NEW ORLEANS - Aging baby boomers, a rapidly growing foreign-born population and the increasing pace of globalization all add up to very real worries for the nation's economy, demographer James H. Johnson Jr. told a packed house Friday morning at the last full day of the National Conference of State Legislature's annual Legislative Summit.

"This nation--every region of this country, every state and every community--are in the midst of an unprecedented set of demographic changes … that will transform the nation," said Johnson,  the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina.

The two key developments driving this transformation, he said, are the graying of America and the browning of America.

The country's 86 million baby boomers, he pointed out, are heading for retirement, but there are only 60 million people in the working population coming behind them.

"It's referred to as the silver tsunami," Johnson said, and the result is that "the competition for talent is going to be incredibly fierce"

The browning of America--the rapid rise in the population of people of color--comes partially from immigration, but also from the wildly higher birth rate primarily among Hispanics as compared with non-Hispanic whites.

Our ability to prosper, Johnson said, "will depend upon our ability to manage the transition from the graying of America to the browning of America."

At the same time this huge demographic shift is taking place, he said, the country is experiencing the effects of the second wave of globalization.

That first wave was the deep drop of manufacturing in this country. "We don't make much of anything in this country," Johnson said. "We told the workers who lost manufacturing jobs that they should go back to school and prepare themselves for new jobs."

But now the second wave of globalization is affecting those jobs and moving "all the way to the very top of the knowledge chain."

For example, he said, people are traveling to India for highly complicated surgical procedures. But it goes further than that: "We have begun to outsource innovation in America."

This nation, he said, has always taken the attitude expressed in the Bobby McFerrin song, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Instead, he said, "I suggest to you that it's time to worry."

An example, he said, is the John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore, India, a General Electric research facility staffed by nearly 3000 scientists and engineers. Average salary: $650 a month.

That, Johnson said, is impossible to compete with in this country and should alarm Americans. "We're in a global war and right now I'm not sure we understand the degree to which were at a competitive disadvantage in that marketplace."