Most People are too Stupid to Understand Where this Leads, But . . .

....Just in case you are not too stupid, you may wish to take some things into account in planning for your future.

Stanford
Populations of Europe, North America, Oceania, and East Asia are aging rapidly. Such aging brings about certain unavoidable costs to societies.

Stanford

One of the most significant financial problems that countries will face in the coming decades is the amount they will spend to support the elderly. This will be exacerbated by increased debt-to-GDP ratios in most of the 49 countries where old age costs will be the highest percentage of GDP, according to the Standard & Poor’s Global Aging Report PDF. Of the 49 countries, 32 are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and 17 are large, emerging market nations.

The Standard & Poor’s Global Aging report emphasizes: “No other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances, and policy making as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging. The problem has been long observed and is well understood.” The analysis adds, “U.N. figures show the proportion of the world’s population aged over 65 is set to more than double by 2050, to 16.2% from 7.6% currently.” _Source

The higher the educational levels and IQs of a given society, the faster it is tending to age. And within advanced societies, it is the higher IQ segments -- the smart fractions -- which are aging and disappearing most quickly. In terms of national and global skills resources -- human capital -- these trends are quite ominous. Not only will the costs of pensions, elderly medical care, long term elderly care, and unemployment increase exponentially with aging, but the remaining human capital -- people who keep the wheels of commerce and industry rolling -- is likely to shrink at an increasing rate as well. Put another way, the people who keep food on the table and keep the lights on, are going away at the same time that the need for them will grow greater.

In Korea, farmers over age 60 accounted for fully 55.4 percent of the country's total farming population. Rising costs of aging and impending skills shortages in Germany threaten the nation's shaky prosperity. Australia continues to experience critical shortages in skilled trades relating to its most important industries.

People with important skills in energy, industry, construction, the infrastructure of IT, and other central skills in a high-tech society, are nearing retirement age, without sufficient replacements having been trained.

The irreversibility of these trends is what is so hard for many to grasp, despite the danger they represent to the future. Governments which are incapable of making difficult decisions will allow these trends to shape a dead-end future, without ever having explained to an increasingly dumbed-down constituency what is happening to them.

The skyrocketing costs of pensions, health care benefits, unemployment, disability, and a host of other entitlements, is very real and important. But not nearly so important as the loss of the human capital which underlies the engines of industrial and agricultural production, and the market mechanisms of distribution.

The "singularity" is not the answer, except as a sort of escapist fantasy preventing more imaginative humans from working out solutions to real problems. Clinging to the security of government unions, academic tenure, or other group-thinking organisations will likewise only get you so far. In fact, the early retirement ages found among government union workers etc. only accelerates the descent into irreversible debt and demographic decline.

Most people are far too stupid to even suspect that a problem exists. But instead of a single problem, multiple interlocking problems are tied into the ongoing demographic transition. The consequences of some of them are extremely dire.

What to do?

Population Bomb: Earth is Bleeding Human Capital

"I've got colleagues running around Florida trying to find people to take their knowledge before they die," says Peter Waggitt, a uranium production consultant to the IAEA. "Most of the senior experts in uranium mining are pushing 50 and some of the best are over 70." _SwissInfo

It is not too surprising when third world countries such as South Africa dismally fail to meet their electric power demands. Even though South Africa is the wealthiest and most advanced nation in SubSaharan Africa, it must still struggle with an average population IQ of only 72. More and more high IQ market dominant minorities in business, technology, and the professions are being driven from South Africa by sky-rocketing crime rates and other forms of rapid descent into third worldism.

It may come as a surprise to find that some of the same problems of human capital shortages are beginning to crop up in the advanced world.

The average university technician is aged over 40 and almost a third are over 50 years old, according to their trade union, Amicus Unite. It also warns that the training schemes that drew that generation of technicians into the sector have largely withered.

A report for the Higher Education Funding Council for England by consultancy Evidence Ltd found a 22 per cent drop in the number of technicians in engineering between the 1996 and 2001 research assessment exercises, almost a 23 per cent decline in biological sciences technicians and 16 and 17 per cent decreases in technicians for physical sciences and pre-clinical technicians.

"People are not coming into the sector as there is no development for them, and we are losing people because of the demographic time bomb," said Matt Levi, manager of the Leadership Foundation's Heated project, which was set up to research the problem. _TimesHE

Such problems are appearing in technology sectors all over the developed world. Europeans, S. Koreans, Japanese, Russians, and residents of the Anglosphere are failing to have children to replace themselves. Of the few children they have, not enough are going into technical professions that will be badly needed in the near future. One of the technology sectors which needs to grow the fastest, is the nuclear power sector. And that -- along with the power and energy industry in general -- is where some of the worst losses of human capital are occurring.

French utility EDF says around 50 percent of employees in its nuclear branch will retire by 2015 and that its workers are on average 43-44 years old.

In the United States, the peak age of workers in the nuclear sector is 48-52 while Britain estimates that up to two-thirds of its top-tier nuclear managers will retire by 2025. Worldwide, the nuclear industry employs around 250,000 people. Many first-generation nuclear staff have just retired or will do so in the next few years, taking with them skills and knowledge of complex, costly projects -- just as the nuclear renaissance gets underway.

Sometimes referred to as a "silver tsunami", the departure of the first generation of nuclear workers is a big concern for the IAEA, which promotes civilian nuclear technology alongside its role as atomic watchdog. Many countries and private firms have new units planned or under construction, the agency said in a September report for a conference of its 151 member states. "(They) are facing shortages of experienced personnel and loss of knowledge as they look to replace retiring staff for their existing fleet while at the same time staffing new projects."

Finnish nuclear regulator Stuk says the lack of skilled workers is at least partly to blame for the delays at Olkiluoto. So many experienced nuclear manufacturers have left the business that project managers have been forced to look for subcontractors who then need nuclear training, the regulator said in a presentation in August. Building the next generation of power plants will be demanding, "because much of the earlier experience and resources have been lost from the nuclear industry." _SwissInfo

As European populations fall from Europe to North America to Oceania, few members of many replacement populations possess the native talent to be trained in highly technical occupations which are crucial for an advancing future. Mexican immigrants to the US have an average IQ no higher than 90, shifting the occupational bell curve significantly to the left -- with many technical and scientific professions out of reach for most of the newcomers. Immigrants to Europe from North Africa and the Middle East have average IQs of around 85, a full standard deviation below native European populations. Fewer than 5% of these will be qualified for highly technical areas of study. The manpower shortages will only get worse.

Leaders and policy makers in the US, the EU, and elsewhere need to learn that low-IQ immigrants will quickly become a drag on their economies, and provide very few in the way of qualified high tech professionals. Affirmative action can attempt to force these unqualified immigrants into the technical professions, but a lowering of standards will be the result. There lies the Idiocracy and collapse.

It is not for advanced nations to tell third world nations how large their populations can grow. But it is the job of advanced nations to take care of their own societies, and to make sure that they maintain the technological skills and standards which keep their citizens safe, warm, and healthy.

The only shortage humans are facing that is of any significance is the shortage of human ingenuity. If we allow human ingenuity to die out due to postmodern groupthink and political correctness, then certainly everything else that we need will come in short supply. It is up to those who are still awake to make sure that that does not happen.

Manpower Skills Shortages: Ongoing Loss of Human Capital

Worldwide, skilled trades positions are the hardest to fill, according to Manpower global 2010 Talent Shortage Survey of 35,000 employers across 36 countries and territories (PDF); in 31 countries they are among top 10 jobs that companies are having difficulty filling. Shortages of skilled workers are acute in many of the world’s biggest economies. In 15 countries, including the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Canada employers ranked skilled trades as their number one hiring challenge. In Poland employers are also struggling to find skilled trades workers, admitting since three years that they represent the 1st most difficult position to fill, as show the results of three consecutive editions of Manpower’s Talent Shortage Survey. _Source

Even if economic demand improved so as to require the building of significant new infrastructure, most nations lack the necessary manpower skills to rapidly ramp up construction, development, and production.

Australia is one of the countries feeling the strongest pinch, with a healthy mining sector and unemployment near 5%. But Germany is also coming to grips with a manpower shortage, exacerbated by a rapid demographic aging.

The US -- with it's perpetual ongoing Obama recession -- has far less current demand for skilled labour. Real US unemployment is well into the teens, with underemployment into the twenties. In Obama's US, the demand simply isn't there. But what if the economy were to revive itself by some miracle -- even under the Obama regime? Where would the skilled workers come from?

The US educational system has been a disastrous failure from the standpoint of training skilled workers in the crucial trades -- the foundations of an advanced high-tech infrastructure. By attempting to channel all students into a 4 year college track -- and neglecting the trades -- US schools have wasted the potential talent of generations of students. As the US educational establishment becomes further ossified under the control of a massive incestuous political machine involving public sector unions and ideologues at both the federal level and the university school of education level, any hope for salvaging the newer generations of prospective skilled work is slipping through the US' fingers.

As baby boomers retire, massive numbers of skilled workers will be lost to an infrastructure that is already suffering for lack of skills.

The problem is that the requirements for skilled jobs tend to change as the underlying technology changes. One cannot train for a skilled job and expect for the job to stay the same. In addition, the economics of domestic production or construction vs. outsourcing work is apt to change from year to year -- making it tougher for managers to plan their infrastructure into the future.

Under the Obama administration's distinctly anti-business regime, this planning task is made 10 X more difficult for managers than it needed to be. As a result, new projects are put on indefinite hold, and the economy goes into a long-term stasis.

Since industry training and industry-sponsored training provide a significant proportion of skilled workers, as industries down-size and postpone their new projects, the training of skilled workers also suffers.

All of these problems add up, so that when a more rational governmental regime finally falls into place, the nation at large has far fewer skills in place to take advantage of a new building phase, should it occur. The skills must be imported at a higher cost -- financially and socially.

In terms of peak oil or peak energy, it is actually peak manpower which should be feared the most. For as soon as the energy starvation regime of the Obamas, the Boxers, the Pelosis, the Salazars, and that ugly ilk is eliminated, the energy resources that have been there all along will still be there -- but will be less obtainable for the loss of skilled manpower that has occurred in the interim.

All-around skilled craftsmen and craftswomen are becoming more rare in the US -- although Canada, Australia, and some European nations are taking active steps to ameliorate the problem. As the world emerges from its carbon hysteria and peak energy fogs, it will be the nations that can solve the peak skills problem which will prosper.

As for all of those PhD's in queer ethnic studies and semiotic basket-weaving -- what are they doing now?