Surely this irritating insistence on creating more bloody young people is only half of the problem, though? As you mentioned, two people producing two more people isn’t a completely fair deal as there’s that large chunk of time between the new ones being born and the old ones popping their clogs and at least a chunk of the problem is that that gap’s getting larger, owing to our insistence on feeding and heating people longer and longer after they would previously have done the decent thing and helped to keep the population down by way of their local crematorium.

In this context, the idea of continuously nudging up the age of retirement seems rather sound: work the buggers into (and, if at all possible, under) the ground to clear some space for the new’uns, although I can see myself becoming ever more disillusioned with that one as my own years advance. But short of some kind of Logan’s Run-esque age-control policy (or my own favoured option to alleviate both overcrowding and food shortage: Soylent Retirement Homes), that annoying habit of ours of managing to lead increasingly long and healthy lives seems just as troublesome as some people’s obsession with popping sprogs into the world every nine months or so.