The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [92]
America’s Secret Weapon
America’s advantages might seem obvious when compared with Asia, which is still a continent of mostly developing countries. Against Europe, the margin is slimmer than many Americans believe. The Eurozone has been growing at an impressive clip, about the same pace per capita as the United States since 2000. It takes in half the world’s foreign investment, boasts labor productivity often as strong as that of the United States, and posted a $30 billion trade surplus in 2009. In the WEF Competitiveness Index, European countries occupy six of the top ten slots. Europe has its problems—high unemployment, rigid labor markets—but it also has advantages, including more efficient health care and pension systems. All in all, Europe presents the most significant short-term challenge to the United States in the economic realm.
But Europe has one crucial disadvantage. Or, to put it more accurately, the United States has one crucial advantage over Europe and most of the developed world. The United States is demographically vibrant. Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that the U.S. population will increase by 65 million by 2030, while Europe’s will remain “virtually stagnant.” Europe, Eberstadt notes, “will by that time have more than twice as many seniors older than 65 than children under 15, with drastic implications for future aging. (Fewer children now means fewer workers later.) In the United States, by contrast, children will continue to outnumber the elderly. The U.N. Population Division estimates that the ratio of working-age people to senior citizens in western Europe will drop from 3.8:1 today to just 2.4:1 in 2030. In the U.S., the figure will fall from 5.4:1 to 3.1:1. Some of these demographic problems could be ameliorated if older Europeans chose to work more, but so far they do not, and trends like these rarely reverse.”18 The only real way to avert this demographic decline is for Europe to take in more immigrants. Native Europeans actually stopped replacing themselves as early as 2007, so even maintaining the current population will require modest immigration. Growth will require much more. But European societies do not seem able to take in and assimilate people from strange and unfamiliar cultures, especially from rural and backward regions in the world of Islam. The question of who is at fault here—the immigrant or the society—is irrelevant. The political reality is that Europe is moving toward taking in fewer immigrants at a time when its economic future rides on its ability to take in many more. America, on the other hand, is creating the first universal nation, made up of all colors, races, and creeds, living and working together in considerable harmony.
Surprisingly, many Asian countries—with the exception of India—are in demographic situations similar to or even worse than Europe’s. The fertility rates in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and China* are well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per female, and estimates indicate that major East Asian nations will face a sizable reduction in their working-age population over the next half century. The working-age population in Japan has already peaked; in 2010, Japan had three million fewer workers than in 2005. Worker populations in China and Korea are also likely to peak within the next decade. Goldman Sachs predicts that China’s median age will rise from thirty-three in 2005 to forty-five in 2050, a remarkable graying of the population. By 2030, China may have nearly as many senior citizens sixty-five years of age or older as children under fifteen. And Asian countries have as much trouble