A failure to adapt: demographic problems to newspapers

Tim Harford has a nice column in the FT today It’s time to stop being shy about retiring – we can’t afford it about the "problem of demographics". As he puts it,

An ageing society is not, primarily, a demographic crisis. The problem is a failure to adapt – a failure that afflicts politics, management and society.

It's interesting because this failure to adapt is also true of so many other things. For example, in the railway industry it's not the lack of new technology that's the problem in many cases, it's the institutions that fail to adapt effectively to the new technologies. Slate's Jack Shafer in (The Beginning of the End for Newspapers) describes a similar failure of newspapers to adapt to new markets in the 1960s, with the results being felt in today's newspaper crisis.