By now, we’ve been pretty much terrorized by the demographers’ prophesies of the coming apocalypse of an aging society. The health-care system will collapse under the weight of geriatric care. The actuarial basis of the Canada Pension Plan is threatened. Statistics Canada warns of manpower shortages within 15 years, when the tail end of the baby-boom bulge exits the labour force.

All these scenarios are possible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re probable. Indeed, to accept such straight-line projections as inevitable or the forces of demography as immutable leads to a faulty assessment of the future and blinds us to alternative possibilities that may be more in keeping with the future we want.

Fortunately, history shows that society does not evolve in the linear fashion that demography may suggest. Based on population projections alone, our universities should have been wanting for students since the late 1980s, when the last of the big generation graduated. Instead, post-secondary institutions are bursting at the seams and only high-school grads with top grades are admitted to their school of choice. What happened? The value we, as a society, place on university education increased and participation rates skyrocketed, more than offsetting the declining numbers of eligible, university-aged students.

Even more than hindsight, common sense tells us the unidimensional perspective of demographic analysis alone provides an incomplete, often distorted picture of our future. To leap from predicting an aging population — which is indisputable — to the conclusion that society will be exactly as it is today except with more old people would be simplistic and illogical. Already, the baby boomers have transformed society in ways no demographer could have predicted 40 years ago.
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