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The aging of the U.S. population is, well, a fact of life that gets mentioned often in political and economic discussions but seldom is communicated in an understandable way. Stephen Holzman, who appears to be something of a data visualization whiz, decided to pull together the statistics and animate them. The most striking element of the graphic, unsurprisingly, is the movement of baby-boomers through the population, seen as a very distinctive bulge appearing in the mid-1940s and moving up in age through about 2040, at which point it begins to fade. But the most important point is that the population as a whole is aging. (The red and blue bands on the graphic reflect the uncertainties of population statistics starting in 2010.) The World Economic Forum reproduced Holzman's graphic for a discussion of the implications of the trend, which roughly parallels that in the rest of the world. "The potential consequences of an aging population," observes the WEF, "include economic pressure on healthcare and other welfare systems and a much smaller working-age population relative to the elderly." Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-aging-us-20160416-snap-htmlstory.html