A report from The United Nations encouraged policymakers around the world to plan for older populations with fewer younger workers.

Developed countries with a greater share of older people and developing countries with more young people will experience the “irreversible global trend” of population aging, according to a report from the organization. The number of people over 65 years old is expected to more than double over the next three decades, from around 760 million to over 1.6 billion, while the number of people over 80 years old is increasing at an even faster rate.

“This pattern began on a global scale around the middle of the twentieth century and is expected to intensify in the decades ahead,” the analysis explained. “Most of the more developed countries have experienced population ageing over several decades and are already in advanced stages of this process. By contrast, many developing countries face rapid transitions towards ageing societies.”

While nations in Europe and North America currently have the highest number of older people, nations in Africa and Western Asia are “expected to experience the fastest growth in the number of older people” over the next three decades. Dependency ratios, which chart the number of older people and children relative to the working-age populations upon which they depend, are projected to increase over the same horizon.

The UN therefore called upon governments to increase retirement ages and expand pension coverage while making investments in healthcare and education that permit older people to be more self-reliant and economically productive.

“Based on current global trends, future cohorts of working-age and older persons are likely to be healthier and better educated, and therefore more productive, compared to earlier cohorts,” the report continued. “Eliminating age-related discrimination and barriers to formal employment are other critical measures for older persons to make continued contributions.”

Several developed nations are facing overburdened pension systems as more individuals enter retirement age. Medicare Hospital Insurance in the United States is projected to be insolvent by 2028, while Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will deplete reserves by 2034, according to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The UN forecasts that the human race will have 8.5 billion people by 2030 and 9.7 billion people by 2050 even as worldwide fertility rates reach their lowest levels since 1950. India will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous nation; the former maintains a fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman, while the latter has a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Some commentators have rejected the conventional wisdom that the global population is expanding at an unsustainable rate. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called low birth rates “one of the biggest risks to civilization” and encouraged people to build families.

“So many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control,” he said. “It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.”

A British rapper known as M.I.A. lost her gig at the 2-day U.K. music festival in August called Field Day following her appearance on the Candace Owens podcast on The Daily Wire.

The 47-year-old singer, born Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam MBE, appeared with Owens in a November 1 video. During the show, Owens said M.I.A. has been described by legacy media as an “anti-vaxxer,” “a terrorist sympathizer,” and “an out of touch elitist who’s suffering from terminal foot-in-mouth syndrome.”

On January 10, the rapper tweeted a message she said was from the festival informing her that she had been removed from the event over her “online comments,” which “could be viewed as being quite contentious.” The message said that her remarks would make it “very hard” for the festival to continue with her following an offer to perform sent on October 27.

“After discussing it with AEG, the consensus is that in light of the online activity, we cannot continue with the offer,” the message to M.I.A. added. “We have not taken the decision lightly, but we must consider the wide risks to the festival and its stakeholders.”

M.I.A. tweeted in response to the message, “‘In light of her online activity’ like what accidentally launching a missile on an innocent village, or me scamming a billions of dollars [sic] from people or running a sex scandal? No it was your lil tweet. How Naughty. Festival stakeholders want musicians to be boring Puppets.”

“In light of her online activity”like what accidentally launching a missile on a innocent village, or me scamming a billions of dollars from people or running a sex scandal?

No it was your lil tweet. How Naughty.

Festival stakeholders want musicians to be boring Puppets. pic.twitter.com/KWQJre7DEG

— M.I.A. (@MIAuniverse) January 11, 2023

During the artist’s appearance in November, she and Owens discussed the singer’s childhood experiences growing up in Sri Lanka as one of the Tamil minority in that country. M.I.A. told Candace about an incident in 2009 when tens of thousands of Tamils were forced onto a beach and bombed — and event known as the Mullivaikkal Massacre.

The rapper labeled the actions against the group war crimes, which Owens noted no one wanted the singer to talk about at the time.

“They wanted me to be like, ‘I came from a mud hut, like me now, you know, I’m driving a Bentley, and I’m so happy I’m liberated,’” the U.K. rapper shared. “And that was the narrative Hollywood wanted me to say.”

“But money didn’t mean s***, you know, when 150,000 people are getting bombed, and you can’t speak about it,” she added. “And if you have to compromise that to achieve this status, it just wasn’t worth it, you know, in a larger scale, not just talking about myself and my experience, on a larger scale this level of censorship or gaslighting, I would say it induces mental illness in people, which I think is why it’s been going up in society because it’s so, it’s so difficult.”

“Because on the one hand, 99% of the people would have shut up and took the the Bentley route, you know, and become the billionaire,” the artist continued. “And would have found it quite easy to make that compromise, you know, but for me, obviously, I have a very political dad and my family come from that, you know. So it was just not — it was just not an option not to talk about it, because it’s ingrained in the DNA of my music.”

“So if you had simply forgotten who you were, you could have become someone else,” Owens replied.

At the time of this publication, there has been no further comment from the festival.