Demographic Trends

The World Won't Be Aging Gracefully. Just the Opposite.

By Neil Howe and Richard Jackson
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 4, 2009; B01

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Meanwhile, with the demand for low-wage labor rising, immigration (assuming no rise over today's rate) will double the percentage of Muslims in France and triple it in Germany. By 2030, Amsterdam, Marseille, Birmingham and Cologne are likely to be majority Muslim.

Of course, some developing regions will remain extremely young in the 2020s. Sub-Saharan Africa -- which is afflicted with the world's highest fertility rates and ravaged by AIDS -- will still be racked by large youth bulges. So will several Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. In recent years, most of these countries have demonstrated the correlation between extreme youth and violence. If that correlation endures, chronic unrest and state failure could persist through the 2020s -- or even longer if fertility fails to drop.

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