Critical Questions for Ageing Societies. Carney, Gemma
is ageing rapidly due to the exodus of young, educated people to more economically healthy member states of the EU, such as Ireland and the UK, since 2004. Conversely, in countries where immigration is a politically contentious issue, the link could be made between relaxing immigration laws and increasing the number of younger people in the population. Of course, gerontologists would also argue that there are many other means of increasing productivity, such as providing opportunities for older people to gain further education, to remain independent and to enjoy encore careers into their eighties and nineties. This philosophy of ‘active ageing’ has been the official policy of major international organisations and supranational institutions such as the WHO and the EU since the late 1990s. While this approach is not without its critics (Bülow and Söderqvist, 2014;), active ageing is useful for helping us to challenge notions of old age as a period of dependency (Foster and Walker, 2015). In fact, many older people are independent and active throughout their lives. Related to this is the issue of access to education, which tends to be focused on the early decades of the lifecourse. However, looked at from the perspective of long-term demographic change there are two compelling reasons which suggest that education should be lifelong. First, there is a ‘positive correlation between education and the likelihood of a long and healthy life’ (Reher, 2015: S66). Second, access to education allows ageing societies to improve their capacity to adapt to challenging circumstances (Coleman et al, 2015: S4). Taken together, changes to any or all of these policy areas – particularly education and migration – could have a major impact on the rate at which a population is ageing.
It is generally recognised within social gerontology that ageing is a gendered experience, and that women suffer particular discrimination and disadvantage in old age. This is, perhaps, why there is a whole journal (the Journal of Women & Aging) dedicated to the analysis of women’s ageing. In more recent years, scholars such as Laura Hurd Clarke have identified gender issues arising for older men, though this work is less abundant (Hurd Clarke and Lefkowich, 2018). The absence of a gender analysis is problematic for lots of reasons, not least that it tends to cause scholars to be blindsided in their analysis of the causes and consequences of demographic ageing. For instance, in his otherwise robust account of the role of baby booms and baby busts in the ageing of the developed world, Reher (2015: S57) cannot account for the abrupt decline in fertility rates from the 1970s onwards. Other scholars have identified an important role for women’s fertility choices in precipitating this change. The 1970s saw the advent of the second wave women’s movement in the very countries that experienced a sudden dip in their fertility rates, leading Carney (2017: 2) to conclude that ‘gender relations can and do shape demographic trends’.
State, citizen and age relations
The welfare state was designed on the basis that people would live for a relatively short period after retiring. Prussian Chancellor, Bismarck, who is largely credited with introducing the first pension in 1889, was working on the basis that most people would be dead long before qualifying for a state pension (von Herbay, 2014). At that time, life expectancy was 68 and the state pension age was 70. Even up until the time welfare states were established following World War II, life expectancy was much lower than it is today. Moreover, people tended to die suddenly of critical illnesses, such as heart attack or stroke. Fast forward to the 21st century and our population is not just older, it is entirely different in terms of physical health, socio-economic status and the older person’s expectations of retirement. For example, the male breadwinner model which was a cornerstone of the welfare state allowed the state to delegate large amounts of unremunerated work to women. Thanks to the work of campaigning second wave feminists from the 1960s onwards, this set of norms is no longer acceptable and more women are in employment. This change in the employment status of women has a positive impact on the dependency ratio (Spijker and MacInnes, 2013) but raises major questions about who will provide care to current and future generations of older people.
Extended life expectancy means that we are now living for up to 30 years after retirement. In countries with established health and welfare systems, people are less likely to die suddenly of heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. Nowadays, people have much higher survival rates across a range of illnesses, from cancer to pulmonary disease and stroke. Nevertheless, we are more likely to live with a chronic condition such as type 2 diabetes or dementia. Of course, our trusty longitudinal studies have captured all these changes. However, it is proving very difficult to translate this complexity into public understanding of what it actually means to be older. Health is just one area of change, and there are also major challenges in terms of our expectations of wealth, how we have organised housing, and experiences of loneliness and social isolation, as well as more recent problems such as the digital divide. The big question for ageing societies is that a changing demographic balance will require a reallocation of resources. There is no point in building lots of schools if there are not enough children to take up places. At the same time, we need to start investing in lifelong learning and training programmes if delayed retirement is to become a workable policy solution to increased longevity. Crucially, we need to convince voters and taxpayers that this demographic change justifies a change in resource allocation away from early years and towards older people’s services. Unfortunately, this task has been further complicated by the fact that some pundits have decided to use older people as a means to justify the retraction of the welfare state, with disastrous consequences. For instance, the systematic underfunding of social care for older people in the UK has long been a campaigning subject of critical gerontologists, an issue that has been thrown into sharp relief by the thousands of unnecessary deaths in care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic (Phillipson, 2020).
The lack of public understanding of the complex range of issues that arise from an ageing population goes well beyond politics; indeed, it affects every aspect of life, business and community. A major challenge for gerontologists (and a good reason for writing this book) is to help people to understand the implications of ageing for themselves, their families, communities and societies. We are not alone in seeing this gap. In fact, this book contributes to a growing literature which seeks to directly address the gap between public understanding of ageing and its actual, observable implications. Such is the lack of public understanding of what it means to have an older population that Axel Börsch-Supan (the architect of SHARE) felt compelled to write an article aiming to ‘demystify popular fallacies’ about our ageing population. In that article, Börsch-Supan (2013) outlines a number of myths that have endured, despite ample evidence to the contrary provided by SHARE and other longitudinal studies. None of the statements in Box 1.5 is supported by research evidence.
Box 1.5: Common myths about ageing populations
•To make a peaceable and successful transition to an older population policy makers need to plan for changes to the lives and behaviours of older people only.
•Older workers are less productive than younger people.
•Retirement is bliss.
•Keeping older people in the workforce leads to higher youth unemployment.
•Older societies have more intergenerational conflict.
Source: Börsch-Supan, 2013
Börsch-Supan (2013) is not alone in expressing frustration with the misinformation and half-truths that are peddled as ‘facts’ in relation to population ageing. As social scientists, you will be interested to hear that some of those most sceptical of the ‘demographic time-bomb’ hypothesis are hard data enthusiasts. For instance, Spijker and MacInnes (2013) have described population ageing as the ‘time-bomb that isn’t’. Scepticism also comes from demographers such as Teitelbaum (2015) who argue that public debate on population ageing, one of the most significant and impressive developments in human history, has been reduced to a series of crises for the public purse framed in ideological terms (see Willetts, 2010, or Howker and Malik, 2010, as examples of this kind of ideological writing). Teitelbaum (2015: S87) traces the difficulty in producing reliable public information about demographic ageing to its complexity, which had led many pundits to fall for the ‘seductive temptation of long range demographic projections, demographic dystopias and garbled demography’.
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