Issue Redefining the intergenerational care contract toward 2050

Summary

The report expects the implicit social contract between generations to change fundamentally on the way to 2050. The twentieth-century welfare state rested on a broad base of workers supporting a small group of older people, but the inverted population pyramid demands a new definition of what caring for someone means. The report sees room for a move from institutional care to network care, in which technology and AI would go beyond assisting human carers and take over much of their work at scale. Access to care would then depend less on whether people are available and more on whether technology is accessible and accepted. In the shorter term, ageing drives up both health care and societal costs, and care workers are already having to choose whom to help.