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Reconstructing the elderly: A critical analysis of pensions and population policies in an era of demographic ageing

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

This article examines recent ageing policies and the way they are framed. Here it identifies underlying but sometimes contradictory narratives of growth and decline. It concludes that the overall aim of such policies is to reconstitute elderly subjectivities, conduct and everyday experience in light of neoliberal ambitions for sustained economic growth and geopolitical anxieties about regional decline nurtured by an unprecedented demographic process of population ageing. As a consequence, the language of inclusion is judged to be of ambiguous value for elderly people. Although the article is critical of the ways older people are perceived as a problem and of the solutions – such as pension reform, biopolitical-cum-economic behaviour modification and pronatalism – that are being pursued, in response it also finds some potential in current thinking for a more radical reappraisal of the elderly lifestyle and of the life cycle as a whole in relation to work regimes. It speculates that the generation of post-war baby boomers now approaching retirement just might rediscover resources in its counter-cultural memory to imagine a more emancipatory elder life congruent with a more sustainable environment.

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Notes

  1. The world's median age is projected to increase from 29.1 to 38.4 years by 2050, and from 39.7 to 45.6 years in developed countries. In 2009, the UN found half of all governments (79 per cent in developed countries) perceive population ageing as a major concern (UN, 2008, 2009, p. 10).

  2. The Hutton Report calculates that about half of all public sector pensioners in the United Kingdom receive less than £Ł5600 per annum, with some 90 per cent on less than £Ł17 000.

  3. If one substitutes ‘the elderly’ for ‘the poor’, M. Hardt and A. Negri make a similar point in order to explain everyone's integration within a post-Fordist economy (2004, p. 129ff.).

  4. This emphasises a ‘life course perspective’ and calls for policies to be based on ‘the rights, needs, preferences and capacities of older people’, understood as a ‘vital resource’.

  5. ‘Risk here denotes a family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations about possible futures in the present, followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future. Mortality and morbidity were key sites for the development of conceptions of the future as calculable, predictable and as dependent upon identifiable factors some of which were manageable’ (Rose, 2001, p. 7). Rose focuses especially on the biopolitical interests of the state (plus commerce and experts) in transferring responsibilities for health and well-being to individuals.

  6. This was the opinion of the National Red Cross Societies of the EU Member States and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in response to the EC (2005).

  7. While age bulges in the working population may be viewed as a ‘demographic dividend’, youth bulges (for example, in the Middle East) inspire insecurity in the West since they are associated with instability in economies with poor employment prospects. In this case, lack of manpower to fuel Western armies is cited as an additional danger of Europe's failure to repopulate itself (cf. European Defence Agency, 2006).

  8. George Magnus acknowledges that in the long run, ‘the issue of population aging will probably fade. The baby boomers will move on to the great retirement home in the sky, and the global trend toward lower fertility rates will result in the restoration of better demographic balance’ (Magnus, 2009, p. 1f.).

  9. In the United Kingdom, population growth as a solution to ageing has been vigorously recommended by the Institute for Public Policy Research (Dixon and Margot, 2006).

  10. For a statement of the secularisation thesis, see Norris and Inglehart (2004). Recent research by Eric Kaufmann suggests that more fundamentalist religious followers are likely to maintain higher fertility rates, tipping demographics in their favour as secular reproduction declines (Kaufmann, 2010).

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Generational Politics panel at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Lisbon, at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I’d like to thank everyone, including two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments. My work on population ageing is part of a 3-year project on the population question, generously funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

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    Diana Coole

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Coole, D. Reconstructing the elderly: A critical analysis of pensions and population policies in an era of demographic ageing. Contemp Polit Theory 11, 41–67 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2011.12

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