PLEASE RELEASE ME:

One deal to allow Britain to grow old gracefully (James Purnell, April 1 2003, Financial Times)

Europe is ageing. Our birth rate is falling below the levels needed to balance deaths. Fewer working-age adults will be left to pay for the growing costs of pensions and long-term care. One solution is immigration. Another is to increase the proportion of adults who work.

We need fundamental reform of the welfare state to achieve that goal. We need to help parents, mothers in particular, to combine work and family. We need to invest much more in small children. We need to require everyone who can work to consider doing so. [...]

The new welfare state must...aim to make women truly equal at work. In the 1970s, countries such as Denmark and Sweden decided to meet the problem of an ageing population by helping more women to work. By reducing child poverty, offering generous paid parental leave and attacking discrimination, they raised the proportion of women in work from 58 per cent then to 72 per cent now. The government has introduced longer and better-paid leave for parents but we need to do more to match up to the success of Scandinavian countries. [...]

The New Deals should be rationalised into a single programme - a Single Deal, open to all claimants under the poverty line. Job advisers should be able to design programmes around the needs of the individual. We should investigate the experience of Wisconsin, which guarantees a wage-paying transitional job as an alternative to benefits. In return, job advisers could then be given the power, in exceptional circumstances, to apply a benefits sanction to any claimant who could work but persistently refused to do so.

Different benefit conditions could still apply to different workers. A young man would be treated differently from, say, a single mother with children under school age. But with 1m of those on incapacity benefit saying they want to work, and most single mothers saying the same, there is real potential for reducing poverty and increasing the working population.

Combined with universal childcare and equality at work, Europe might even be able to age gracefully without relying just on immigration.

This is just sad. What she's essentially suggesting is that England euthanize itself. Obviously moving more people, especially women, into the workforce will reduce the already suicidal birthrates, though it will enable the elderly do die more comfortably--at least for awhile--as these young workers fund the retirements of the older, larger generations.

When you read something like this, which implicitly accepts as an impossibility the idea of increasing birthrates, you almost have to conclude that Europe has reached the point predicted by Albert Jay Nock:

Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. 'For us to love our country,' he said, 'our country ought to be lovely.' I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 2, 2003 10:51 AM