The intergenerational war is a false myth
When it comes to aging, we can’t just talk about government, pensions and care homes. We need a focus on capitalism too
Martin Hyde, Associate Professor of Gerontology at the Centre for Innovative Aging at Swansea University and author
If I close my eyes and remember my life in Milan, one staple image is the roads in the city center. The irregular maze of the cobbled streets, their shiny quality in the days of rain. With their rounded corners, the cobblestones resembled the rocks in a stream. You could even imagine trout swimming about. For almost four hundred years, Palazzo Brera has been facing one of these ancient pavings, offering passers-by its severe brick façade, a stark contrast with the harmony of a white colonnade that runs along its internal courtyard. Upon entering the austere doorway, a bronze statue of a naked Napoleon, with a tiny winged victory in his right hand, gives you a silent welcome (The original marble statue by Antonio Canova is at the Wellington Museum in London). I can’t explain why I took all this grace for granted while I lived in the city, but sometimes, like in the case of this interview, I discover a thread of life entangled in those cobbled streets.
Since I relocated to South East Asia, on every trip to Milan, I pay a visit to the Brera Art Gallery. That’s how I discovered Carlo Crivelli, a painter I had never heard of before. His painting of a Madonna and child stopped me dead in my tracks. The chubby child holds a branch from which stems a yellow and juicy pear. The image is so unusual (ever seen a baby Jesus with a pear?) that I got closer to the canvas. The more I looked at the painting, the more unexpected details seemed to bloom out of the paint, including the little candle on the bottom left that gives the name to the artwork.
Similarly, during my conversation with Martin Hyde, Associate Professor of Gerontology at the Centre for Innovative Aging at Swansea University, new details emerged at the intersection between economy and aging. Professor Hyde is a member of the Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology, a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and author of Aging and Globalization, a book written with Paul Higgs, Professor of Sociology of Aging at the University College of London. Stemming from his analysis, our economic system appears more nuanced, and Professor Hyde offers also an alternative interpretation of the dichotomy young-vs-old. In this debate, there’s another variable we rarely think of, but that we should begin to call into question.
Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you start in the field of gerontology?
My interest sparked by accident. After finishing my Master’s degree in Sociology, I was looking for a job in London. One of the options was a job in epidemiology. At first, I thought it had something to do with skin disease, but soon I found that its goal is to measure the quality of life. In my case, with a focus on aging. It was such an interesting experience and, most of all, it opened my eyes about how important is aging for all what we do, because it impacts on every aspect of life. That’s how I got hooked in exploring the social, cultural and economic ramification of a biological process in life.
You are the co-author of Aging and Globalization. What prompted you to write this book?
The book stems from my research for my Ph.D thesis. I always had an interest in globalization and I wanted to study in depth how it impacts on the way we think about aging.
Following books like No Logo and The World is Flat, we are aware of many effects of globalization, but we rarely reflect upon its relationship with aging. What are the main findings of your book?
When we started, we had a simple argument. In the West, old age has always been seen as a social policy issue. With the advent of globalization, things began to change and this assumption was challenged by the emergence of supranational agencies like the EU, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose scope and activities overlapped the ones of governments. Personally, I was dissatisfied with the way globalization was depicted as univocally negative. Aging and globalization are multifaceted. Furthermore, they are not just a single economical issue, but are a multilayered matter and all these levels impact on our perception.
A couple of years ago, we might have had a more sectorial view, we might have thought that the interactions were more limited, but the Covid-19 epidemic has revealed a series of implications. Think about the negative discourse about aging, the discriminatory use of definitions like “Boomer remover.” Covid-19 has exposed a very dark side of the way we treat older people and because of globalization these ideas spread around the world. Chronological age has once again become an indicator for policymakers.
You pointed out that even the concept of “aging in place” is multi-layered. Which are the additional dimensions of our physical space and how do they impact on our idea of aging?
We often think about aging in place as our place, our neighborhood, but we need to look at what happens nationwide and internationally. We need to take into account the overlapping spaces we talked about before. These spaces include the global financial markets, regional spaces like the EU, and local spaces, such as industrial or technological districts, like Silicon Valley.
A good example would be Kerala in Southern India. One third of the economy of Kerala is made of international remittances and this shows how deeply connected some ‘local’ areas are to the world economy. It also demonstrates the growing role of international mobility in the modern life course. People are moving around the world, some parts do well, some others don’t and the big corporations have largely freed themselves from the constraints put on them by the nation state. Aging in place is interwoven in all these layers; it is trans-local and trans-national.
Aging is presented at the same time as a global concern and an individual challenge. This dichotomy makes navigating old age particularly daunting. What do you make of it?
In neo-liberal economies, success is presented as a shift from state-funded systems to private-funded systems. In the first case, the responsibility of care is placed on the country and in the second case, on the individual. There are of course differences in the way this formula is played out nationwide, but freedom and autonomy are valued in a private-funded system. However, in both these systems, aging is presented as a diminishing condition. The welfare state has been important for social contract, but its weakening is playing in the intergenerational contract. Following a certain narrative, baby-boomers “stole the future” of the young. Even during the Brexit vote, older adults were seen as antagonist to younger Britons. At the core, there is a misunderstanding of where intergenerational inequalities come from. Whilst it is true that current cohorts of young adults are unable to buy a house I do not think that this is due to some nefarious plot by older adults to keep them from the property market.
We must remember that these are the same older adults who are having to take in their adult children and continue to support them at home. Instead I would look at the series of economic and political decisions made by policy makers that has restricted the number of affordable houses that have been built and made it harder to get a mortgage following the Global Financial Crisis. So – just as the older generation were presented with a historical opportunity to buy their council houses as part of a political strategy by the then Conservative government to create a ‘home owning democracy’ – the current housing crisis is due to political decisions not because of older adults – many of whom are also forced to live in inadequate housing.
That’s why it is more important than ever to challenge that narrative. The welfare state can be problematic in its way. The question is not going back to that system, but designing a system that supports a new way of thinking - including the desire for many to work longer years - and how to maintain equality.
Assuming that the dominant narrative accuses the older generations of “stealing resources” from the younger generations, in your post “What do the Paradise Papers tell us about capitalism, globalization and aging” you outlined a different scenario. Can you tell us more about it?
We are continuously being told that, on both an individual and societal level, we cannot afford to grow old in the way we have done in the past. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released leaked documents from the offshore law firm Appleby, the international trust and corporate service provider Asiaciti Trust and corporate registries, they made me think. Because of the way the debate is framed, we forget about the tremendous sums of money that leak out of our countries due to tax avoidance. Thanks to the loopholes, there are around 7-10 trillion dollars of global GDP that flee the tax system.
So on one hand we are told that we must reduce public spending on things that matter to many older people like pensions, healthcare and social care, under the guise of austerity politics. Yet, on the other hand, the Paradise Papers reveal that global corporations and the super-rich are allowed to avoid paying huge sums of money in taxes. With the exception of the owner, this is unproductive money that could be used for supporting programs for the citizens of the country that helped to make them.
Working to resolve some of the problems in our society reveals other things. The first thing is the growing inequality between the 1% and the rest of society. The loss of industrial jobs and the rapid rise of the service sector has created precarious ways of working. More people are pushed out from the job market and this will impact on later life.
The second thing is that when it comes to aging, we can’t just talk about government, pensions, and social care homes. We need to focus on capitalism too. Capitalism can be good and positive. Some businesses have a philanthropic approach. We need to show that it’s good for the business and good for the people. We need to change the narrative. Even from the consumption side. Andrew Scott and David Sinclair, for example, pointed out the wealth older people possess.
In his book Capital in the XXI Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty noted that the rapid increase in income at the very top in advanced industrial societies is paired with the increasingly fragile position of a growing number of workers. Older workers have fewer opportunities to reverse negative outcomes. Does the weakening of the welfare state embed an ageist view?
When the focus is on the frail and the wrinkly it reinforces the cultural idea that aging is decline. We noticed that amongst those 55-64, a more globalized economy implied a lower participation in the job market. For women we discovered no effect, apart from some hangover from the banking crisis. In another study I am part of with researchers in the Netherlands, we showed that younger workers got hit harder by the financial crisis, but then they returned to work. The protection for older workers, instead, wears off over time, when there might be more expenses and it is more difficult to return to work.
Moreover, it looks like once they are made unemployed they are less likely to re-enter the labour market. There’s a sort of a compound effect. This would fit with other evidence on the impact of age discrimination on the employment of older workers. Hence we need to ensure that governments and businesses develop policies that support workers of all ages to remain or return to work following a financial crisis – it just might be that different groups of workers need different types of support at different times.
Shouldn’t we reframe the whole issue of aging and care as super rich versus old instead of old versus young?
The epistemic community is setting the scene, making the argument. We identified a number of variables in the book. The world has moved very quickly. Retirement for older workers has been presented as a drain on the system. The need for a change in the way it is calculated is paired with concepts like active aging that place part of the responsibility on the individual. The impact on the older generations has the potential to be very negative if they become scapegoats for other economic ills.
It is clear that economic insecurity exists. But it exists for those of all ages. We need to challenge this and in so doing we need to challenge the idea that this is the fault of older adults. Hopefully as more and more of us do this I’d like to think that people will see that ‘old vs young’ it is a false dichotomy. The intergenerational conflicts are a fight against your future self and that is not a fight any of us will win.
