Age Friendly

Ending Ageism in America

Lawrence R. Samuel

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032051451
• eBook ISBN: 9781000453683
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Age Friendly: Ending Ageism in America is a rallying call to make the United States a more equitable and just nation in terms of age. "Age friendliness" means being inclusive towards older people as workers, consumers, and citizens, something that can't be said to exist today. The United States and, especially, Big Business, are notoriously age-unfriendly places, a result of our obsession with youth. Virtually all aspects of everyday life in America will be impacted by the doubling or tripling of the number of older people over the next two decades, more reason to adopt age friendliness as a cause.

Age Friendly shows how large companies are in an ideal position to address the aging of America and, in the process, benefit from making their organizations more age friendly. Because of its economic power and commitment to diversity in the workplace, Big Business—specifically the Fortune 1000—has the opportunity and responsibility to take a leadership role in changing the narrative of aging in America. The book shows that age friendliness offers the possibility of bridging gaps not just between younger and older people, but those based on income, class, race, gender, politics, and geography. More than anything else, Age Friendly presents a bold and counterintuitive idea—aging is a positive thing for businesses, individuals, and society as a whole—and we should embrace it rather than fear it.

While ageism is a pervasive force in America that, like racism and gender discrimination, runs contrary to our democratic ideals, there is some good news. An age friendly movement is spreading in America and around the world as a growing number of cities and towns strive to better meet the needs of their older residents. Aa well, a concerted effort is being made to convince Big Business that an intergenerational workforce is in the best interests of not just older employees but the companies themselves. Age brings experience, perspective, and wisdom—just the right skill set for both short- and long-term decision-making.

The aging of America also presents major implications for businesses in terms of marketing to older consumers. Baby boomers are still the key to the economy despite marketers' focus on youth, much in part to their collective wealth and propensity to consume. Age friendly marketing thus makes much sense due to "the longevity economy," i.e., the billions of dollars that older consumers spend each year and the goldmine that looms in the future as they become an even bigger percentage of the population. Finally, Age Friendly discusses how more corporations are pursuing social responsibility in addition to maximizing profits—an ideal opportunity for corporations to demonstrate good citizenship by supporting age friendliness on a local, state, or national level.

Chapter 1

Ageism in America

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196235-2

We’re all going to get old (if we’re lucky).

David Rotman
Editor-at-Large of MIT Technology Review

In December 2018, an age discrimination complaint was filed to the New York Division of Human Rights by one Michael Boyajian. Who had Boyajian accused of infringing upon his rights? The Rolling Stones, of all people, who were all in their 70s at the time. Boyajian, who required a walker to get around after a fall, claimed that the band and their promoter, Concerts West/AEG, were charging five times the normal ticket price for a disabled seat to an upcoming show at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. “Baby boomers are their biggest fans, and we’re ageing out now,” Boyajian explained, thinking the “Strolling Bones,” as the four-member band was now sometimes called because of its collective age of 298, was an ageist organization.¹

The story illustrates how prevalent ageism was and remains in America and much else of the world. As youth culture made a rapid ascent in the late 1960s, “oldness culture” made an equivalent descent in terms of social worth or value. Over the last half-century and change, Americans in their third act of life have been engaged in a cultural war to realize the same civil rights as younger people but, it can be safely argued, they have lost most of the battles. Older Americans can be seen as a minority group but without the legal protections that other groups enjoy, a double whammy of discrimination. A host of factors—the historical legacy of ageism, the popularity of “anti-aging” modalities, persistent myths and stereotypes about older people, a hatred of baby boomers by younger generations, a virulent form of age-based bias in the workplace, and an utter failure by our legal system—have nurtured the ageist climate we have today in this country.

Still, despite all this, there is reason to be hopeful that ageism will wane over the next couple of decades. Millions more Americans are heading into their 70s every year, for one thing, a shifting of our demographic plates that may trigger social, economic, and political progress. Already there seems to be a sea change bubbling up as the fight against the untenable proposition of ageism reaches a critical mass. More baby boomers (who were likely ageist in their younger days, it needs to be said) are rather suddenly realizing they have joined the older crowd and are finding the cause to be one to which they can personally relate. While much has to be done to wipe out or even seriously damage ageist thinking and practices, a strong sense of social activism is currently in the air, making the prospect of an age-friendly America a very real one.

How Old Are You?

Given the deep roots of ageism in this country, we definitely have a long way to go. “Old age in America is often a tragedy,” the opening sentence of Robert Butler’s Why Survive? Being Old in America reads, about as depressing as eight words can be to anyone in their third act of life. The 1975 book is now considered a classic, not only because it won a Pulitzer Prize but due to its blazing of the trail of “ageism” (a term Butler had coined in 1968 when he recognized discrimination of older people). As the founding director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Butler was in an ideal position to recognize the marginalized status of the elderly at the time of the nation’s bicentennial. (Butler was clearly ahead of his time; as the first chair of a geriatrics department at an American teaching hospital, Mount Sinai in New York City, he made Alzheimer’s disease a primary area of research.) Old age conveyed sickness and death, he argued, running directly counter to our cultural values rooted in youthful exuberance and productivity. Even then, most older Americans were reasonably healthy, making the fear and dread associated with aging a social construct versus a reflection of reality. Butler went on in the book to outline how the United States was not just neglectful to its older citizens but often cruel to them. This was a shameful thing given our noble ideals and wealth, he concluded, calling for a wholesale reexamination of public policy to correct the injustice.²

In his 1989 How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in America, Howard Chudacoff makes a distinction between the biological phenomenon of age and the social meanings we assign to it. An individual’s status is heavily defined by their age and, in Western society, one’s status tends to become greater in one’s 20s and decline in one’s 60s. Chudacoff traces what would become to be called ageism to the late 19th century as before that Americans didn’t think too much about age. Segmentation in many forms becomes common after that, this divvying up of society working to the disadvantage of those believed to be unable to contribute economically. It wasn’t until Robert Butler introduced the idea of ageism into public discourse, however, that the field became canonized. “Since the 1960s, ageism has attracted increasing attention from those concerned with discrimination in American society,” Chudakoff wrote, the parallels to be drawn to unfair treatment based on the physical characteristics of gender or race now clearly evident.³

Unlike gender- or race-based discrimination, however, age-based discrimination is often generated by those who one day will be its recipients. “It seems strange that young people would be prejudiced toward a group to which they will eventually belong,” editor Todd D. Nelson astutely noted in the 2002 collection of essays Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice Against Older Persons, asking where this “negative affect” originates. Researchers had up to that point conducted a number of different studies to try to answer that good question, with various theories put forth based on the findings. Still, the definitive origins of ageism were elusive, the result of many different social factors in play. Nelson made “a loud and clear call to all prejudice researchers to examine the problem of ageism,” thinking that “we have just begun to scratch the surface of this long-neglected area.”⁴

Over the next couple of decades, not just “prejudice researchers” but people of many different backgrounds have devoted at least a portion of their careers and lives to address the problem of ageism in America. One of them is Margaret Morganroth Gullette, who calls herself not just a cultural critic but also an age critic. In her 2011 Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, Gullette argued that Americans were (finally) becoming “agewise,” i.e., sensitive to the discrimination faced by older people that was a part of everyday life. The 2009 movie Up in the Air in which a series of middle-aged employees get fired by the character played by George Clooney sparked real-life conversations about ageism in the workplace and what was euphemistically called “displacement.” Shockingly, the Supreme Court had in 2000 ruled that “States may discriminate on the basis of age,” leading Gullette to conclude that “practices that should be condemned are being institutionalized.”⁵

Gullette continued to point out America’s shameful and openly tolerated policies that have damaged the lives of millions of older people. In her wonderfully titled 2017 Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, Gullette again weighed in on what she called “the infliction of suffering by mere birthdate.” Ageism was culturally defined, she emphasized, and the central theme of the narrative had declined significantly over the past century. There needed to be something equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to make Americans rise up, Gullette felt, as only that had the potential to motivate enough citizens to engage in the struggle against ageism.⁶

Until somebody makes such a stirring speech, it’s up to ordinary folks like us and some very smart people to do what we can to point out ageism when we see it and advocate for change. Fortunately, a growing number of researchers around the world are gravitating to the field as aging becomes a rather hot area within the social sciences. In their 2018 Contemporary Perspectives on Ageism, editors Liat Ayalon and Clemens Tesch-Romer gathered a group of scholars from 20 different countries and a wide variety of disciplines to offer their thoughts on the subject. Academics specializing in psychology, sociology, gerontology, geriatrics, pharmacology, law, geography, design, engineering, policy, and media studies contributed essays with the collective goal to suggest ways we can “reconstruct the image of old age.” Although decidedly European-centric, the (open-access) textbook demonstrates the collaborative efforts being taken to address the origins, consequences, and potential responses to ageism.⁷

In her 2018 Disrupt Aging: A Bold New Path to Living Your Best Life at Every Age, Jo Ann Jenkins, the CEO of AARP, offers useful ways we can reconstruct the image of old age. Jenkins wisely suggests we stop fighting aging and instead fight ageism, as doing the latter will make it unnecessary to do the former. Many of us are not even aware that we’re perpetuating ageist attitudes and behaviors, she points out, illustrating how deeply seated the problem really is. “We have to change the mindset and build an awareness of ageism to set the foundation for changing the social norms,” Jenkins explains, with one good way being to make age discrimination equivalent to that based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Beyond the issue of unfairness, ageism creates a negative view of aging, making it in the interests of all of us to speak out against it in order to eliminate it.⁸

Disrupting aging relies heavily on getting rid of the stereotypes that are firmly attached to getting older. In their 2020 Getting Wise About Getting Old: Debunking Myths about Aging, editors Veronique Billette, Patrik Marier, and Anne-Marie Seguin and their fellow essayists directly confront the various myths that support ageism’s central narrative of decline. Older adults are not the idle, feeble, nonsexual, and intellectually rigid people they are often said to be (especially in the media), the contributors show through hard evidence, nor are they responsible for an upcoming economic apocalypse. Deconstructing such myths will indeed go a long way to ending ageism, a tall order that demands a powerful brand of activism.⁹

Enter Ashton Applewhite, probably the world’s leading advocate for anti-ageism. Applewhite made a big splash with her 2020 This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and even more so with her celebrated 2017 “Let’s End Ageism” TED talk. (It was named one of the “50 Essential Civil Rights Speeches” by Stacker.com.) Applewhite took special aim at beauty and pharmaceutical companies, which, by marketing “anti-aging” products and services, are only further demonizing the natural process of aging. By presenting a positive view of aging, This Chair Rocks has been employed as a source of empowerment by its many readers and as an agent for social change. The book is “an important wake-up call for any baby boomer who’s apprehensive about growing old,” thought sociologist, sexologist, and AARP ambassador Pepper Schwartz, echoing Applewhite’s call for “age pride!”¹⁰

The Cult of Youth

Demonstrating pride in one’s age, whatever the number happens to be, is just the kind of rallying call needed to end ageism in America. The idea of an age-equal society in which all citizens—young, old, and in between—are respected and valued is no doubt a worthy pursuit that resonates with what the United States is supposed to be about. Indeed, around the world, Americans are widely considered a friendly people, a function perhaps of our democratic ideals, pluralistic population, and illusion that we’re all somehow middle class. But is America “age friendly,” i.e., inclusive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Ageism in America
• 2 Age-Friendly Communities
• 3 Age-Friendly Work
• 4 Age-Friendly Marketing
• 5 Age-Friendly Responsibility
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index