We recently came across a great demographic book, The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny by Bradley Schurman that dives into the demographic quagmire society will find itself in over the next 30 years. The book hits on many of the topics we’ve covered here since this blog’s inception.
Some key points
There will be more older people in society than younger ones and marketing firms may finally begin to shift toward catering to the older demographic versus the young one.
Communities across America will change, think of suburbs with young couples with young children changed to have older and older people within the communities. This will impact schools, shops, traffic and lifestyle for all involved.
Residential, Commercial, and Industrial buildings will need to cater to older generations far more than younger ones because these will be the predominately type of worker in the labor force.
Work that is hard on the body such as construction, manufacturing, and large retail will have difficulty finding workers.
As we were writing this article, we came across an interview with Finance Yahoo with Bradley Schurman and this quote summarizes the dilemma succinctly:
As an employer, if you aren’t taking a hard look right now at your hiring practices, you’ve lost the game. You have to focus on a new business case for this modern era. You have to compete for new talent, and that’s through salaries and benefits that support employees with care giving leave and flexibility; this is something that every worker loves.
Yahoo Finance
Beyond all this however, one fundamental question gets begged, “What does 2030 and beyond look like?”
We have obviously been thinking about this through the investment lens but not from a marketing, commercial, advertising and other “soft” lenses but we will now. We’ll write a follow up to this post with our findings and results.
In other news, the stock market has been extremely volatile and these are the days we’ve been waiting for to accumulate more stock on our defensive portfolio. Our portfolio has held up well but let’s see how the rest of the month unfolds.
Stay tuned and stay solvent.