James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Thank you to everyone who sent in questions.
Thank you to you for answering them, Sarah Harper.
There'll be another episode of Radical on Thursday, but for now
Goodbye.
Hello and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future.
I'm James Marriott and today we're talking about something that is often presented as one of the biggest challenges facing the Western world, aging populations.
People are living longer and fewer children are being born.
And you've probably seen or heard in the news, even on this very programme.
That this is often presented as a major crisis.
A shrinking working age population is going to have to support growing numbers of unproductive pensioners.
But my guest this week thinks we're looking at it all the wrong way.
Rather than fearing an aging society, she says we should see it as an opportunity.
Her name is Sarah Harper.
She's a professor of gerontology at Oxford University and one of the world's leading experts on population aging.
Her radical proposal is that we should embrace a future with an older population.
Sarah argues that our pensions, welfare systems, and workplaces are still built around an outdated idea of later life, that people become frail in their fifties or early sixties, retire for a short period, and then die.
She wants to radically change the state pension entirely, and base the pension income you receive on how long you've contributed rather than on how old you are.
Her proposal, she says, is not simply about making people work for longer, it is about completely rethinking how we contribute throughout our lives, and also about asking whether chronological age should continue to so rigidly determine the way we work.
But would her idea create a fairer and more flexible system, or just introduce a whole new set of inequalities?
And are our workplaces, welfare state and economy really ready for such a fundamental rethink?
Showing 61–80 of 547 · page 4 of 28
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