François Villon described in Regrets (1461) comment “the beauty who was heaulmière” contemplated the effects of “treacherous and proud old age” on her – which Rodin later transcribed in a sculpture which, under the strength of bronze, conveys the fragility of aging. Before it took the name of the poem, the work was called Winter.
In the 21st century, the elderly are a new spring and the silver economy is thriving. Now, in a France where life expectancy at birth is around 86 years for women (28 to 60 years) and 80 years for men (24 to 60 years), 23% of the population is under 20 years old and 22% over 65, according to INSEE. The age pyramid is distorted. The trend will intensify: the fertility indicator (1.62 children per woman) has not been this low since the First World War. The natural balance is minimal. This is an immense challenge because, faced with the declining birth rate, the answers are not obvious, as Julien Damon points out in a recent work.
The challenges that arise from this are immense. Maxime Sbaihi, who publishes an essay on the subject, cites telling figures: since 2010, France, which has 17 million retirees, has closed more than 5,000 schools. What will be the impacts of this aging on productivity? On the desire to innovate? On infrastructure, town planning or public services? On democratic life, even?
Our working population will decrease. In other words, tomorrow there will be fewer people able to produce, teach, care for, create or cultivate. There will also be fewer taxpayers receiving earned income and fewer contributors to finance the retirement plan. The information is not new: in 1991, Michel Rocard warned in a white paper that “pension plans will experience funding problems” car “where we had three contributors for every retiree in 1970, there will only be 1.9 in 2010 and 1.7 in 2040”. Today the ratio is 1.77.
Tomorrow, there will be fewer people to produce, create…
However, political leaders are proposing to deconstruct the modest efforts painfully envisaged by the 2023 reform. Beyond the impossible equation of a system whose number of beneficiaries increases while that of funders decreases, their project brings a defeatist decline. It amounts, in fact, to reducing the quantity of work in the country by removing people who are still dynamic from the market early, even though it will fall under the effects of demographics and is already lower than among our neighbors. (the activity rate, i.e. the share of people of working age actually on the market, is 74% in France compared to 80% in Germany; the employment rate, i.e. the share of people actually having a job, is 68%, compared to 77% across the Rhine).
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You don't need to be a great cleric to understand that this is an impasse: the less work there is, the more difficult it is to create wealth and the more complex it is to finance public services or solidarity benefits. – especially since innovation is struggling, because the University and research are suffering, and competitiveness is at half mast.
All this is, in short, only the illustration of a failure, that of economic Malthusianism, which impoverishes instead of developing, puts to sleep instead of stimulating, and which Alfred Sauvy already denounced in a book entitled, so premonitory, The Old Age of Nations.
France
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