This was the title of a debate hosted yesterday evening by the British Academy, the first in a series of debates on the ‘big issues’ of the day, in this case, population ageing. The idea is to look behind the stereotypes at the academic evidence with the focus being on public engagement.

Those who follow us on twitter will probably have noticed that we ‘live tweeted’ headlines from the event (and probably don’t want to hear any more about it, we had to go for cocktails afterwards to recover). For those who didn’t attend or follow the twitter stream, there were 4 speakers:

Professor Alan Walker (University of Sheffield) who talked about the role of political choice in determining public spending in a society which tends to see ageing from the ‘burden perspective’ and the need to tackle the structural lag which sees, for example, employment policies lagging some…