History proves that the fastest-growing population group always shapes the prevailing culture. For the first time, that group will not be young people, but middle-aged, graying, in my case balding, Baby Boomers.

Life expectancy has been going up steadily for 300 years and in every developed country, the birthrate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire.

This will mean that the mass market that emerged in all rich countries after the Second World War, dominated by youth, will now be driven my middle-aged consumers, followed by youth. There will be one mass market for middle-agers, and a much smaller one for younger people.

There are signs that this is already happening. During the bubble market of the 1990s, its frantic day-trading in high-tech stocks, belonged mainly to those under the age of 45. However, the customers in the markets for investments like mutual funds tend to be over 50.

Because the supply of young people will shrink, creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people will become increasingly important. As with consumers, there will be two distinct workforces, those under 50 and those over.

Unlike the agricultural and industrial age, knowledge will be the key resource in this “emerging society”, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in the Hudson Valley’s workforce.

At present, the term knowledge worker is widely used to describe people like: doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants and chemical engineers. But the growth will be in “knowledge technologists” like computer technicians, software designers, and analysts in chemical labs.

Fred Harding, director of the award winning Small Business Development center headquartered in Kingston, with offices through the Hudson Valley warns:” As manufacturing jobs have declined in New York, “distribution centers” have filled the gap. However, as “knowledge technologists” become the dominant portion of the workforce, filling positions from our existing labor pool, without retraining, will become increasingly difficult.”

Knowledge workers now account for a full third of the American workforce, outnumbering factory workers by two to one. In another 20 years or so, they are likely to make up close to 40 percent of the workforce. Knowledge technologist will need different skills than factory or distribution workers.

Knowledge workers collectively are the new capitalists. Knowledge has become the key resource, and the only scarce one. This means that knowledge workers collectively own the means of production.

The most successful future Hudson Valley organizations will realize that because knowledge work is specialized, knowledge workers need access to a corporation or organization that brings together a variety of people and applies their output to a common end product or service. The most successful will also market primarily to middle-age consumers with a secondary focus on youth.

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