ABSTRACT
Britain is experiencing a great transformation in the proportions of children, old people, and people of working age in population. The survivors of those children are the adults aged 35-55 to-day; in the next 30 years they will become a generation of old people of record size. But both agree that it is wrong and wasteful to give people pensions as a birthday present when they reach a certain age; in future people will only become pensioners when they have retired from work. This is to prevent old people no longer really in the labour market from inventing fictitious employments in order to qualify for benefits at more than the pension rate. It is argued on behalf of the industrial offices that life assurance is a form of instalment buying and that some failures to maintain instalments are inevitable incidents of such a business, particularly in a society subject to unemployment.
