What happens when the baby boomers die?

[LargeSquareRock]

Sorry about the title, but that’s literally it. I’ve wondered this since I was a child.

Obviously we are about to enter a 20 year spike when a smaller number of tax payers support a higher number of elderly people in healthcare and elder care.

What happens in 20 years when the spike is over? Do we have empty care homes, plentiful housing and easily available health care?

I really have no evil agenda asking this- demographics has always fascinated me.

I had none, but it wasn't through choice. I've told the sorry tale elsewhere on Mumsnet.

What article? Where is the article? Is it a left wing publication supporting Labour’s actions?

Here you are @Judetiff:

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/the-system-has-worked-for-boomers-at-every-stage-of-their-lives/

I had posted it earlier in the thread.

It's the Resolution Foundation, so is indeed left-of-centre, but was published in 2022, so long before Labour came to power.

I knew someone would zone in on that one bit of my post! 😂I’ve actually had this debate with working boomers such as yourself on MN before, hence why I was careful to add ‘generally speaking’. Take a look at this Reddit post if you’re still in any doubt about the % of baby boomer women making up the workforce:

www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/189v70v/most_women_were_indeed_at_home_during_the_time_of/

My point is more to do with the ever increasing cost of living - difficultly for many young couples to get on the property ladder, and then high mortgages when they do, high tuition fees so student loan repayments can cripple many, high nursery fees, high food and energy bills, the list goes on…personally I don’t see this changing, meaning it’ll be the care of babies and infants the state will have to subside with taxpayer’s money rather than that of the elderly, as progressively more and more couples both need to work full-time, and childcare is outsourced.

Your father took nothing from the state, educated privately as we did thereby creating more available spaces in schools. He has GIVEN to society & will continue to. Nuff said before I get torn to shreds

Gosh yes the stats for the 1950s are really relevant when some of the boomers weren't born until 1964 and the 60s and 70s aren't really that relevant are they? The very earliest a boomer could have been working fulltime with a school leaving age of 15 was 1961 and they were a very small proportion of the boomers born between 1946 and 1964. Some boomers weren't even starting work till the 1980s.

Boomers are still working, some even have dependant children (I'm in my 70s but bringing up a teenage GC.) Other boomers who had children in their 40s will still have children in full time education.

We aren't actually a historical set of statistics we are people who are living, working, paying tax, bringing up children just like many younger people.

That also shows how generalising just means nothing, people who didn't want children, people who did but it never happened, people who did but had fewer than their parents, people who had the same as their parents or people like me who had more. My husband also has more children than his parents who only had him.

I'm sorry about your sorry tale, not having a choice must be very hard.

Thank you. That's appreciated.

Is this a MN thing or a UK thing? I live in a different country and have never in my life heard people talk about how much anyone has put in or taken out of the system. What a weird way to look at things. I get the same amount of national superannuation after almost 50 years of work as someone who never worked a day in their life - and I couldn't care less! Many baby boomers will have started their working life several years earlier than the generations below them, but that gets conveniently forgotten.

It is certainly a weird bitter obsession. I am inclined to remember that after a certain point, people get the faces that they deserve.

I can’t see many people now or in the future covering their later years health care - everything is curable or operate able.

It's only boomers people are obsessed with though. If anyone from any other demographic is taking "more than they put in" that's totally fine and people will fall over themselves to explain why these people have/are actually benefiting society in other ways.
These obsessed people would have loved my boomer parents. Both started working at 15 (None of this free university). My mum still worked part time when I was very young going back to full time when i was a bit older. Then my dad died at 64 and mum at 66. So no/hardly any state pension "wasted" on them.
They did however own a house so that's the one thing people would dislike them for. But they died so young they didn't get to "hog it" for long.

I’m afraid you are part of a set of statistics, sorry to break it to you. Just like I am. That’s what this thread is about - demographics, populations, societal patterns. That might rattle you because you don’t feel you’re being represented correctly, but step back from the limitations and narrowness of your own life and things actually start to get interesting.

What the above stats illustrate is a trend for progressively more women to enter the workforce and stay in it, and here’s another one:

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/rise-and-rise-womens-employment-uk

This point in the key findings explains what I’m trying to get across:

• Overall, the proportion of couples with children where only one adult works has almost halved (down from 47% in 1975 to 27% in 2015) and the proportion where both work has increased from 49% to 68%.

So what impact will that have on our society? Population numbers? Need for housing? Nurseries? Care homes? It’s all very well to say a certain number of boomers you know joined the workforce, but what did the whole population actually do and how will that affect all of us down the line?

I'm not represented in the figures you linked to of women working in the 1950s and I was a young child, or for the 60s as I spent 90% of them at school. You might think you are clever linking to such low numbers of women working in the 1950s with the link to boomers but boomers were babies or young children then. You are very disingenuous.

So the figures you linked to in the 1950s into the 1970s was very little if anything to do with boomers. The figures for 2015 will include many boomers.

I don't know what you want to make it a boomer thing when it isn't the clear cut picture you want it to be. All the figures you are reporting include boomers and non boomers except for a very short time at the end of the 60s when a small proportion would have been old enough to work.

If you want us to tie that to trends in women working then do that without making it a boomer issue.

Here is an article you might find interesting, and if you look at the section about employment you can see that between the ages of 22-37 higher numbers of Millennials and Gen X women work than Boomers (and that’s in 1985 for Boomers which I’m guessing must be around the time you were in the workforce):

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millennial-life-how-young-adulthood-today-compares-with-prior-generations-2/

And I didn’t make this a boomer issue, if you recall I was hypothesizing that old age homes will be repurposed as nurseries in the future. You think I’m disingenuous but actually I’ve been presenting evidence to support my argument. Where’s your evidence to support yours?

Boomers are a big generation. My parents are boomers but so are people a decade older than me.... They'll still be working a fair while...

Yep, I'm a 1964 boomer... 7 years til my pension.
My kids were born in 2000 and 2002, so GenZ.
All this thread proves is there is no such thing as a typical boomer.

My evidence is you using stats for women working when boomers were babies or at school is ridiculous.

You weren't talking about boomers? Maybe read the title, perhaps you are on the wrong thread.

They are either cremated or put in the ground where their bodies putrify, bloat, decompose, and finally just lie there skeletonising for several millennia, or until a redeveloper digs them up and moves them

Which is best though?

Cryomation/Promession will be next. Much lower effect on the environment.

That’s your evidence? 😂 Ok, so disregard the figure for the 1950s, and let’s say from 1967 (when the youngest boomers would be 21 years old) we compare female boomers in the workforce to subsequent generations of the same ages. Fewer boomer women worked.

This is the problem with boomers like yourself - you see a thread with the word ‘boomer’ in the title and you immediately have a knee-jerk reaction to defend yourselves without even fully considering the topic, tone or facts. Good for you that you worked, well done. But that’s not what everyone did because not everyone had to as more couples could afford to live off one person’s salary than today.

Just repeating myself now so no point engaging with you anymore. Read the articles I posted again at some point when you’re less defensive and maybe you’ll learn something, that’s if you’re interested in thinking about society beyond your own limited frame of reference.

It is interesting... my dad was also (just) a boomer - by three months. (My mum was slightly older, but not much - she missed it by 5 months).

They wouldn't have recognised themselves as "boomers" either.

Well according to people on here your dad is the devil incarnate but your mum is fine.

Lol.... and so am I... my dad and I are apparently of the same (boomer) generation.