You’re completely right: we need to educate everyone as to what is happening with demographics, and ideally early in their life.

My dad is firmly in the boomer cohort, but he’s a teacher and as always been thoughtful and progressive.

We were discussing this problem of the the retired using their (relatively) new found life expectancy to spend it entirely selfishly.

His proposal was that his generation should pay more national insurance — we were in the UK where there is the national concept of a tax that goes towards the social security net. Of course as you’d expect after 70 years of parties tinkering, the numbers don’t fully add up.

So I asked him how much he thought of the elderly should be paying, and he was shocked when I informed him that the figure that would probably be equitable had a zero on the end, compared to his thought.

The problem we have to get grips with is that we all mentally picture a small adjustment that would make a difference, whereas we end up spending a lot of money on the latter portion of life, personal care and medical care etc.

There are some solutions to the the Western European Nations having an elastic demographic stretching thin the proportion in the productive decades.

Sadly most of them involve, upping sticks, or immigration from different parts of the world where there is a relative over supply of young people.

These are not going down so well with that cohort.