I also think that when it gets right down to it, they don't really know what to do either.
As much as they might like to control how the global economy works, they don't. And globalism has made what politicians can do about that stuff even less effective than it was in the past. No national government has the power to change the way banking works, to do away with the concept of the constantly expanding economy, or profit as the goal of productivity.
Immigration is a stop gap, but it creates local problems in terms of absorbing new people and integrating them, even under the best circumstances. For some reason the left prefers to pretend that isn't a thing, while the right talks about it but has no real solutions. Plus there are all the ethical issues of what is essentially harvesting the best labour from other countries for our own purposes, the modern capitalist version of importing colonial labour.
And the population is unlikely to accept the answers. IN some cases for good ethical reasons, killing off the elderly is rightly something most will back away from. But we also are unwilling to accept a world where consumer goods are much more scarce, where cars are an unusual luxury, where people seldom travel abroad, and where we need to rely on our own workforce for things like agricultural production or caring for our elderly and children.
How many young people now looking at going to university and working in what is undoubtedly a bloated civil service, or academia, or as some kind of edi consultant or advertising position or whatever, would be willing to consider that where they are really needed is agricultural production? The vast majority would consider that work to be too hard and beneath them, though obviously it is ok for migrant workers or immigrants.