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Opinion
1 May 2016 2.00 h

THE LAST WORD

The 'problem' with ageing

We should be celebrating the fact that we have improved diet, living standards, medicine, technology, security – all of the elements determining when we might die

Very few peo­ple look for­ward to get­ting old, and the rea­sons are so ob­vi­ous that there is lit­tle point in list­ing them here. En­tire so­ci­eties can age, too, and ours is doing just that every day that passes. The com­bi­na­tion of an in­creas­ingly longer life ex­pectancy and a lower birth rate puts so­ci­ety in a dif­fi­cult po­si­tion. With eu­thana­sia or en­forced re­pro­duc­tion out of the ques­tion, as they nat­u­rally are in a so­ci­ety like ours, then the only real so­lu­tion left is to en­cour­age im­mi­gra­tion. Yet, in gen­eral, peo­ple are not so keen on for­eign­ers and so the num­bers of de­pen­dent el­derly grows, with in­creas­ingly fewer young peo­ple to sup­port them, while fer­tile, able-bod­ied mi­grants are dis­cour­aged from seek­ing their for­tune among us.

It paints a pretty grim sce­nario.

And yet, as with so many things in life, it all de­pends on how you look at it. One of the things that struck me when I read the re­port we have this month on the fu­ture de­mo­graph­ics of Cat­alo­nia – which ad­dresses all the above is­sues in a se­ries of il­lus­trated ar­ti­cles be­tween page 20 and 27 – is that we should see in­creased life ex­pectancy as one of the great achieve­ments of our times (see in­ter­view on page 24). When you think about it, of course it is just that. Rather than see­ing the ever-greater num­bers of older peo­ple in so­ci­ety as a bur­den or a prob­lem to be solved, we should be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we have im­proved diet, liv­ing stan­dards, med­i­cine, tech­nol­ogy, se­cu­rity – all of the el­e­ments de­ter­min­ing when we might die – to such an ex­tent that most peo­ple now have the po­ten­tial to live a long, safe and ful­filled life. Isn't that the whole point of progress in the first place?

New chal­lenges

Which is not to say that such fun­da­men­tal changes in so­ci­ety do not pre­sent new chal­lenges. There are al­ways chal­lenges to over­come and, no mat­ter how much progress we might make, there al­ways will be. What is use­ful about the sort of sta­tis­tics and fore­casts to be found in our re­port this month is not that it gives us a good rea­son to throw in the towel, but that it gives us a chance to pre­pare prop­erly for the fu­ture. Whether it is as in­spi­ra­tion for pub­lic pol­icy, for tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion, for new busi­nesses, for ed­u­ca­tion re­form – you name it – this sort of in­for­ma­tion helps give so­ci­ety a heads-up, as it were, so that we don't have to walk blind­fold into an un­cer­tain fu­ture in which the hard work done so far (and done by the older gen­er­a­tions, don't for­get) will mean lit­tle.

Catalonia's future population Pages 20-27
Fewer children are being born these days in Catalonia, while the country has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. As a result, Catalan society is ageing, and so it is important to know how immigration might offset the trend or how the exodus of young talent from the country due to a high youth unemployment rate might affect us in the future. This makes it essential to understand the exact situation at the moment, and in the future, as well as having an idea about how it might affect the development of society as a whole. All weighty subjects, yet ones we clearly need to be aware of. You can make a start by reading our report, which is a good entry point into the complex yet fascinating subject of population dynamics.
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Neil Stokes
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