Phillip Longman–who ranks just beneath Batman in my pantheon of heroes–has a great piece at Foreign Policy about the demography of aging societies. Longman’s point is that the world is getting a lot older: “[T]he global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of midcentury, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion.” And that this global graying is likely to cause lots of problems. Among Longman’s interesting take-aways:

* “The very last Japanese baby will be born in the year 2959, assuming the country’s low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman continues unchanged.”