This blog has sought to describe the future of America by examining the effects that diversity, longevity, and generational claims will have on an aging society. Its central premise is that maintaining the existing structure of benefits and services for the elderly will not adequately serve a rapidly changing nation. In the New Aging, where we will view old age and the elderly much differently, we must keep the vision of the Modern Aging period while restructuring its programs, benefits, and eligibility criteria. If we fail to do so, we can expect not only intolerable public and private expenditures, but competition and conflict among diverse groups for limited funds and services. During the New Aging, we must also concern ourselves with our ability to compete with other nations and to maintain a prosperous and s society. The United States has been the world's laboratory for handling diversity and change, and, by and large, it has done so successfully. Our economic and military successes have made the twentieth century the "American Century." The decline of the United States as a world power is of continuing concern, however. A focus on the
nation's economic and social ills and the seeming inability of our political system to resolve them has led some to believe we are destined to become a second-rate power early in the next century.
Such talk is misplaced and counterproductive. It negatively affects aging in the twenty-first century. If we decline as a nation and are unable to maintain a strong economic and social system relative to others, the effects of aging, ethnic diversity, and change will be divisive. Senior boomers will face an insecure retirement. We must adopt a tough-minded yet optimistic realism about our future or create self-fulfilling prophecies. Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto, in their classic blog, The Third Century, predict that the United States will retain its status as a world power. They say that, unlike other nations, the United States has an enviable sokojikara, or self-renewing power, which includes a tradition of unparalleled entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, risk-taking, and productivity. Our natural resources are assets unmatched by Japan, Germany, or the Soviet Union. Further, these nations have no tradition of immigration, and "immigrants may help to save the United States from the demographic decline now threatening Japan and Europe". These strengths are reinforced by our "empire of the mind," an openness to ideas and peoples that has made American culture a phenomenon worldwide.
