How to save ourselves from an ättestupa
Sir, if countries were open-ended investment trusts, then if the average lifespan was eighty years, a newborn baby should have eighty shares, a fifty-six-year-old consultant (like me) should have only twenty-four shares, and anyone over eighty should count his blessings and be happy with the one he’s got left. From this perspective, the representation of the young in our current democracy is null.
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, in “How to save the young from the burden of pensions” October 18, describes precisely the conflicts that are getting more serious by the day as the graying of the democracies in Europe (and the US too) is reducing even more the low representation of the younger generations. This though is not a problem restricted to the developed countries. The World Development Report 2007 from the World Bank titled Development and the Next Generation is a truly hair raising reading that evidences our failings as a society and that most of those coming after us are giving up on participation and hope, with damned good reasons.
It is said that in Scandinavia, a long time ago, when the older people felt that they stood in the way of the young, they threw themselves off steep cliffs known as an ättestupa. In this respect Bini Smaghi, instead of talking about saving the young would be more correct phrasing it as saving ourselves, before they throw us down an ättestupa—for damned good reasons!
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, in “How to save the young from the burden of pensions” October 18, describes precisely the conflicts that are getting more serious by the day as the graying of the democracies in Europe (and the US too) is reducing even more the low representation of the younger generations. This though is not a problem restricted to the developed countries. The World Development Report 2007 from the World Bank titled Development and the Next Generation is a truly hair raising reading that evidences our failings as a society and that most of those coming after us are giving up on participation and hope, with damned good reasons.
It is said that in Scandinavia, a long time ago, when the older people felt that they stood in the way of the young, they threw themselves off steep cliffs known as an ättestupa. In this respect Bini Smaghi, instead of talking about saving the young would be more correct phrasing it as saving ourselves, before they throw us down an ättestupa—for damned good reasons!
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