Many people are afraid of aging … much of the negative attitude is generated by a set of myths about individual and population aging that are not backed and often squarely contradicted by evidence. (Axel Börsch-Supan, 2013: 3)
If you are reading this book, chances are that you have signed up for a course in ageing studies or social gerontology, which is a sub-set of gerontology – the study of human ageing. Or, perhaps, you are working with older people and would like to know more about social policy issues related to ageing. You may even be one of those people who picked up this book because you are curious. Regardless, you are sure to have some questions about ageing and older people. In our experience of teaching people about ageing, we have identified a number of questions to which students want to know the answers, but are too afraid to ask. These questions range from ‘What counts as old age anyway?’ to ‘Will I have enough money to retire, and when?’. You probably have more questions of your own that relate to your personal experience, members of your family or what you have observed from news or public debate.
Whatever your question, we can assure you of two things: you are probably not alone in asking it, and the answer will be much more interesting than you expect. We have been so inspired by the questions that students have put to us over the years that we decided to use their curiosity to shape our whole book. Each chapter is written as a response to a question posed by a student to one of us at some stage in our teaching careers. In every chapter you will find interesting questions lead to fascinating answers.
It is this constant capacity of the study of human ageing to shock, excite, inspire and even provoke fear that makes it one of the most interesting areas of scholarship in social science today. Box 1.1 sets out six shockers to whet your appetite:
Box 1.1: Some ageing factoids
•If you are female and were born in 2000 in Kensington and Chelsea (a wealthy area of London, England), your life expectancy at birth is eight years longer than a baby girl born just 200 miles north in Manchester, England, in the same year (ONS [Office for National Statistics], 2013).
•In the UK, as of April 2019, the full state pension is £167.25 per week. That’s about £8,700 per year (Department for Work and Pensions, 2019).
•Population ageing is as much to do with children as it is older people. One of the main drivers for population ageing is actually falling total fertility rates (that is, the number of children born per woman) (Harper, 2016).
•In 2016, more than 30 per cent of the homeless population of the United States (US) were over 50 years old and this is still growing (Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2016).
•According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, in the US, around 50 per cent of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither a pension nor any retirement savings (Government Accountability Office, 2019).
•Extended life expectancy varies across the globe. A girl born in Swaziland today will be lucky to see her 50th birthday. This compares with a life expectancy of 87 years for a girl born in Japan (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2015).
To check out your own life expectancy, use the tool on the UK’s ONS website (www.ons.gov.uk).
Throughout this book, we aim to keep you interested. So, we will include lots of boxes with interesting facts, references to relevant online resources, and, crucially, difficult questions for you to think about as you learn more about ageing. In this chapter we are going to lay the groundwork by describing some of the infrastructure that you need to understand population ageing. However, we have left detailed descriptions of some key concepts, such as the ‘dependency ratio’ and ‘birth cohorts’, to later chapters. We have provided a glossary of key terms for you to check the meaning of concepts too. As social scientists we are also keen to explain how different approaches in social policy and allied health services such as social work and social care might affect older people, or indeed, whole populations who are ageing. Deciding the legal age at which someone qualifies for a state pension may seem like a simple and straightforward policy decision, for example, but it has very significant implications for the experience of ageing in that particular country. For instance, if you are required to work until you are 67 (the current age at which someone is eligible to receive the state pension in the UK) that may lead you to take a very different perspective on your work-life balance than someone who knows that they can retire at 62, such as pensioners in Greece (OECD, 2017). Retiring earlier also means that you will need to have saved a much bigger pension pot throughout a shorter working life. Likewise, if, like many middle-class people in northern and western Europe, you spend longer in education and so don’t start earning a salary until you are in your thirties, the time available to you to make adequate pension contributions is shortened. Our working lives are changing and so our pension policies must too. As you work through the book you will get down to the nuts and bolts of policy questions such as this, but first we need to talk about theories of ageing and how they help us to understand and explain population change.
Theories are vital because they help us to sort and interpret information, evidence and data. Evidence without theory is like jelly without a mould – shapeless and difficult to work with. Arguably, theories are the most important part of the infrastructure of your learning about any topic. That is why in this book, rather than separating theories of ageing into a chapter by themselves, we have grounded each chapter in the relevant theory. So, in Chapter 2 you will be introduced to basic concepts of ageism, Chapter 3 covers the dependency ratio, Chapter 6 includes feminist theories of gender and ageing, and so on. As we are interested in both the theory and policy implications of population ageing we have used practical tools to help you to understand how knowledge of ageing societies is constructed. For instance, towards the end of this chapter we will examine and deconstruct the most popular and useful method of representing an ageing population in graphical form, the population pyramid. You will see in Table 1.1 later in this chapter that we have outlined life expectancy and a human development index for populations all around the globe. These are useful measures of working out which stage of the demographic transition a society has reached. First, let us lay out a few ground rules about the theoretical approach that the book takes: critical gerontology.
An important note on the language of gerontology and ageing
For the most part, in your daily life you will notice that the language around ageing and older people tends to swing between two extremes. On the one hand there are the sensationalist newspaper headlines which suggest that our ageing population represents a ‘demographic time-bomb’. The time-bomb analogy is based on the idea of the dependency ratio, which we explore in Chapter 3. The short version is that actuaries suggest that, based on current costs of pensions and healthcare, if more people live longer and fewer children are born, then we will be left with fewer workers per retired person. They envisage pension funds then having a big gap between the expectations of members and the funds available. When this is applied to a whole population, it seems legitimate to claim that there is, indeed, a time-bomb of under-funded pensions.
Critical gerontologists have always critiqued this