Investment banker Peter G. Peterson, a former US Secretary of Commerce, writes:

"The list of great hazards in the next century is long and generally familiar.

It includes:
proliferation of nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons;
high-tech terrorism;
deadly super viruses;
extreme climate change;
the financial, economic, and political aftershocks of globalization;
and the ethnic and military explosions waiting to be detonated by today's unsteady new democracies.

Yet there is a less- understood challenge -- the graying of the developed world's population -- that may actually do more to reshape our collective future than any of the above. ...

Unlike other challenges, such as financial support for new democracies, the cost of global aging will be far beyond our means -- even the collective means of all the world's wealthy nations. How we confront global aging will have direct economic implications -- measurable, over the next century, in the quadrillions of dollars -- that will likely dwarf the other challenges. Indeed, it will greatly influence how the other challenges ultimately play out." "Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America -- and the World."

 [NewsScan, 30Apr01.]