| 2025 | 30.9 |
| 2022 | 30.1 |
| 2020 | 29.6 |
| 2010 | 27.2 |
| 2000 | 25.1 |
| 1980 | 21.5 |
We last looked at the graying world in the fall of 2023. Here’s a reprise, with two more years of data:
Until the 19th century, life expectancy at birth was about 30, and a 25-year-old expected (on average) to live to 50. One rare exception who made it to the tenth decade — 90-year-old Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian aristocrat living in retirement at Saladin’s court in 1185 — found the old age experience a dismaying surprise. In his youth, he would happily ride off on weekends to spear a few Crusaders or some charismatic megafauna; now he’s worn out by a few hours with a calligraphy pen:
When I wake up I feel like a mountain is on top of me
When I walk, it’s like wearing chains
I creep around with a cane in my hand …
My hand struggles to hold up a pen, when it once
Broke spears in the hearts of lions.
Nobody’s surprised now. The elderly demographic is the world’s fastest-growing, adding 15 million octo- and nonagenarians, plus half a million over 100, since 2020. Birth rates, meanwhile, have dropped by half in the last 50 years. So humanity is steadily aging. Per the Our World in Data table, the world’s “median age” — that is, the age of the person exactly in the middle — rises about three months a year. At 30 years and a month as of 2022, it’s now about to hit 31. (Meaning that this actual “median person” is a “millennial” born early in 1995.) By the next U.S. presidential election, it will likely hit 32. A little detail, beginning with a sample list of median ages by country –
| Japan | 49.8 years |
| South Korea | 45.6 years |
| France | 42.3 years |
| Sweden | 40.3 years |
| China | 40.1 years |
| U.S. | 38.5 years |
| Australia | 38.3 years |
| Brazil | 34.8 years |
| Jamaica | 32.8 years |
| World | 30.9 years |
| Mexico | 29.6 years |
| India | 28.8 years |
| Fiji | 28.1 years |
| Jordan | 24.7 years |
| Ghana | 21.3 years |
| Kenya | 20.0 years |
| Central African Republic | 14.5 years |
Pulling back a bit, Africa is the world’s “youngest” region, with a median age just above 19. Europe is the “oldest” at nearly 43, and Latin America is in the middle at 32. Asia is mixed: the South Asian tier is relatively youthful (Pakistan at 21, India 29, Sri Lanka 33); ASEAN skews a bit older, from the 26 in Cambodia and the Philippines to 41 in Thailand; Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea join Japan and Korea on the world’s aging frontier. China is a notch younger but aging fast: the median Chinese out-aged his or her median-American counterpart in 2019, turned 40 this year, and is now a year and a half older than the median American.
Youngest: The world’s youthful extreme is in the Central African Republic, where the 14.5-year-old median person is possibly a lycee sophomore (or more likely, in a 56% rural country, a farm kid pondering a move to the city). Niger, Somalia, Mali, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are one grade older, all somewhere between 15 and 16.
Most typical: The countries most closely representing this year’s world demographics, each with a median age between 30 and 31, are Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Panama.
“Oldest”: Japan, whose median age will likely cross 50 this winter (after reaching 30 in 1977, and 40 in 1998), is furthest out on the gray frontier.* Italy is next at 48, followed by Hong Kong and Portugal at 47, with Korea, Bosnia, and Germany.
So: Over the 2020s and 2023s, expect production and consumer booms in India, Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Americans, and the U.S.’ neighbors north and south, will be aging. And Europeans and East Asians, having long since put down their spears and growing tired as they push around the modern equivalents of calligraphy pens, can look forward to labor shortages, lower growth rates, and politics increasingly dominated by arguments over how to pay for health and pensions. Maybe not very inspiring but still, as ibn M. might agree, better than any currently realistic alternative.
* Counting countries with populations above 100,000. The Vatican, with about 800 people, is technically the oldest country, with its various Cardinals, secretaries, and Swiss Guards at a median age of about 57.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Aging:
Our World in Data’s interactive table of median ages by country, region, income group, etc., from 1950 to the present with projections to 2100.
The CIA’s World Factbook ranks countries by life expectancy.
And Usama ibn Munqidh has perspective on old age and lots more — medieval battle tactics, poetry and calligraphy advice, Crusaders’ odd gender habits and loony trial-by-ordeal legal theories, and the mighty Saladin.
Countries:
Indonesia, at 240 million people, joins Malaysia, Panama, and Bhutan at the demographic median. Stat-portrait here.
Japan will be the first country (again, setting aside the Vatican and a couple of other micro-states) to pass 50. Through the lens of Nippon Steel’s eventually successful bid to purchase U.S. Steel, Senior Fellow Yuka Hayashi explains how this is playing out in Japanese industry and foreign direct investment.
And only in the Central African Republic are most people 14 years or younger.
And at home:
As America’s population approaches the 40-year median Japan reached in 1998, PPI’s Ben Ritz and Nate Morris look at Social Security at 90, with demographics, financing, and policy ideas.
… and the broader PPI Budget Blueprint sets out tax, health, retirement, interest, and other reforms to bring down long-term debt, stabilize retirement and health programs, free up money for discretionary spending, and ensure “fiscal democracy” for the next generation.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
