Read the Age Wave.
A population wave is the one shift you can see coming. Read it next to the platform arc.
The Creator's Journey · Chapter VI, Seeing the Shift
The platform arc tracks technology: Infrastructure, Consolidation, Regulation, Scale. I use one more lens to read a shift, and it has nothing to do with code. It is population.
I am very interested in population dynamics: how the size of a market changes with the birth rate, and how a market changes as the people in it age. I have watched what the baby boom generation did to every market it moved through, from school class sizes to vacation homes.
You can see it coming
A population wave differs from a technology shift in one useful way. You can see it coming. The people who will be seventy in twenty years are fifty today. That makes demographics one of the most useful lenses I know for asking where a market is headed.
A technology’s position on the arc has to be read from the evidence. A generation’s position is already on the calendar.
Of all external changes, demographics … are the clearest. They are unambiguous. They have the most predictable consequences.
Drucker listed demographics among his seven sources of innovative opportunity, and his reasoning still holds. A technology shift asks you to guess when the curve will turn. A population shift gives you the lead time in advance. The question is whether you use it.
What the wave says now
The numbers are large and already in motion. The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 projects that by the late 2070s, people aged 65 and older will outnumber children under 18 worldwide. By the mid-2030s, people aged 80 and older are projected to outnumber infants.
Joseph Coughlin, who founded and directs the MIT AgeLab, argues in The Longevity Economy that business still serves older customers through a social construct at odds with reality, one that constrains how people live after middle age. That matches what I see. A very large generation is getting older and wants to stay in the game longer. Products built for an outdated picture of age will miss it.
This is a lens, not a forecast. It does not tell you what to build. It tells you which way the ground under your market is moving, and it pairs with the arc. Place your technology on the arc. Then read the age wave for the people you serve.
Read the wave for your market
- Count the peopleWrite down whether the people your market serves are growing in number, shrinking or getting older.
- Age them twenty yearsDescribe your core customer today. Then describe the same person twenty years from now.
- Name the demandWrite what that older, larger or smaller group will need that nobody serves well yet.
- Pair it with the arcAsk whether your technology’s stage and your customers’ stage point the same way. When they do, you have tailwind.
Quick answers
Why do demographics matter for business strategy?
Rob Frasca treats population as a second lens next to the technology arc. Unlike a technology shift, a population wave can be seen in advance: the people who will be seventy in twenty years are fifty today. Peter Drucker called demographics the clearest and most predictable of external changes.
What is the age wave?
Rob Frasca’s term for the way a large generation reshapes each market it moves through as it ages. He points to the baby boom, which changed markets from school class sizes to vacation homes, and to a generation that now wants to stay in the game longer.
Sources
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter VI, Seeing the Shift.
- Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (Harper & Row, 1985). Passage as quoted by the Drucker Institute. Source
- United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024, summary of results. Source
- Joseph F. Coughlin, The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (PublicAffairs, 2017). Source