Geraldine Beddel, editor of Gransnet, wrote a very thoughtful piece last week which argued that our society has unwittingly colluded in the mistreatment of old people by our widespread casual ageism.

Her thesis is that until we respect our elders, the pernicious cruelty towards old people will continue.

While I agree with her arguments I would like to make two observations.

The first is that these attitudes are far more prevalent in the indigenous, longer established population and much less in the families from Africa and Asia where the wisdom of age is much more valued and respected.

People from these continents are used to seeing their elders work hard, without the protection of a welfare state and pension schemes. In these cultures, a person is brought up and protected by the extended family, and as they get older they then look after those who’ve looked after them. 

There’s self interest and community interest at heart here, and it works well. Where this family/community protection is replaced by the state or other institutions, the appreciation of the human relationship is rapidly diluted. 

When transplanted into this country, such respect for older people remains for one or two generations. I know several African families very well, and respect for elders is a value that is instilled into the children. Any ageist remark or attitude is sometimes literally slapped down.

The second point is that we should value old people not just because they brought us up, but because they have so much to teach us. Again this is where communities from less developed countries can illuminate our failings.

Their idea of education was less through formal schooling and more from the passing down of wisdom, ideas, values and experience from generation to generation. The collective learning of old people was critical to the success or failure of a family, village or tribe.

In our more developed culture, old people may not play such an educational role, but their memories, life stories, achievements, attitudes make up micro social and family histories.

We should understand their worth and do all we can to keep them, because once lost they are lost forever.

This is why the Lifebox is such a useful service.  It’s an online secure area designed to enable personal histories to be uploaded and stored, then to be accessed by chosen younger family members.

It’s probable that many older people who will want a Lifebox will need the help of younger family members to populate it, and in doing so, the bonding between young and old will increase the mutual intergenerational respect.

This in turn will reduce our tendency, pointed out by Geraldine Bedell, to dismiss the value of our older family members.

The daily revelations to the Leveson inquiry into the media illustrate  how unprincipled, tawdry and vile the media in this country has become.

It’s not necessary to repeat the evidence of journalists’ appalling and life ruining behaviour. But this must be stopped and in doing so the professional standards of the media might just be raised from its dire current level.

I doubt, though, whether those running our press and broadcast stations will let go of their front places in the race to the bottom in terms of crass, cheap, facile, immoral and unprincipled reporting, but at least a stop can be made to behaviour which can ruin lives just to scream ‘Exclusive!’  on a paper that will wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips. 

It’s imperative that Lord Leveson isn’t afraid that the media will bleat that restrictions will limit their role to investigate and bring to book politicians and public administrators.

He is too intelligent to fall for this spurious and dishonest argument. There’s no remote link between going through Steve Coogan’s dustbins looking for confirmation of an extra-marital affair and investigating political corruption.

The dreadful torment suffered by Milly Dowler’s parents when the NoW hacked her phone must not go unpunished because of an irrational fear that in future journalists will be unwilling to expose a Cabinet member putting the security of the country at risk.

The Leveson inquiry must ensure we have a media that will never again intrude into the lives of private individuals whose activities have no bearing whatsoever on the public good.

Indeed, if such pernicious activity is punished so severely so that it will not be contemplated, then the media might be encouraged to concentrate on more serious reporting. That will be a good thing for the health of our society, but I fear the moral rot has gone too far.

Penelope Keith, now one of our ‘institutions’, has written in the Daily Telegraph that if younger people mixed more with older people they would be less inclined to break the law.

The star of The Good Life and To The Manor Born is president of a prisons charity which works to divert young people away from a life of crime.

She believes that teenagers and young adults would behave better if they spent more time with grandparents and other older people.

I hope she would like the idea of the Lifebox, the area in My Last Song where people can store and upload their digital memories so they are available for future generations. In effect it’s a digital time capsule.

The reason it should find favour with Ms Keith is that it is ideally suited to encourage younger members of the family to help older members use it. And in doing so, they will learn the lifestories and family history being imparted. This bonding might indeed make youngsters more law abiding. 

For in return, the young relatives will teach their grandparents and other older loved ones to use a computer with more confidence, the result being a unique and valued piece of family and social history which otherwise would be lost forever. The soft skills coaching of their elders will give youngsters a greater sense of purpose and self esteem.

If your family could benefit from all the features of the Lifebox, including drawing the generations closer together and older people being more computer literate, look no further than buying a Lifebox for the person whose memories should be safely stored, or for the youngster to show to his grandparents, ready to sit down and populate it every week or so.

During the past 40 years or so, a huge numbers of people in the poorer nations have been paid not much for doing a lot, while in the developed world many people have been paid a lot for doing not much.

And that, dear readers, is why there is now an irrevocable shift in the world’s economic order.

Those in the UK will be aware of the scores of thousands of jobs in the public sector, created by Labour and Conservative governments, which are not in the slightest bit productive. Many, but by no means all, are necessary to make our society run more smoothly, to help the disadvantaged, to regulate, to administer, to advise.

The private sector is also teeming with well paid overstaffed functions which produce little of value at one end of the scale, and hugely overpaid executives and directors at the other.

The service industries are particularly good at paying their staff a lot of money by providing services that might add value, but produce little that has a tangible long term worth.

In private and public sectors, the pay and conditions have been protected first by trade unions and later by the collective greed of workers and bosses scratching each others’ backs, unified by the shallow values of the baby boomers. Lots of people shouting ‘Me, Me, Me!’ soon becomes ‘Us, Us, Us!’.

Until only a short time ago, our pay increased every year, bonuses went up, pensions rose and our working life reduced.  As we live longer, our retirement extends and with it the time greater numbers of people are being paid for doing nothing.

We are now facing the consequences of an economy which has for decades been based on unproductive overpaid employment as our population grows increasingly old.

Meanwhile in countries such as India, China, Brazil, Vietnam, Korea, and increasingly in Africa and South America, vast and growing numbers of people have been working very hard from an early age until they expire making goods or harvesting food or extracting raw materials, all of which are sold for a profit. Their pay has been low, and kept low – talk of workers’ rights getting you imprisoned or laughed at.

In the UK, the increased income was used to borrow to buy property on the erroneous assumption that this would permanently gain in value. With our property as a safety net, we cheerfully got further in debt to buy more goods and foodstuffs, most of them made and grown by the millions upon millions of people in the by now fast developing world.

And so those countries grew richer as we got more in debt. That debt couldn’t be sustained once the property edifice started to shake and values dropped. Banks had huge books of toxic debt, interbank lending ceased and overstretched banks had to be bailed out by the government.

In many other developed states without a solid manufacturing base and without a well developed service sector, the situation is worse. In the southern European countries productivity per head is falling from a low figure, pensions are over generous, retirement age is in the 50s, working hours are low, unemployment high and tax payments a small proportion of what they should be.

Contradictions within the EU mean that a common currency is untenable; Germany will be able to make the financial rules, and enforce the austerity measures for a two tier Europe.

The electorates in these countries won’t like being told to accept reduced hand outs, pensions, to work longer and harder, but fundamental economic decisions won’t be influenced by the ballot box as much as by the markets and credit rating companies.

Funding the bail out of bankrupt economies are those countries in the developing world who have become very rich as money has flowed into their treasuries from the developed nations. China, India and the emerging economic countries will get us out of this mess, because it’s in their interest to do so, but the rules will be forever changed.

So the world is now one where in the west our lives are less influenced by democratic decisions than by the bond markets; Germany has gained economic and political hegemony in much of Europe, and countries such as China and India are more powerful than the UK, France, Italy, Spain and before long the US.

It was never supposed to be like this, but we had better realise that the old order, shaped by statesmen and industrialists after the second world war, has changed forever.