Bernard Salt abandons his Baby Boomer theory

Salt also used the odd argument that you can call yourself a demographer if you are just writing for the business community: "Business calls anyone who deals with population, workforce or market numbers a demographer, including pollsters." Similarly on his Facebook page he told Kate Case who queried his qualifications, "The Australian column is pitched to the business community so the editor gives me the tag of demographer. I tag myself as KPMG Partner." So is it all the Australian's fault?

And without admitting that his main argument about the baby boomers was in ruins, Salt tried to transpose back into the original plain-vanilla variant of the aging population scare:

The issue is not the 10 per cent jump from boomers to Xers; it is the 60 per cent jump between pre-boomers and boomers. We are used to providing services to, say, 2.5 million retirees now; the funding required to deliver the same services (let alone to ramped expectations) to boomers in retirement will be 60 per cent higher. Who's going to pay for that?

The answer is of course that this is largely an imaginary problem, as Dr Ben Spies Butcher recently pointed out in his, "The myth of the ageing 'crisis'" and as the government's recent report on sustainable population makes clear.

We are moving towards a "normal" population in which there will be roughly equal numbers of people in each ten-year age group (up to those ages at which people begin to die off). Yes there will be more people too old to work --- but fewer too young. That is no economic disaster, since the young are far more economically dependent than the old. (In simple terms, grandparents mind children; children don't mind grandparents. And remember that even now Australia each year has twice as many births as deaths.)

Worse still for Salt, if aging is a problem, the Productivity Commission says immigration is no solution. In a recent submission to the Minister for Population the Commission says that to delay the aging of Australia's population to deal with baby boomer retirements "would require a net migration-to-population ratio of 3 per cent per year, leading to a population of around 85 million by 2044-45." (!!!!! ) That's more than twice the Big Australia figure of 35.9 million in 2050 that so alarmed Ken Henry. They add, "It follows that, rather than seeking to mitigate the aging of the population, policy should seek to influence the potential economic and other impacts." Professor Peter McDonald has produced a similar calculation. How come Bernard doesn't know about this?

In any case, this older and simpler version of the aging population scare is one over which Salt has no special ownership. The failure of his Baby Bust theory threatens to leave him as a guru without portfolio.

Back in 2004 when the Property Council asked him to explain his success as a "property guru", Salt obliging explained that the secret was to be impartial and fearless:

In order to be a property guru you cannot have a vested interest. A guru must be an advisor, not a developer.... I do think that gurus can set the agenda. All you need is a genuinely good and new idea that has a commercial edge. And all for the better if that concept is pitched to a rising market.

Well Salt's Baby Bust idea was certainly pitched to a rising market, or at least to a property and developer audience that wanted to believe any reasons he could offer them for thinking it wasn't selfish to demand a continuation of Big Australia.

Yet, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, the parts of Salt's big idea that are true seem not very new, and the parts that are new now seem not to be true.