Why an ageing population is not necessarily the disaster many people think it is

We’ve got used to the idea that an ageing population is a bad thing. But that’s not necessarily true, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Glamorous old lady
Older people are pretty big spenders
(Image credit: © Getty Images/Cultura RF)

Last spring, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a suggestion that long-term home arrest might lead to something of a baby boom. I wasn’t convinced – who wants to have sex when they’ve been repeatedly told that being touched or breathed on by the wrong person is an almost certain path to instant death? It’s just not sexy is it?

It turns out I was right on this one. We cleaned out pet shops and animal shelters (we now have a few substandard house rabbits to cope with – there wasn’t much choice). But physically produce our own little things to love? No. Birth rates, which were already falling, have dropped further over the past year. In England and Wales we are down to 1.6 per woman. The rest of the world is headed in the same direction: in the US, the fertility rate fell last year to 1.6.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.