And although pensioner poverty is real and – because there are far more pensioners than ever – widespread, so is pensioner wealth. More than 80 per cent of personal wealth in this country belongs to people over 55. The surest way to get a cheer at a Conservative Party conference is to say how disgraceful it is that old people have to sell their house in order to pay for residential care. I don’t see it myself: to be in a position where capital that you no longer need for other purposes can pay running costs which you require is, in the history of the world, a rare achievement. It may be annoying for your potential heirs, but that is not a matter for moral outrage.  The famous Beatles song When I’m 64 is not, as is often thought, a lament about the awfulness of getting old, but a hopeful love song. Paul McCartney (who was 16 when he wrote the words, and is now 69) imagines what the couple might be able to attain: “Every summer we can rent a cottage/ In the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear”; “Doing the garden, digging the weeds/ Who could ask for more?”. Compared with hundreds of thousands of cruise-taking, second-home-owning pensioners today, the Beatles were guilty of poverty of aspiration.  Yet the 21st century is proving more problematic for retirement than the last quarter of the 20th, for two reasons. One is demography. Until now, those getting their pensions have benefited from a giant Ponzi scheme – their money has been successfully paid out only because more and more money kept coming in. Far more people were born between 1945 and 1965 than in the previous two decades, so their taxes helped finance their parents’ old age. But we baby boomers so enjoyed booming away that we neglected to have enough children ourselves, and now we are bringing about a bust. The oldest of us are beginning to retire, and the Ponzi pyramid is the wrong shape.  The West has been indoctrinated that population “explosion” is threatening humanity, but its implosion is a much greater risk to economic order. Mass immigration is in many ways a social catastrophe, but it was made inevitable by our indigenous failure to reproduce. In 1977, 350,000 fewer people were born in Britain than 12 years earlier, a drop of more than 30 per cent. In hospitals and care homes, our old people are looked after by young immigrants. There simply aren’t enough locals to do it.  The second factor is uncertainty. Looking back, one can see how extraordinary it was that people worked all their life for the same company, and that the company could guarantee a pension based on final salary. It also seems incredible that people could invest, with such long-term confidence, in the shares bought by pension funds. Since then, there has been mis-selling; there has been Gordon Brown, who removed the dividend tax credit for private pensions, with devastating effect, in 1997; there has been market trauma and a vast shift of economic power away from the West. As this column has frequently said since the credit crunch: Everything Is Different Now.  I have often wondered how Jesus’s teaching, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow… sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”, could possibly be compatible with the traditional Protestant emphasis on saving. I don’t think it can be. Now I suspect that Our Lord understood something that we don’t about pensions.  Economic theory is based on the idea that people make rational decisions in their own best interests. But, in the case of pensions, this is almost impossible to do. You cannot know what you will want when, and by the time you do know, it is too late. You cannot make long-term provision when government rules keep changing the ground upon which you are trying to stand. You cannot arrange market values to coincide with your personal timing. The only certainty about your pension is the money you must pay to the companies that administer it. It sounds a nice idea to take thought for the morrow, but, rationally, can you? At present, pension planning feels like Micawberism (“Something will turn up”), with the difference that Mr Micawber is on a percentage for his advice.  Lack of security is a general condition of human life, of course, but it is much worse for people when they are older than when they are young. “Defined benefit” has turned out to be unaffordable, but having your benefit defined is the ideal for someone aged 65 in a way that it is not for someone aged 25. Peace of mind matters most.  The best reason for believing in a free economy is that it empowers its citizens. If they are free to choose, they tend to choose well. But the effect of the credit crunch, which bites worst in the countries which we thought were most free, has been to empower only the few with international economic mobility, and to make the rest of us feel powerless. I don’t think liberal conservative governments have woken up yet to the way this is sending our grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.
The sooner we accept that the conditions of old age have changed for ever, the    better, writes Charles Moore.