People are living longer lives. In the course of the last century, improvements in diet, sanitation, medical science and healthcare drove a steady increase in longevity, both in Britain and around the world. This change, unique in history, is perhaps the greatest triumph of the postwar period.
And yet longer lives alter the balance of society, as the proportion of older, retired people increases at a faster rate than the working-age population. The question then arises of how to pay for the pensions of the retired. Pensions, after all, are not paid out of a fixed store of cash. They are paid from returns on invested funds and those returns are derived from the productive capacity of the economy as a whole.