On a bright February morning under a blank desert sky, three experts in world population get into a van in Tempe, Arizona, and drive back to the future. From the campus of Arizona State University on the edge of Phoenix, the three head northwest along Grand Avenue, following old U.S. Route 60 out of the city. On either side, what used to be cotton fields and cattle feedlots, and before that catclaw bushes and cactus scrub, has turned into suburban sprawl. The Phoenix metropolitan area, a.k.a. the Valley of the Sun, has grown more quickly than any other urban area in the United States, following an influx over the past decade of Hispanic migrants and white retirees. Due largely to the latter, the Northwest Valley of Phoenix is one of the fastest-aging population centers of the country.
The day starts cool, even cold. Frost disrupts the tee times on the bright green golf courses dotting the Northwest Valley. Arizona’s median age is 34, but at the point where Grand Avenue crosses the dry bed of the New River, palm trees sprout from the sidewalks and the median age jumps to 75. Silver-haired drivers on souped-up golf carts nose into the traffic, one maneuvering fearlessly in front of the university van. Screened by a low white wall, rows of nearly identical single-level houses nestle on tidy, concentric streets. A big hospital overlooks the development like a lifeguard scanning a beach. Welcome to Sun City, Arizona, population 38,000, the once and future retirement mecca, where the whole world seems to be headed.
At Del Webb Boulevard—Del E. Webb was the visionary developer who built Sun City—the van turns and parks in front of the community’s historical museum. The three academics get out. They are Michael Birt, 58, a gerontologist and director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Health; Jennifer Glick, 42, a sociologist and demographer at the ASU Center for Population Dynamics; and Haruna Fukui, 32, a Japanese graduate student working on her Ph.D. in sociology with Glick as her adviser.
At DISCOVER’s invitation, the trio had formed an impromptu panel. They were asked to discuss global population trends, including growth, fertility, and the impacts of immigration. But especially they planned to address the overarching trend of aging, which some researchers are calling “the gray tsunami” because it threatens to inundate the world’s health-care systems and sweep away today’s social, political, and economic norms. To make the discussion more pointed, it would take place during a field trip to Sun City, the prototypical American retirement community, now entering old age itself. None of the three has been here before, and they are curious to see it.
Population growth, not aging, has drawn the lion’s share of public attention, so the panel speaks to that topic first. There was consternation in the media when the Population Division of the United Nations announced that Earth had gained its 7 billionth person in 2011. By 2050 there could be 3 billion more of us, according to the agency’s most pessimistic projection. But Glick, the demographer, says, “Let’s not make a big deal about that number. The focus should be on the rate of growth and on the eventual turnabout.” Although billions of people are still in the pipeline, global population growth is slowing so rapidly that a decline in the population later this century seems unavoidable.
