Watching the world grow older, redux…

Last week Becky posted a story with some animated gifs showing the rate of population aging in selected countries.  This brought to mind my introductory lecture in my Elder Law class, which always starts off with a segment called “The Phenomenon of Global Aging”.  I use the Census Bureau’s animated population pyramids (which have become population chimneys in most countries)  as part of this discussion–I can actually generate the pyramids on the fly in class, asking students to name individual countries in which they have a particular interest.

Here are a couple of examples:  Canada    Japan   United States

(Click the play button to animate the charts)

Visit the Census Bureau’s International Data Base to generate your own animated graphs!