddenly being forced to come to terms with brutal new demographic realities that are placing enormous stress on social security and retirement systems and calling into question basic assumptions about the comforts that a long period of prosperity once seemed to guarantee them.
For most people, living longer will mean needing to rely on the financial support of the state longer, and this creates steadily increasing fiscal pressures. This difficulty is compounded by another trend that has been unfolding alongside it: people wanting to have fewer and fewer children on average. In Italy, which ranks near the bottom of the scale in the European Union, only 1.29 children were born per woman in 2022. In France, close to the high end, that figure stood at 1.79. The bad news for people who have to plan state budgets and future outlays for national retirement and health care systems is that even that number is far below the average number of children per woman that can sustain a population without shrinkage, known as the population replacement rate, which is usually put at 2.1.
Having enough children to stave off population decline has nothing to do with bragging rights or old-fashioned nationalism. Rather, its importance lies in what demographers call population structure and, most specifically, making sure that there are always enough young people entering the workplace to sustain a social compact built around guaranteed support for older adults in retirement.
France’s ongoing showdown among street demonstrators, opposition parties, and President Emmanuel Macron can be looked at in countless ways, from the democratic deficiencies some have denounced in a constitution that concentrates excessive power in an almost monarchical presidency to the shocking violence employed by the police as they try to restore order in the streets and suppress the protests. However one looks at things, though, one unavoidable reality stands out: France simply needs more working-age people or to have people work longer in order to finance the kinds of benefits in retirement that its citizens have long come to regard as their birthright.
And although the surface manifestations and political and social tensions will play out differently in each rich Western society where fertility rates are in retreat and people are already living far longer than when today’s retirement systems were drawn up, here and there throughout this economically privileged part of the world, the basic problem—of needing more workers or for people to work more—is much the same.
Notwithstanding the statement of the Italian advocate quoted at the top of this column about everyone needing to search for possible solutions, in most of the rich countries that are starting to experience the gravity of their demographic conundrum, few are looking to the most obvious places for relief from the looming fiscal problems that drastic shifts in population structure will bring. Indeed, that is the common message one can distill from stories about care robots and 14-year-old factory workers: People in rich Western societies will go to almost any length to avoid the readiest and most humane solution available, which involves steady but substantial increases in immigration from parts of the world where young people are eager to learn and work, with decades of productive life ahead of them.
Immigration, in fact, kills two birds with one stone: Bringing billions of humans more deeply into the global economy, with the possibility of building economic security and uplift for themselves while also contributing to the financial stability and overall prosperity of the places they migrate to.
An ugly paradox comes into play here. The part of the world that offers the greatest reserves of such young, energetic, and ambitious labor—Africa—is the same part of the world that arouses the strongest aversion among the rich. The continent situated immediately to Europe’s south, and the source of over one-tenth of the U.S. population, has a median age of a mere 19.7 years, meaning that it is utterly dominated by precisely what the old rich world increasingly lacks: youth.
During a visit to Brussels last spring, though, a liberal Belgian intellectual told me: “I fear that the threat of immigration from Africa will drive people here to extremism. They will do anything and everything to avoid being inundated by Africans, and even though I oppose extremism, I completely understand them.”
But in a world where an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of young people are African, the question that will increasingly confront Europeans—and, indeed, all Westerners—is whether clinging to self-identities deeply bound up in race (or, to be more explicit, whiteness) is more important than economic growth; prosperity; competing with the obsession of the day, China; being able to retire with a pension; or, ultimately, maybe even economic survival? Scarcely polite today, sooner or later, questions like these will become unavoidable.
There is another way to frame them, though, that may be helpful. During the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mass commerce in people brought in chains from Africa had been justified on the basis that they were not fully human. In the United States, the era when people of African descent were legally treated as less than fully human is still well within living memory. Going forward, will rich Europeans and Americans be able to overcome their aversion toward Africans, who may hold the key to their economic salvation, and embrace them as their fully human equals? As I told my Belgian friend, their future will depend on it.