Each year the World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report, which aims to outline the biggest threats facing society in the year ahead. The 2022 edition features many common sights, including climate action failure, extreme weather, and biodiversity loss. Such catastrophic events often succumb to the so-called availability heuristic, whereby we’re naturally drawn to the things we’re familiar with. In the case of the kind of threats posed in the Global Risks report, these are all risks that are commonly featured in the media, so perhaps take on added prominence in our thinking as a result.

A threat that has never been mentioned in all of the years the report has been published is the declining birth rate, yet this is a sufficient risk for Elon Musk to brand it the biggest threat to civilization at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit.

Nowhere is this more evident than in China, where the population is set to decline for the first time since the famine of 1959-1961. This is caused by a decline in fertility rate to 1.15 in 2021. They’re far from alone, however, with Australia and the United States enjoying fertility rates of 1.6 and Japan at just 1.3.

Attitude towards age

While Musk’s concerns have an existential element to them, in the short to medium-term, it means that our societies are going to get significantly older. That carries numerous challenges with it, but nowhere more so than in the workplace.

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