"we don't often talk directly about demographics..."

"we don't often talk directly about demographics..."

>> TUESDAY, JULY 07, 2009

... says Evan Davies on the Today programme, treading delicately on eggshells as he interviews Richard Ehrman, author of 'The Power of Numbers' . Funny that.

"Partly, perhaps, because it all tends to change rather slowly, and partly perhaps because we have an aversion to any kind of population control"

I wonder who the 'we' is ? And aversion to population control ? You wouldn't get that impression from the BBC. Evan's back on the eggshells again ...

"We very much .. um .. (unintelligible) relied, either explicitly, you know, deliberately, or by default - on rising immigration, if you like, to keep the labour force growing, haven't we"

We may well have done - but the BBC certainly didn't tell us that. You'd be better off reading Charles Moore if you want to know what the problem is. He doesn't agree that the changes are slow, either :

Each day, a small number of people walk up from the station and past our house on their way to work. It is quite a long walk – perhaps a mile and a half – but I imagine they walk because they do not earn enough to own cars. They are virtually all foreign. They are on their way to serve as carers and nurses in an old people's home, whose inmates are virtually all British... ...the change is not marginal, but drastic. In 1960, OECD countries had a fertility rate of 3.2 children. Today, they have one of 1.6, well below the "replacement rate" of 2.1. So the rate has halved in my lifetime, moving from fast increase to steady decline. We in the West are collectively deciding not to bestow on others the gift which we most value for ourselves – life. ... the welfare state as we know it is essentially the creation of the post-war baby boom, and cannot survive a baby bust. In 1950, there were 5.5 million people in Britain aged over 65. There are 10.5 million today. If I am still alive in 2035, I shall be one of 15.25 million pensioners, while the number of those working, and therefore paying for me and the other 15,249,999, will have fallen steeply.

The problem for the BBC is that the factors which have caused the demographic collapse - the Pill, the sexual revolution, easily available abortion (one baby in four - six million plus since 1967) , women putting career before children, the glorification of extended adolescence - are part of the cultural revolution in which the BBC played a supporting role and which the BBC celebrate to this day. Alas, in those days of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll no one mentioned pensions or the care of the elderly. No one told us ideas had unintended consequences. The writer Lionel Shriver describes the mindset with great insight and honesty inthis Guardian piece. The timebomb is serious, and makes the Government's current credit crunch deficit look like small change. You can see a 'population pyramid' here - note the immediate post-war 'blip' of babies, then the great bulge born in the 50s and 60s. As that bulge moves into retirement over the next 25 years, the ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers (elderly people need more care and particularly more medical care) will fall. Where will the money come from to pay for their care ? There's another issue too. Public sector pensions - which are funded, not by investments squirreled away, but by current tax receipts. A larger number of pensioners plus a smaller number of taxpayers is not a sustainable situation - unless the government either raises taxes significantly, cuts public spending significantly, or prints money. A private pension provider who paid existing pensioners out of current receipts, and who therefore needed a continual inflow of new clients to pay the existing ones, would be guilty of a criminal offence. There's a word for financial schemes which take in money, promising a good return in the future, and use the new money coming in to pay existing investors. They're called Ponzi schemes. A characteristic is that they need to recruit more and more new investors to pay the outgoings to the current investors. When the supply of new investors dries up, the scheme cannot continue to pay out and collapses. For 'new investors' in the Ponzi scheme, read 'new taxpayers' paying for some old chap's pension and NHS treatment, or for some quangocrat's inflation-proofed pension - maybe even a BBC one. You can see why they haven't given the subject much coverage. (A nasty thought occurs to me. I hope the BBC's continual plugging of euthanasia isn't softening us up for the inevitable tax-saving cull of the aged and infirm. We wouldn't want to be a burden on the state, would we now ?)