ABSTRACT
Much of the stimulus for the development of social gerontology as an academic discipline, and as an area of social and political concern, has come from the increase in the number and proportion of the population categorised as `old' or `elderly'. Indeed issues concerned with the demography of ageing are central in understanding many of the social, political and policy-related issues characteristic of twenty-firstcentury Britain. The backdrop for much political and policy-related debate is the concern about `the demographic time bomb'. This is a rather pejorative term for the changing age composition of our population and of the balance between different age groups. As this chapter demonstrates, over the past 150 years there has been a profound change in the age composition of the British population with the `ageing' of the population and a decrease in the number of children. This is represented in some quarters as an impending social disaster for two reasons. First, `ageing' populations are attributed many of the negative stereotypes given to ageing at an individual level. All the negative attributes ascribed to an individual older person have been transferred to ageing populations. These are characterised as lack of energy, enthusiasm, innovation and artistic and intellectual achievement. Ageing populations are seen as being unresponsive to change and traditional in approach. Second, the increase in the number of older people is seen as having negative, perhaps even dire, consequences for the social and health services. These arguments taken together have been used to describe what Jefferys (1983) termed the `moral panic' of population ageing which focus upon the perceived `burden' which the increased numbers of older people will impose upon the state and younger people. Another way of describing this negative perspective is apocalyptic demography (Vincent, 1999) — the perception that we will be overwhelmed in social, political and welfare terms by the increasing numbers of old people.
