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The prospect of a long life
Key themes
- Shifting perspectives from demographic change to cultural adaptation
- Balancing reflection and engagement as priorities for a long life
- The role of policy in shifts from holistic to particular forms of legitimacy
- Managing cultural and personal uncertainty
- Increasing precarity across the lifecourse as a source of generational solidarity
- The need for a critical approach
This first chapter identifies some of the key elements that are shaping contemporary thinking about adult ageing. It takes as its starting point the rapid demographic changes that have marked the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries and goes on to explore how changes in the relative numbers of older and younger adults have been accompanied by cultural shifts in the meaning of a long life. These changes are a global phenomenon, embracing developing and developed, emerging and mature, and poorer and richer economies and societies. This gives rise to two fundamental questions. The first asks what the purpose of a long life might be. The second asks how societies will adapt from a world in which there were relatively few elders and many younger people to one in which generations are approximately the same size. It is suggested that contemporary social and public policies have produced a premature answer that may eclipse the potential arising from lifecourse change. This has implications for a critical approach to ageing societies and a rethinking of critiques and solutions based primarily on economic participation rather than lifecourse priorities. These issues and their possible alternatives will be examined in detail as the book progresses.
Global ageing
In 2050, the global population aged over 60 will reach two billion, making this age group three times larger than it was in 2000 (United Nations, 2016). This is a challenge that is facing both mature and emerging economies, and the debate on the future shape of a long life is one that is key to social development in the 21st century. It is increasingly exercising the minds of policy makers, service providers and generational groups throughout the world. And whilst living longer and, for many, healthier older lives is a cause for celebration, it has, as the 21st century emerges from the shadow of the twentieth, increasingly been reframed as a social, economic and political problem. In 2012, the World Economic Forum (Beard et al., 2012) Global Risks group identified population ageing as one of the top five issues facing the world community in terms of international stability. The others were climate change, migration, social inequality and pandemics. Harvard-based economic demographers Bloom, Canning and Lubet (2015) have argued that as the challenges of population ageing âcome from the fact that our current institutional and social arrangements are unsuited for ageing populations and shifting demographics; our proposed solution is therefore to change our institutions and social arrangementsâ (2015: 86).
If, as the WEF implies, the task of addressing global ageing is principally one of cultural adaptation, the question arises: Which adaptations suit which interests? The forms that adaptation takes therefore require critical consideration.
The changing promise of a long life
The speed with which our attitudes to adult ageing have changed can be seen by a series of events held by the United Nations (UN). The UN has held two World Assemblies on ageing, one in Vienna in 1982 and a second in Madrid in 2002. Both assemblies attempted to define the essential role of older adults in society, and it is interesting to look at the differences between the two. The first stated that
A longer life provides humans with an opportunity to examine their lives in retrospect, to correct some of their mistakes, to get closer to the truth and to achieve a different understanding of the sense and value of their actions.
(Vienna International Plan of Action on Ageing, 1982)
While Article 10 of the second says,
The potential of older persons is a powerful basis for future development. This enables society to rely increasingly on the skills, experience and wisdom of older persons, not only to take the lead in their own betterment but also to participate actively in that of society as a whole.
(Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, 2002)
Twenty years is a relatively short time in historical terms, yet the tenor of the descriptions show a markedly different approach to the relationship between personal ageing and society. A couple of the key words in each have been put into bold type to illustrate the change in expectations of later life. The form of social inclusion envisaged by the two statements varies significantly. One appears as a personal, reflective task, looking across the lifecourse via a sifting of accrued experience; the second privileges the application of particular skills in the here and now, as a springboard for future aspiration.
While we are still waiting, at the time of writing, for a third international plan, there have been a number of other statements, perhaps most clearly articulated by the European Union. In 2012, The European Year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity made the following announcement:
Empowering older people to age in good health and to contribute more actively to the labour market and to their communities will help us cope with our demographic challenge in a way that is fair and sustainable for all generations.
(European Union, 2012)
There are many things worth noting about the European Year, but what stands out is a narrowing of the aspirational tone of 2002, to a much more sharply focussed role for older adults. The contribution of older adults is to be channelled into work and work-like activities, such as volunteering.
The degree to which these differing statements reflect changing historical and economic conditions is retrospectively much easier to see than it was at the time. And perhaps the first âViennaâ version itself reflects what Piketty (2014) has called the âtrentes glorieusesâ or thirty years of growth and development of health and welfare services that followed the end of the World War II. Certainly in the West, this was seen as a period of growing prosperity and late life as a well-earned release from the rigours of working life. The second âMadridâ statement is very much the child of those years of social improvement but focussing on the contribution that a fitter and wealthier older population might make. Its holism reflected the views of the World Health Organization (WHO), characterising âactive ageingâ (WHO, 2002) as an opportunity to develop a whole raft of potential that older adults had still to develop. Indeed, the thirty years between 1950 and 1979 could be seen as a time of clearing away the risks to allow a flourishing of the majority of western populations.
The recessional world of the second decade of the twenty-first century is reflected in the 2012 statement. Here, the developmental potential of a long life has been reigned in. It has been corralled in the service of extrinsic priorities, mostly to do with labour economics. A long life is not to be viewed as a period of multiple purposes and diverse social contributions but as a pool of potential workers, which will hopefully restore profitability to an ailing world economy.
While these statements point to alternative visions of a long life with implications for the contributions made by different generational groups, it is also possible to see the UN declarations as two sides of a coin. They may not be paths towards either disengagement or to active ageing but simultaneous developments of reflection and engagement, which perhaps illustrate interior and exterior orientations to the task of growing older. They reflect how one responds to personal lifecourse change and how one can connect to the social world.
Both visions appear threatened by public rhetoric that stokes generational competition, with material productivity as the principal criterion by which to gain social legitimacy. At the time of writing, both of these trends have marked a recessional and neo-recessional world characterised by extreme economic inequality and a tendency to use generational rivalry as a distraction from these deeper concerns.
The UN are now only one of a growing number of international organisations that circulate briefings, bulletins and working papers on ageing populations, which also include the WHO, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the World Bank and even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Each explores a different consequence of population ageing and promotes a particular ideological position.
In social terms, there are certainly indications that a long life in the twenty-first century is becoming increasingly precarious. The ILOâs World Social Protection Report 2014/15, for example, indicates that 49% of all people over pensionable age do not receive a pension and for many who do, pension levels may leave them below national poverty lines. Additionally, future pensioners will receive lower pensions in at least 14 European countries, whilst in the United States, a reliance on private schemes, housing wealth and stocks and shares have increased the risk of poverty in old age.
What emerges from these changing perspectives is that expectations of a long life have become increasingly contested, and the notion of the purpose and contribution of older adults is itself in a state of cultural flux.
Demographic certainties
So what are these demographic changes that have provoked so many twists and turns in the ways we are expected to view growing old and living longer lives?
The analysis of population ageing has been characterised by three defining demographic facts. People are living longer. Generations or age groups are becoming approximately the same size. And the oldest old are the group growing most quickly. It is now a commonplace political and economic debate that we are moving from a demographic triangle to a column. That is to say that in traditional societies, where a lot of children are born but die relatively quickly and with many adults also dying in early midlife, through poor health care, during childbirth and the greater likelihood of physical threats and accidents, the population profile tapers off pretty quickly, with only a few elders surviving to the top of the age pyramid. Under current conditions, however, people are having fewer children and living longer, which will eventually create a population in which each age group is of approximately the same size. This latter pattern, because of its historical uniqueness, leaves us with few tools to understand its implications and ways in which to respond.
These âfacts of ageingâ rest on a series of underlying demographic changes (United Nations, 2016). The first concerns declining global fertility, measured by the number of children born per woman. This has fallen from 5 children in 1950 to approximately 2.5 today and is projected to fall to 2 by 2050. The most rapid descent is expected to occur in developing countries, halving between 1965 and 2050. Second is increased longevity, the average number of years lived, which is set to increase globally from 48 to 75, from 1950 to 2050. While there are disparities between mature and emerging economies â with wealthy industrial countries rising on average to 82 years, this is no longer a local phenomenon. In fact, when the speed at which developing countriesâ or emerging economiesâ demographics are changing is taken into account, it is apparent these nations are ageing much more rapidly than others. If the UN definition of an ageing society is accepted, when 14% of the population reach 60 years and over, then the longest time is estimated to have occurred in France, at over a hundred years, whereas Thailand and the Philippines are expected to make the same transition in as little as twenty years. Over time, a fall in mortality and a fall in births plus an increase in longevity radically reshapes the age structure of a society and leads to the column shape we are now achieving.
These changes affect the proportion of working to non-working people in a population, commonly referred to as the dependency ratio, spawning a series of apocalyptic predictions of doom â for productivity, health-care systems and social wages, such as pensions. However, as Beard et al. (2012) point out, such calls of woe have happened before and are âstrongly reminiscent of the work by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s, which predicted mass starvation and human misery in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of rapid population growth, or what was termed âthe population bombââ (2012: 4).
The world population did double from three to six million from 1960 to 2000. However, technological advances and levels of education increased dramatically, and per capita income increased by 115%. The world as we knew it had not ended, although it had changed radically.
Bloom et al. (2015) point out that, in terms of dependency ratios, increasing numbers of people leaving the workforce as they achieve late life are largely offset by a reduced youth dependency ratio marked by fewer younger dependents, even though they are spending a longer amount of time in education rather than in work. In the United States, the ratio had grown from seventeen adults aged 65 and over (per one hundred working-aged adults) in 1980 to twenty-one by 2013. However, the same ratio for younger people under 15 had fallen from thirty-four to twenty-nine. Neither is it clear that older adults are a net cost on younger generations. At least in the private sphere, generational transfers tend to travel from older to younger family members, even in later life (Irwin, 1998). In a 2011 communique, the OECD has noted that in the public sphere there may actually be a form of fiscal generational altruism associated with large infrastructural investments, where the contributors may not live long enough to receive the full benefit of investments made. It has also been argued that it may be incorrect to assume that continued working is the solution to the fiscal costs of health, for example, if 60% of tax revenue is raised outside taxable income (Betts, 2014). So while the figures for demographic change are by now well known, their implications have yet to be fully worked through and may not conform to widespread negative expectations.
Cultural uncertainties
It has become common to suggest that an ageing population is a policy priority. What is less commonly recognised is that this is not simply a question of demographic change and economic response, it is also one of cultural meaning and the possibilities attributed to adult ageing and later life.
Mature aged individuals have in the immediate past become generally richer and fitter than preceding generations (Metz & Underwood, 2005). As a result, many have developed lifestyles that reflect a mixture of extended youthful activities and novel mature priorities. This conclusion has been supported by longstanding evidence of a compression of morbidity, meaning that people are living longer and also healthier lives until their final years (Fries, 1980), that decrements associated with old age are increasingly modifiable and sometimes reversible (Rowe & Kahn, 1987), and by the growth of occupational pensions (Phillipson, 1998). While each of these points have since been contested, they are still the bedrock for thinking in this area. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we have moved, it is argued, from an understanding based on late-life dependency to one that sees older people as potentially active consumers or continuing producers or some combination of both. So, while there are particular concerns about the numbers and distribution of older adults in various national populations, there is also a common understanding that generally speak...
