This is my party, so I can tickle my bias if I want to.
Here’s a cool paper via Tyler Cowen:
We confirm what others have already demonstrated, but we extract markedly more statistical significance by adapting a polynomial curve-fitting technique pioneered by Fair and Dominguez (1991), to this new purpose. In our work, we find that a growing roster of young adults (age 15-49) is very good for GDP growth, a growing roster of older workers is a little bad for GDP growth, and a growing roster of young children or senior citizens is very bad for GDP growth.
Ok, here are some population pyramids:
According to the 1990 population pyramid, we should have been experiencing a boom in the 90s.
This boom should have abated in the 2000s.
By 2025, the transition is almost complete and the economy reaches a demographic steady state.
I haven’t read the paper, but I know what Scott Sumner has taught me: falls in nominal GDP are super duper bad. And demographics appear to have contributed to this.
AND, that contribution is ending.
This is an aspect of the debate that some of my favorite commentators haven’t yet addressed to my knowledge.
Not Unreasonable 