Looks Like Fewer Care About Valentine’s Day

How demographic shifts are reshaping societies globally

Ric Edelman: It's Wednesday, February 14th. Today's show; it's Valentine's Day. Hope you didn't forget. And in recognition, I thought I'd share with you the future of love, or at least the future of family as a result of our love for each other. In China, looks like love is having some problems. They polled women ages 18 to 34, and 15% of them said they will never get married. Last year, China had the fewest number of marriages ever, 50% less than ten years ago.  

This is not just a problem for China. We're seeing this trend all over the world. In Europe, the number of marriages there is also down 50%. compared to 1960. There are a lot of reasons for this. Lots of countries in Asia, for example China, Japan, South Korea, the traditional view there is that the man is dominant and the woman is submissive. That view is still pervasive, and a lot of women are fed up with it to the point where they're rejecting men and marriage.  

Societies are also now more open to the idea of unmarried people living together, and women now have more career opportunities than ever, and they are increasingly choosing career over marriage, at least when the would-be husbands are demanding that the wives stay at home to raise babies.  

So guess what? Globally, 40% of the babies born are now born to unwed mothers. We're not talking minority teens and low-income housing. We're talking career focused women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who want a baby but not a husband. And societies that are okay with this are producing more babies than societies that still frown on the idea of single women having kids. And so the societies that are not okay with this had better change their posture, because the women are not giving in. In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, less than 5% of births are from unmarried women, compared to 40% everywhere else. But those countries also have the lowest birth rates in the world. South Korea is the worst, just 0.78 babies per woman. You need 2.1 babies per woman to sustain the population. And so South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China, they've all got big problems on their hands. They are facing extinction simply because women there are refusing to have kids. Over the next 50 years, the population in these countries is predicted to shrink by 28%.  

This isn't news to these governments. The problem is they haven't been able to fix it. But boy, they sure are trying. Since 2006, South Korea has spent $215 billion trying to get women to have kids actually paying them to get pregnant. If you have a baby, you get 18 months of paid leave from your job, plus $750 a month. The government has paid for taxis to install car seats. They've even paid to open lots of daycare centers. The government is even paying women to freeze their eggs. None of this is making any difference. The birth rate is still falling there. China is trying to bribe women to one county. There is now offering to pay women 25 or younger if they get married. So far, few takers for the 137 bucks. Go figure.  

Taiwan's trying something different. They have now legalized same sex marriage. They now let gay couples adopt children, although there's no sign yet that this is increasing the birthrate. Single and childless families are now a third of households, up from 3%, 20 years ago. Same thing with Korea and China. And here's a crazy statistic. In Taiwan, they registered last year almost twice as many new pets as babies. It's so common to get a dog or cat instead of a child that the animals are known as “fur children”.  

And while we're dealing with the fact that we're making too few babies, scientists, meanwhile, are busy keeping all the babies we do create alive, along with the rest of us. Saudi Arabia is spending now $1 billion a year to develop new treatments for aging. A lot of the money is going to universities and startups here in the U.S., where scientists are trying to prevent slow or even reverse aging. Scientists are looking at nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Oh, let's just call it Nad+ for short. It's derived from vitamin B3, which is in asparagus and peas. Two doctors who study all this say everybody should love this, and it might be as close to the fountain of youth as we get.  

Others are looking at ozone therapy. Ozone gas increases proteins and red blood cells, which increases the oxygen supply in your body. This has been used to treat autoimmune diseases, infections and viruses. The benefits include improved circulation, lower inflammation, higher energy levels and sharpened brain function. But none of this has really proven to reduce aging. There are potential risks and side effects as well, so don't go running out to buy whatever it is the promoters are promoting just yet. But this is giving us a sign of where science might be taking us in the future. For example, one enthusiast is taking the ozone through his rectum. He says he blasts it directly into his colon so it goes straight to his liver. Alrighty then.  

Another area of study are stem cells. Scientists are transplanting stem cells into the body to heal wounds. One outfit is offering to store your stem cells until you need them for up to 30 years. One guy who calls himself a biohacker says he got a full body stem cell makeover by having his own stem cells injected into his spine and all of his joints. The FDA says the treatment is not approved.  

If you don't want to inject yourself with stem cells, how about peptides? These are chains of amino acids the building blocks of proteins. They modulate a lot of aspects of our bodies. We produce 7,000 different kinds of peptides. They do everything from help with our immunity to our libido, but they deplete as we get older. So now there are dozens of synthetic and natural peptides that you can buy. You either inject them or you rub them on your skin. You think all this is crazy? Well, one of them is Ozempic and you've heard of that. Millions are taking it for weight loss, and now they're saying it might be able to prevent heart attacks. And its competitor, Wegovy, has been found to cut the risk of death by 18%.  

Here's another thing under development, Plasmapheresis. This is a technique that removes your blood, sends it through a filter to remove inflammatory molecules and proteins, and inserts albumin donated from younger people and then puts the blood back into you. They did this with mice and they say the mice all got younger. Some are arguing for taurine, a naturally occurring amino acid in meat and fish. It's a common ingredient in energy drinks.  

And then there's rapamycin that's used to treat cancer and for people who have had an organ transplant. Now they're saying it might be able to beat age related chronic inflammation. But there are side effects if you take it in large doses, including cancer. Yikes.  

So we just need to keep doing what we can to keep living longer and healthier. And it looks like eating less can help you live longer. I mean a lot less under 2,000 calories a day. A lot of people eat 2 or 3 times that much in one study, people who were limited to 1,700 to 2,000 calories a day lost weight. But after eight months, their weight stabilized and yet they continued to have high energy levels. This is why there's excitement about those new weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. They were created to treat diabetes, but everybody who took the drugs lost weight. Now, researchers are thinking that these drugs can make people live longer, too.  

Metformin is also being studied. People who take it have a lower mortality rate. And there's a new trial starting soon with 3,000 people ages 65 to 79. This study is going to take six years. We'll see how many of those people survive. Don't ignore all this. If you think all you need to do is eat right, get plenty of sleep, exercise, have healthy, loving relationships; Wrong.  

The folks at Gerontology Research Group, which is a nonprofit scientific organization, says 25% of our ability to live a long time is determined by our genetics, meaning it really doesn't matter what you eat or how much you exercise. And by age 100, genetics are responsible for 50% of our longevity. So if you don't have the right genes, you need to think about these new therapies that make up for what your genes aren't naturally giving you.  

Let me rattle off some names here, and you tell me what these guys all have in common. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; and Sam Altman, the founder head of OpenAI. What do they all have in common? All of them invested in startups, No, and I don't mean their startups. I mean new startups that are trying to extend human life. They aren't doing this out of philanthropy. These guys want to all live forever. They're nice guys. If they figure it out, they're going to share what they've learned with the rest of us. And these guys are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this.  

One of the guys in this camp is a fellow named Brian Johnson. He sold his company for a zillion dollars, and now he eats a kilogram of vegetables. Every morning he does a daily rigorous workout for an hour. He swallows a hundred pills every day, and he lets a host of doctors monitor his vital signs all the time. He says he has slowed his age rate by 30%. He swallows a hundred pills a day, he sleeps more than eight hours a night, and he lets a host of doctors monitor his vital signs, and he says he has slowed his rate of aging by 30%. He's 46 years old, but he says his biological age is 37. He says he has the cardiovascular capacity of an 18-year-old Olympic athlete, and to follow his regimen, he's spending $2 million a year.  

Now, I don't know if you're going to spend $2 million a year on that regimen. You might not even have $2 million. That raises a related issue with this entire aging thing. Because we're producing too few babies, it means likely there won't be anyone to take care of you when you get old. If you don't have children, you get no natural caregivers because children are the number one source of caregiving of older people. They care for their parents. Of all the women who are currently 46 years old, half of them are caregivers.  

When you're 80 or 90, you're going to need health care providers, nurses, home health aides, rehab professionals, physical therapists. But if we're producing too few babies, we're going to have too few kids growing up to be those people at the very moment we're going to need them. So you are likely to be on your own. That means you better have a whole lot of money, because it's going to take a whole lot of money because it's going to be a seller's market. If you want health care in the future, you're going to need a lot of money to pay for it.  

Already, the Department of Health and Human Services says you're going to spend $440,000 on health care in retirement, and they're not assuming that you live to age 100. You might just spend $1 million or more. And here's the real crisis: 27% of people over the age of 60 have no retirement savings at all. So is it any surprise that the fastest growing group of people who are falling into homelessness are people 50 plus? And the number of people 65 plus who are homeless is expected to triple by the end of the decade. They're already a quarter of all the people in shelters. No wonder that 5% of everyone 80 years old or older are working. They're trying to avoid being homeless. The number of workers 75 plus rose 78% last year.  

What happens to these people if they get sick, if their spouse gets sick, or if one of their kids, who's now 50, gets sick or has a child problem of their own, or a divorce, or a drug or alcohol problem. So yeah, a lot of older people are looking for work when they ought to be able to be retired.  

But as much as they want to work, they often can't get a job because of age discrimination. The EEOC says they got 11,000 complaints last year. Two-thirds of employees over the age of 50 say they face age discrimination in the workplace. 17% say they've been the recipient of negative comments about their age. 13% say they didn't get a promotion because of their age. Maybe this is why 15% of working women over the age of 80 are self-employed. And maybe this is why the biggest age group for suicide is 75 plus. Last year, 50,000 people killed themselves, the highest number in 80 years. But while suicides among people under the age of 25 have gone down, it's never been higher for people over the age of 75.  

And finally, one other huge implication on all this massive change in aging. One place where fertility is not a problem. I'll tell you where it is in 30 seconds.  

The one place where fertility is not a problem is Africa. There, the population is expected to double to 2.5 billion people over the next 25 years by 2050. 25% of the world's population will be African, and a third of them will be 15 to 24 years of age. The median age in Africa right now is 19. In India, it's 28. In China and the US it's 38. If you want to look to the future, look to Africa. Africa is producing tens of millions of new consumers every year. The number of African millionaires is going to double by 2027. They'll have 750,000 millionaires, the fastest growth rate of wealth in the world. Within ten years, Africa will have the world's largest workforce, bigger than China or India. By the 2040s, two of every five children will be born in Africa, 44% graduated from high school. In 2020, 570 million Africans used the internet and everyone is paying attention to this, governments and businesses alike.  

But Africa has a long way to go, despite the fact they've got 18% of the world's population, Africa accounts for just 3% of global trade. All that's going to change. Africa has 60% of the world's solar energy potential, 70% of the world's cobalt. That's key for making electric vehicles. It's tropical rainforests pull in more carbon from the atmosphere than the Amazon. 400 embassies have opened in African countries over the last ten years. Hilton is opening 65 new hotels over the next five years. Netflix has spent $175 million in Africa over the last decade. There's a $10 billion hydrogen plant going up in Namibia. In Kenya, a machine extracts carbon from the air. It could well be that the future belongs to Africa.     

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