Critical Questions for Ageing Societies. Carney, Gemma
the predictions do not allow for any change of policy. In fact, if pension policies were adjusted to allow for greater life expectancy, through policies such as making larger employer contributions or workers retiring later, then the gap between savings and expectations should never arise. Second, critical gerontologists recognise that by applying actuarial assumptions to a whole swathe of the population, it is easy for the public to come to the mistaken assumption that older people, as a group, are dependent, a burden in some sense. It would not be acceptable to apply this reasoning to other groups. For instance, can you imagine actuaries saying that all pregnant women and their babies represent a ‘maternity benefit time-bomb’? This seems ridiculously sexist and short-sighted. If so, then why should it be perfectly acceptable to apply such a reductionist moniker to pensioners as a group? Third, critical gerontologists are very conscious of the role of language in perpetuating myths and stereotypes about old age. We are aware not just of the structures which confine older people to homogenous categories, but also the processes that maintain and support those structures. So, critical gerontologists take great trouble to analyse policies for older people in a way that reveals potential benefits but also the potential of the policy to be oppressive. A good example of this kind of reasoning can be viewed in the work of Bülow and Söderqvist (2014) in critiquing ‘successful ageing’. In their historical overview of ‘successful ageing’ (a concept introduced through Rowe and Kahn’s 1984 paper, ‘Human ageing: usual and successful’) the authors identify how the language of success, central to the discourse of ‘Reaganomics’ in the US in the 1980s, managed to shift responsibility for well-being in old age away from society or the state, instead placing it on the individual. The door was then left open for neoliberalism, that ideology of the individual, to claim that those who avoided poverty and ill health in old age were ageing ‘successfully’. Critical gerontologists are more concerned with where this leaves the many millions of older people who become frail, ill or poor through no fault of their own, a theme that we develop in some detail in Chapter 4.
Bülow and Söderqvist (2014) make a convincing case for recognising that language is not neutral, particularly when it is being used to evaluate the performance of a particular segment of the population. Their critique applies to other related concepts which built on the successful ageing ideology, such as active ageing, healthy ageing or ageing well. At its heart, the critique of these neoliberal approaches to analysing old age has its roots in the broader claim by critical gerontologists such as Meredith Minkler that to understand human ageing we must see beyond the physiological and particularly the biomedical which tends to reduce old age to ‘a series of downward sloping lines’ (Minkler, cited in Bülow and Söderqvist, 2014: 146). So, language is important because it links back to ideology as well as to conceptual schema and theoretical approaches. The overall impact is that language serves to empower or imprison depending on the kind of ideology or approach it is describing. As you read through this book, take note of when we use terminology such as ‘pension time-bomb’ or ‘economic burden’ to describe a policy response to a particular question facing our ageing societies. We will use quotation marks to indicate that the term being used needs critical interpretation by you as a reader, and by your whole class in discussions and debates.
Ageist language, whether hostile or paternalistic, is the tool used to empower or imprison people in stereotypes of old age. It is an important goal of our book that students learn about the impact of their own words, and how to devise fair and clear language to describe ageing and older people through their study and work. There are some clear examples of the impact of language and particularly how a lack of nuanced understanding of the diversity of older people’s lives and experiences has resulted in the use of age as a means of controlling the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 (Carney, 2020). The use and misuse of language in the formation of stereotypes is developed in Chapter 2. The issue of language as a means of empowerment or oppression has come to the fore in recent years with the rise of populist and divisive politics in the Western world. There are many reasons for this, most of which are beyond the scope of this book. However, there is one aspect of this shift which is an important conceptual theme running through this book – the prevalence of neoliberal ideology in government, politics, and society for the past three decades.
A note on neoliberalism and Right versus Left politics
Neoliberalism is an ideology, best understood as the marketisation and commodification of every aspect of our lives, from our social media data to our education and healthcare. It began with a backlash against the economic instability of the 1970s, which saw the UK economy dominated by industrial unrest and the US by repeated economic crises. The antidote to this instability was presented as the free market. This neoliberal ideology was institutionalised in US and UK politics through the leadership of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Thatcher and Reagan worked hard to liberalise and deregulate markets so that the state had less control over the national economy. The purpose of this liberalisation was to free up the market to provide goods and services in a manner which was more efficient and effective than the state could provide. In the UK, Thatcher claimed that the state had no responsibility for individual welfare, setting out to remove state control from as many aspects of life as possible. State-run utilities and transport networks were privatised and those living in free, local government-owned ‘council housing’ were encouraged to buy their homes under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. While Thatcher’s premiership ended in 1990, her legacy is still visible in every general election held in the UK since, including the New Labour government of Tony Blair which held office from 1997 to 2008. Even Labour, the traditional party of the Left with strong socialist and social justice ideals at its core, opted to embrace neoliberal ideology in order to be elected. Thatcher and Reagan’s regimes left a legacy, shifting politics in the UK and the US firmly to the more conservative and free-market Right-wing of the spectrum. This shift has been solidified in elections of Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK. However, the importance of collectivist solutions to major problems has been thrown into sharp relief since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Suddenly politicians who won votes on the basis of promises to retract state-run public services are utterly dependent on the state institutions they have spent years depleting, such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. These conditions beg the question whether a post-COVID consensus, like the post-war consensus of 1945, could emerge once the pandemic has passed, or whether the experience of the pandemic will make politics even more divisive and individualistic.
Throughout this book, we make reference to Right wing and Left wing governments. In general, Left means a government which is more socialist or social democratic, such as those parties associated with workers’ rights, women’s rights and protecting minorities. This would be the Democrats in the US, the social democratic governments of Sweden and Denmark or the Labour Party in the UK. It is worth noting that there is still a lot of diversity within this, with Swedish socialists being decidedly more collectivist than the US Democrats, who are more liberal than socialist. On the other end of the political spectrum we see parties of the Right, or Right-wing governments. These governments tend to subscribe to ideologies such as free-market liberalism, or more commonly, neoliberalism. Examples of Right-wing governments include the US under Donald Trump and the UK under Boris Johnson. Further to the Right on the political spectrum are governments such as those of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Viktor Orban in Hungary. In these cases governments may set out to erode equality or human rights, such as the policy of Orban to ban gender studies from universities in Hungary (Redden, 2019). While you will need to read on to Chapter 3 to engage with a worked example of neoliberalism, it is worth taking some time to read its full definition in Box 1.2.
Box 1.2: Defining neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is one of those awkward phrases that is widely used but, perhaps through such over-use, has lost some of its analytical weight. In his article, ‘What is Neoliberalism?’, Kean Birch (2017) outlines many of these issues, but also provides a handy definition of the concept and its uses: ‘Neoliberalism is regularly used in popular debate around the world to define the last 40 years. It is used to refer to an economic system in which the “free” market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds … Neoliberalism is generally associated