It was great to have Anthony Hilton of the Evening Standard breeze in for a coffee yesterday. In contrast to most, he is much more of glass-half-full man on the UK economy.

In particular, he doesn’t buy the notion that the UK will be facing an unprecedented strain on its economy due to an ageing population. If you look at the projections for the ratio of workers to non-workers in 2040, it is roughly the same as in the 1960s. The difference in 1960 was of course that the non-workers were mainly young children, not the elderly. The great furor about the aging population, then, is actually more of a political/cultural problem than an economic one: we don’t mind paying for kids, but we dislike paying for the elderly.