Drucker states in the introduction: “This is not a book of predictions, not a book about the future. The challenges and issues discussed in it are already with us in every one of the developed countries and in most of the emerging ones. They can already be identified, discussed, analyzed and prescribed for. Some people, someplace are already working on them. But so far, very few organizations do, and very few executives. Those who do work on these challenges today, and thus prepare themselves and their institutions for the new challenges, will be the leaders and dominate tomorrow. Those who wait until these challenges have indeed become ‘hot’ issues are likely to fall behind, perhaps never to recover.”
“The most important single new certainty-if only because there is no precedent for it in all of history-is the collapsing birthrate in the developed world.”
Drucker outlines the problems in seven pages at the beginning of his book, and then carries the thread throughout the work. He describes how Japan and all of Southern Europe are “drifting toward collective national suicide by the end of the 21st century.” He cites statistics to back up his contention and then observes that the United States is not far behind the other dying nations. He gives us another twenty to twenty-five years and then points out that our population will begin to seriously decline.
Drucker predicts that the age of retirement will most likely rise from today’s 60-65 to 79 during the next century.
“The birthrate collapse has tremendous political and social implications that we cannot even guess at today. But it surely will also have tremendous economic and business implications . . . Above all, any strategy . . . has to start out with demographics and, above all, with the collapsing birthrate in the developed world. Of all developments, it is the most spectacular, the most unexpected and one that has no precedent whatsoever.”