Comments on The Great Demographic Reversal (Varian and Dodge)

Two comments received regarding Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan’s “The Great Demographic Reversal” follow questions that surfaced during the CFS roundtable discussion. They include 1) the role of technology and productivity as well as 2) the internationalization of the big demographic shift.

First, Hal Varian (Chief Economist, Google and Emeritus Professor, UC Berkeley) offers a paper on advancing technology and automation vis-a-vis the impact of demographic forces on the supply of labor – https://voxeu.org/article/automation-versus-procreation-aka-bots-versus-tots.

Second, David Dodge (Senior Advisor, Bennett Jones and Former President, Bank of Canada) noted…
“I have been making the same point about the aging of the baby boom generation in Canada. This big cohort were big savers in the first two decades of this century. They will become big dis-savers from 2025 to 2045.”

The original message and link to slides are below.

—–Original Message—–
From: Lawrence Goodman lgoodman@the-cfs.org
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2020 12:31 PM
Subject: The Great Demographic Reversal (Goodhart and Pradhan)…

Last week, we hosted a roundtable discussion with CFS Advisory Board Member Charles Goodhart and his co-author Manoj Pradhan.

The Great Demographic Reversal is superb. It addresses head-on demographic forces that will only gain in importance over time. The book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalization will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. Charles and Manoj broadened the country-by-country demographic analysis by connecting many global threads and interactions among nations.

Please find their slides at
http://www.centerforfinancialstability.org/speeches/The_Great_Demographic_Reversal_CFS.pdf