If there is one thing that will get my goat quite quickly, it is politicians (worldwide it would seem) berating people for getting older and draining the country of every resource including housing and money.
I am amazed that they are amazed that all these older people exist - were they not expecting us? Did we just materialise one day in order to take up valuable living space and claim the overly generous pensions (said tongue in cheek) and lie in hospital beds because we haven't got the decency to die sooner?
I decided to look into it and, as usual, all is not as it seems on the surface.
From the 1970s/80s, the problem of the elderly has been put forward in order to bring about an anti-welfarist consensus in Anglo-American societies and it highlights some very important trends in society.
It coincides with the tendency to marginalize the elderly from the labour market and from society at large.
The real issue isn’t that there aren’t enough people capable of working to support an older population, it is more that, increasingly, older people find it difficult to find employment in order to support themselves. According to recently published figures, employment for older men has declined faster than any other age group. As a result, a third of men aged between 50 and 65 are now jobless in Britain. Demography has little to do with enforced early retirement. It is this shortening of working life which is likely to create difficulties for the economic position of the elderly.
Over the past 54 years, the United Kingdom - Age dependency ratio has remained fairly static beginning with 54% in 1960 and 51% in 2011. It peaked in the 1970s at close to 60% for most of the decade. The percentages shown put Britain in middle ranking worldwide for age dependency ratios.
The British government requested two reviews from Sir Derek Wanless but don’t appear to have adopted the recommendations made by Derek Wanless and The King’s Fund www.kingsfund.org.uk/press/press-releases/wanless-review-calls-extra-money-and-new-funding-system
Canada has undergone the same process we are undergoing but with very different results: University of British Columbia health economist Morris Barer says Canadian researchers have known for more than 2 decades “that the aging of Canada’s population has a very small impact on Canadian health care costs and will continue to have a relatively small impact. Speaking to the Canadian Association of Health Services and Policy Research last year, Barer said his group alone had written 3 papers focusing on this subject over a period of 15 years but the concept of a demographic time bomb persists despite evidence to the contrary.
So given that no research exists to support the argument that the elderly are to blame, why does this persist? Is Canada managing its health service better than the UK does? Is it a way for governments to opt out of social welfare? Why do the counter-arguments never seem to gain as much airtime or column inches as the doomsayers?
Any thoughts?
(the above has been copied from various websites including Dominic Lawson on 'The Imaginary Timebomb' by Phil Mullan and the Canadian Health Service report)
