Demographic discussions nowadays tend to concentrate on the aging of the population in so many places, and that’s going on. But at the same time, many places in the world have a growing population of people between the ages of 15 and 24. The chart above is from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and it shows the projected number of people between the ages of 15 and 24 in a given region between 1950 and 2100. You can see that it’s big in Asia now. It is rising rapidly in Africa and gently in Latin America.
This matters because the more young people a population has, the more cultural and political change it is likely to have. Think about the post-WWII baby boom in the U.S. When all those kids came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, they brought new music, political protests, and civil rights into the fore.
This youth energy can be good or bad. That depends on where you stand, but it also depends on the overall level of corruption in the society. Will new music be enough of a rebellion? Will we be looking at revolutions? That’s the question for investors.
