Good old days?

Old age and the search for security: an American social history
Carole Haber and Brian Gratton
Indiana University Press, 1994

This is a myth-busting book from a nation of myth-makers, with many lessons for those of a more European persuasion. The authors demolish the notion of a ‘golden age’ in pre-industrial America when older people were a scarce and valued resource, and go on to dismantle the beliefs that industrialisation wrecked the extended family and isolated the old, that modernisation drove older workers out of paid employment, and that the American welfare state - tardy and grudging as it was - was a response to the growing impoverishment of ageing citizens.

The reality was more complex, they argue, and much more optimistic. Before industrialisation wealthy old people bought their offsprings’ respect and allegiance by holding onto property, while the elderly poor were despised. Families tended to be nuclear, and frequent admonishments to the young to hold their elders in high regard suggests that they did just the opposite.

During industrialisation economic pressures kept older people in the labour market, and younger people in the family home, for longer so that the extended family became more prevalent. And during the Depression the collapse of family economies made it harder and harder for young and old to sustain themselves, so fuelling the desire for state pensions to relieve families of the economic costs of their elders. Retirement of older workers allowed the dwindling number of jobs to be made available for the unemployed young.

The outcome was a mass withdrawal of older Americans from the pressures of work, and a mass escape from the conflicts of family life. Early retirement and living alone are not problems, but solutions, for the current generation. Older Americans can live a better life now than ever before, say Haber & Gratton, except for those trapped in poverty and ‘outside’ the system. The welfare state is the precondition for wealth to cascade down the generations; a lesson that our government could usefully learn.

Steve Iliffe