Pub. 3 2013 Issue 1

6 At the Center of Utah Industry Mining and Medical Devices in Utah S omeone who sees mining as only mining is missing the entire point. Mining can be whatever you want it to be. It’s like the old story about the three masons building a cathedral. Two of the masons saw only the rough manual labor. The third saw his effort as part of something larger and more enduring, and he did his work accordingly. He wasn’t just hitting and shaping rocks. He was building a cathedral. If you want to build cars, you mine the metal for those cars. If you want to build state-of-the-art medical devices, you need mining just as much, if not more. Among other things, mining is key to anything involving electronics, and electronics are key to creating medical devices. Although cars are still important, medical devices may turn out to be more important still during the next half century. Why? The place to start is with a brief analysis of the aging U.S. population. • On Ap ril 1, 2010, according to the U.S. census, the U.S. had 40.3 million people who were 65 or older, or 13 percent of the total U.S. population. The number in 2000 was 35.0 million, meaning there was an increase of 5.3 million. The percentage of the total population then was 12.4 percent. That’s an increase of 15.1 percent, compared with 9.7 percent for every other age group. • The five -year group that grew the most in the 65+ crowd were those between the ages of 65 to 69; they went from 9.5 million to 12.4 million, an increase of 30.4 percent. Since the first members of the baby boom generation started turning 65 in 2011, experts think that the group of those between 65 and 69 will begin to grow even faster during the coming decades. To put this in perspective, consider that the last of the baby boom generation will hit 65 in 2029. There’s another mini baby boom to consider after that — the children of the baby boom. Assume that the mini baby boom starts 20 years after the first one; a child born in 1966 will turn 65 in 2031. The two years between 2029 and 2031 are not much of a breather. • According to the 2010 census, the region with the highest increase in those 65 and older was the west. There were 8.5 million people in that age