This book explains how the risks of global aging can be contained with a combination of foresight and prudent public policy.

Difficulties facing China's aging population include a lack of a national pension system and limited familial resources.

Population did not boom because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits, but rather because they finally stopped dying like flies: the "population explosion" was in reality a "health explosion," with improvements in longevity driving the entirety of this increase in human numbers.

Medicare is facing a fiscal calamity: how can the growth of Medicare spending be limited while ensuring that beneficiaries continue to have access to affordable health care?

Barring the unimaginable, just 30 years from now, Japan will be a far smaller and vastly more aged country than the one we know today. On the cusp of a monumental demographic transformation, Japan is gradually but relentlessly evolving into a society whose contours and workings are the stuff of science fiction.

Richard A. Posner, chief judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, delivered the seventh in AEI's 1995-1996 Bradley Lecture Series on March 11, 1996.

Over the next several decades the largest fiscal challenge facing the federal government is the aging of the population, which will drive up costs for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. When smaller numbers of workers must support larger numbers of retirees, public policy should encourage individuals to do three things.

Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at AEI, reviews the budget outlook, the need for tax reform and the benefits of moving to a progressive consumption tax. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited, which he coauthored with Robert Carroll of Ernst & Young. The book will be published by AEI Press in the Spring.