And all this modern medicine complicates life. A major factor in the rise in divorces is due to medical care (previously, few marriages lasted more than ten years before one of the spouses died – if you didn’t like yhour spouse you could reasonably expect to be rid of each in the foreseeable future). And then there is the problem of overcrowding in schools – until recently most chidlren died before reaching school age, reducing class size significantly (just look at a typical class and imagine how uncrowded it would in half the students weren’t there). And supporting old people is becoming a global crisis, almost totally the fault of the medical profession which has raised life expectancy by several decades over the last century.
