The 'crisis of the 50s': falling birth rates, ageing and AI squeeze Argentina's labour market

By Fenix951 · September 8, 2026.

Sociologist Matías Schiaffino, interviewed by radio station Fenix 95.1 in La Rioja, Argentina, has put a name to a phenomenon that is starting to be discussed in the country: the "crisis of the 50s," the growing difficulty people between 45 and 60 face in getting back into the labor market after losing their jobs. As he explained, it is not an isolated problem affecting that age group but a symptom of a broader labor crisis, one that also hits young people and is bound up with informality: those who work off the books or in precarious conditions reach that age without enough contributions to retire.

Schiaffino linked that point to a harsher one: comparing 2014 with 2024, 40% fewer babies were born in Argentina. The fall in the birth rate, he argued, has a direct consequence for the pension system, because there are not enough young people entering the labor market to replace those reaching retirement age. The result is a pincer movement: adults who cannot retire because there is no generational replacement, and that same replacement generation, where it exists, competing for ever scarcer jobs.

The sociologist added a third factor to the equation: artificial intelligence. He said the technology is already rapidly reshaping labor structures in "numerous sectors, including the media," and cited estimates —without specifying the source— that anticipate a significant loss of jobs worldwide. His central argument was a simple one: AI "can be working 24 hours a day" on a project, something no human workforce can match, though he qualified that the human contribution will still be necessary. As additional context, he mentioned the "perri-hijo" (pet-as-child) phenomenon: in the City of Buenos Aires the number of dogs and cats in households is already double the number of children under 14, one more indicator of how family structures are being reconfigured alongside the falling birth rate.

These claims are worth taking for what they are: a sociologist's analysis in a radio interview, not a study with published methodology. The 40% drop in births between 2014 and 2024 is the only precise, verifiable figure in the piece; the rest —the scale of AI's impact on global employment, which specific sectors will be hardest hit— remains in the realm of generic estimation, and should be read as such.

That said, the underlying intuition deserves attention because it brings together three phenomena that are almost always analyzed separately. Argentina is not an isolated case: the combination of an aging population, falling birth rates and automation is already on the agenda in Japan, South Korea and much of Europe, where pension systems were designed for a demographic pyramid —many young people paying in, few older people drawing out— that has in practice been inverted. What is new is that a third variable now joins the mix, one that in theory could replace labor at precisely the moment when more young contributors are needed.

Our reading is that there is a paradox here that the original piece does not explore but that is the real heart of the matter. In the short term, automation makes the problem worse: if AI replaces administrative and back-office tasks —the most exposed segment, according to the sector evidence emerging in banking, insurance, corporate administration and services— it eliminates precisely the entry-level jobs the few available young workers would need to fill, and hits workers aged 45 to 60 hardest, since they combine less room to retrain with less time to accumulate contributions before retiring. It is the worst possible combination: fewer young contributors, fewer re-entry jobs for older workers and a pension system designed for another era.

In the long term, however, the same automation that is straining the system today is what could relieve it. If the productivity that AI unlocks translates into more wealth generated with fewer hours of human work, the logic whereby an older generation's welfare depends on the number of young people paying in —a zero-sum equation inherited from a pre-automation era— begins to lose its meaning. The challenge is not technological but one of institutional design: distributing that productivity requires rethinking how pensions are financed, not assuming the problem will solve itself. Argentina, with chronic labor informality and an already politicized pension debate, arrives at that transition with less room than other countries to improvise an answer.