Generations
Sep. 14th, 2021 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livOne thing that's really frustrating me about a lot of political discussion lately is this baked-in assumption that the interests of "young" people are always opposed to the interests of "old" people. As far as I can see it comes from both left and right, and it seems really wrong to me, so I'm going to try to articulate why.
I generally take it as axiomatic that all of society is interconnected. Yes, racism temporarily advantages white people compared to POC, but overall racial inequality makes society worse in the longer term for everybody. This is if anything even more starkly the case with age, because nearly all young people are not just intertwined with old people, they eventually turn into older people.
I'm not exactly talking about ageism here. Or at least, ageism is part of what's going on, assuming that older people are doddering and clueless and haven't kept up with modern life, or assuming that young people are naive and impulsive and irresponsible. But my main issue isn't about prejudice, exactly, it's about the frame of generational conflict. I am too young (sic) to remember the 60s but from what I've read about the emergence of youth culture, never trust anyone over 30 etc, at least it was exuberant. It was new music and fashion and challenging entrenched ideas that no longer served their purpose, it was progress towards social justice. But now what we have is this joyless awfulness, that education is "bad" because it mainly benefits young people compared to old people, or that climate destruction is "good" because it allows old people who won't live to see ecological disaster to keep up their current lifestyle.
I started noticing it with Covid debates, those who argued we shouldn't close schools or bars because that would be "sacrificing" children's education and young people's fun to protect "the elderly", whose survival isn't particularly important. Which assumes that children don't care if their grandparents or neighbours or teachers or community elders die, let alone that the virus can somehow never be transmitted between people of different ages. It also assumes that older people have no role in education and never go to bars or clubs, for that matter. And instead of countering this by saying, no, elderly people are part of society and need to be protected from deadly disease, we got loads of people repeating that actually, we should take Covid seriously because it also affects young people, it's a myth to say that young people don't suffer serious illness. Which is true factually but to me really alienating rhetorically. If Covid really only killed people over 80, it would still be important to take preventative measures to deal with the pandemic. With vaccine priority, we had horrible arguments that it was unfair on young people to provide the vaccines in roughly age order even though older people are in fact more at risk. Or it was unfair on young people if older people "got to" live with fewer restrictions once they were vaccinated, we should make them wait until young people had their turn.
But actually this is just a more extreme continuation of the rhetoric around Brexit. There's somewhat of a correlation between increasing age and higher likelihood to have voted Brexit. This got spun by Brexiters as young people trying to sabotage Britain's defence against fascism and "invasion" by foreigners (although in fact the exception to the age correlation was that the few remaining people old enough to have been of military age during WW2 voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the EU). And Remainers, instead of arguing that being part of the EU is in everybody's interests, countered that the older generation were unfairly spoiling young people's life chances by taking away their freedom of movement, the ability to travel and study and work in any of the member countries. Some people even argued, apparently seriously, that votes in a referendum should be weighted according to life expectancy!
Currently there is a debate going on about how to pay for social care. Basically all sides of this are awful and I just want them all to lose. Some on the right saying that "old" people have practically no quality of life anyway so we should just let them die (perhaps of conveniently timed Covid) to save on social care bills. Some on the left saying that it's not "fair" to make young people pay for social care for the elderly, old people should "just" sell their homes to pay for their own care. And people pushing back against these horrible opinions are not saying that old people are part of society and if they need care, that should be society's responsibility. No, they're saying that some young people need care too. Definitely true, young disabled people do in fact exist and should be part of the plan for social care. But so what? This line is just as bad as arguing, we should put resources into preventing Covid because (contrary to the usual assumption) young people, or worse, young healthy people, sometimes get Covid. In fact sometimes the bad arguments are even directly connected to Covid: young people supposedly sacrificed by putting up with needless lockdowns and restrictions to protect older people, so now it's the turn of the old to sacrifice their comfortable retirement so that young people can pay less tax.
So we have right-wingers saying that old people are superfluous and should just be left to die because they're not economically productive, or because they're poor or disabled and generally don't deserve rights. And we have left-wingers saying that we should tax (or eat, on the more extreme fringes) the "rich" and assuming that old people are plutocrats unfairly oppressing the young. Occasionally the other way round too: right-wingers think young people don't need any health protections or welfare because they can just work harder if they want to have enough money to eat, and we can't help (presumed young) immigrants or precarious workers or homeless people because we have to prioritize the elderly. While left-wingers think it's fine to oppress minorities because only young naive people care about things like racism or xenophobia, homophobia or transphobia, and the left should only serve older white men who are the real "working class".
This Cory Doctorow piece, Inequality, not gerontocracy helped to clarify my thinking. I don't agree with all of Doctorow's conclusions and some of his economic analysis is US-specific, but this seemed like a really crucial point that is missing from the discussions I've seen:
The thing is I really don't believe there's such a thing as a policy which benefits "the old" at the expense of "the young", or which benefits "the young" at the expense of "the old", because we're all one society. The one possible exception is distorting the economy to artificially inflate house prices. This benefits that segment of older people who were able to buy houses before prices went up, which is by no means all old people, home ownership percentages may be higher in older generations but far from universal. But yes, people who do own homes that they bought cheaply and are now at least on paper "worth" 5 or 6 figures. House price inflation increases the wealth of those people, who skew older, and makes it harder for young people to live settled, economically comfortable lives and start to accrue savings because they have to spend all their income on an exploitative rent market. However, there are lots of reasons why the government deliberately skewing the economy to keep house prices increasing is bad policy. It turns houses into investment vehicles, it distorts the job market, it forces people to commute long distances in ways that given our dire transport policy are probably polluting as well as bad for personal happiness, it accumulates wealth in the hands of a few which never actually returns to the economy since owning a home which is worth £loadsadosh doesn't actually give you any spending power. So although this policy in theory steals from the young to enrich the old, it actually makes everything worse for everybody and most old people don't really benefit, and certainly don't benefit as much as they lose out.
Also, the problem isn't fixed by observing that there isn't enough housing, so we should warehouse all the old people in crowded and under-resourced care homes so that young people can get onto the property ladder. (Honestly I'm pretty hardcore abolitionist [CN: torture, removal of freedom] about institutionalized care anyway.) Just like the housing crisis wasn't fixed by cutting the benefits of anyone who lived in a house with more bedrooms than people (a solution supported by both left and right and opposed only by the far right on the grounds that it wasn't fair on pensioners). You can't. Redistribute. Housing.
I think possibly the answer to this may lie in a framing informed by disability activism. That is to say, what if we consider old age a condition that is disabled by society, and we do something about making society more accessible? There can be an assumption that if old people experience pain, impairment, cognitive loss, or have care needs, then it's not "real" disability because it's normal for old people. So there's no need to make adaptations so that they can participate fully in society. Equally young people get a lot of nonsense about being too young to need mobility aids or to experience chronic pain and fatigue, and also the assumption that the kind of inadequate provision made for old people is suitable for them. Again, they don't need to participate fully in society because old people are supposed to be retired and expected to live somewhat limited lives.
What if we counted old people as disabled? And what if we made it a priority for people to be able to participate in all parts of society and culture and leisure, at any level of functional ability? And at any age? Sure, younger people are more likely to want to be in paid work and may be more likely to be parents of young children, but their needs and wants aren't fundamentally opposed to the needs of older people. Instead of assuming that young people want to have fun and make a meaningful contribution to society, and old people want to be passively cared for, we could facilitate everybody to have fun and make meaningful contributions. Then it would be a lot more obvious that the same things are good for younger people are also good for older people.
I generally take it as axiomatic that all of society is interconnected. Yes, racism temporarily advantages white people compared to POC, but overall racial inequality makes society worse in the longer term for everybody. This is if anything even more starkly the case with age, because nearly all young people are not just intertwined with old people, they eventually turn into older people.
I'm not exactly talking about ageism here. Or at least, ageism is part of what's going on, assuming that older people are doddering and clueless and haven't kept up with modern life, or assuming that young people are naive and impulsive and irresponsible. But my main issue isn't about prejudice, exactly, it's about the frame of generational conflict. I am too young (sic) to remember the 60s but from what I've read about the emergence of youth culture, never trust anyone over 30 etc, at least it was exuberant. It was new music and fashion and challenging entrenched ideas that no longer served their purpose, it was progress towards social justice. But now what we have is this joyless awfulness, that education is "bad" because it mainly benefits young people compared to old people, or that climate destruction is "good" because it allows old people who won't live to see ecological disaster to keep up their current lifestyle.
I started noticing it with Covid debates, those who argued we shouldn't close schools or bars because that would be "sacrificing" children's education and young people's fun to protect "the elderly", whose survival isn't particularly important. Which assumes that children don't care if their grandparents or neighbours or teachers or community elders die, let alone that the virus can somehow never be transmitted between people of different ages. It also assumes that older people have no role in education and never go to bars or clubs, for that matter. And instead of countering this by saying, no, elderly people are part of society and need to be protected from deadly disease, we got loads of people repeating that actually, we should take Covid seriously because it also affects young people, it's a myth to say that young people don't suffer serious illness. Which is true factually but to me really alienating rhetorically. If Covid really only killed people over 80, it would still be important to take preventative measures to deal with the pandemic. With vaccine priority, we had horrible arguments that it was unfair on young people to provide the vaccines in roughly age order even though older people are in fact more at risk. Or it was unfair on young people if older people "got to" live with fewer restrictions once they were vaccinated, we should make them wait until young people had their turn.
But actually this is just a more extreme continuation of the rhetoric around Brexit. There's somewhat of a correlation between increasing age and higher likelihood to have voted Brexit. This got spun by Brexiters as young people trying to sabotage Britain's defence against fascism and "invasion" by foreigners (although in fact the exception to the age correlation was that the few remaining people old enough to have been of military age during WW2 voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the EU). And Remainers, instead of arguing that being part of the EU is in everybody's interests, countered that the older generation were unfairly spoiling young people's life chances by taking away their freedom of movement, the ability to travel and study and work in any of the member countries. Some people even argued, apparently seriously, that votes in a referendum should be weighted according to life expectancy!
Currently there is a debate going on about how to pay for social care. Basically all sides of this are awful and I just want them all to lose. Some on the right saying that "old" people have practically no quality of life anyway so we should just let them die (perhaps of conveniently timed Covid) to save on social care bills. Some on the left saying that it's not "fair" to make young people pay for social care for the elderly, old people should "just" sell their homes to pay for their own care. And people pushing back against these horrible opinions are not saying that old people are part of society and if they need care, that should be society's responsibility. No, they're saying that some young people need care too. Definitely true, young disabled people do in fact exist and should be part of the plan for social care. But so what? This line is just as bad as arguing, we should put resources into preventing Covid because (contrary to the usual assumption) young people, or worse, young healthy people, sometimes get Covid. In fact sometimes the bad arguments are even directly connected to Covid: young people supposedly sacrificed by putting up with needless lockdowns and restrictions to protect older people, so now it's the turn of the old to sacrifice their comfortable retirement so that young people can pay less tax.
So we have right-wingers saying that old people are superfluous and should just be left to die because they're not economically productive, or because they're poor or disabled and generally don't deserve rights. And we have left-wingers saying that we should tax (or eat, on the more extreme fringes) the "rich" and assuming that old people are plutocrats unfairly oppressing the young. Occasionally the other way round too: right-wingers think young people don't need any health protections or welfare because they can just work harder if they want to have enough money to eat, and we can't help (presumed young) immigrants or precarious workers or homeless people because we have to prioritize the elderly. While left-wingers think it's fine to oppress minorities because only young naive people care about things like racism or xenophobia, homophobia or transphobia, and the left should only serve older white men who are the real "working class".
This Cory Doctorow piece, Inequality, not gerontocracy helped to clarify my thinking. I don't agree with all of Doctorow's conclusions and some of his economic analysis is US-specific, but this seemed like a really crucial point that is missing from the discussions I've seen:
Boomers may be richer than Gen X and Millennials on average, but only because the top 10% skew the average [...] savings – like all forms of wealth – are in the hands of the rich, not the old.
The thing is I really don't believe there's such a thing as a policy which benefits "the old" at the expense of "the young", or which benefits "the young" at the expense of "the old", because we're all one society. The one possible exception is distorting the economy to artificially inflate house prices. This benefits that segment of older people who were able to buy houses before prices went up, which is by no means all old people, home ownership percentages may be higher in older generations but far from universal. But yes, people who do own homes that they bought cheaply and are now at least on paper "worth" 5 or 6 figures. House price inflation increases the wealth of those people, who skew older, and makes it harder for young people to live settled, economically comfortable lives and start to accrue savings because they have to spend all their income on an exploitative rent market. However, there are lots of reasons why the government deliberately skewing the economy to keep house prices increasing is bad policy. It turns houses into investment vehicles, it distorts the job market, it forces people to commute long distances in ways that given our dire transport policy are probably polluting as well as bad for personal happiness, it accumulates wealth in the hands of a few which never actually returns to the economy since owning a home which is worth £loadsadosh doesn't actually give you any spending power. So although this policy in theory steals from the young to enrich the old, it actually makes everything worse for everybody and most old people don't really benefit, and certainly don't benefit as much as they lose out.
Also, the problem isn't fixed by observing that there isn't enough housing, so we should warehouse all the old people in crowded and under-resourced care homes so that young people can get onto the property ladder. (Honestly I'm pretty hardcore abolitionist [CN: torture, removal of freedom] about institutionalized care anyway.) Just like the housing crisis wasn't fixed by cutting the benefits of anyone who lived in a house with more bedrooms than people (a solution supported by both left and right and opposed only by the far right on the grounds that it wasn't fair on pensioners). You can't. Redistribute. Housing.
I think possibly the answer to this may lie in a framing informed by disability activism. That is to say, what if we consider old age a condition that is disabled by society, and we do something about making society more accessible? There can be an assumption that if old people experience pain, impairment, cognitive loss, or have care needs, then it's not "real" disability because it's normal for old people. So there's no need to make adaptations so that they can participate fully in society. Equally young people get a lot of nonsense about being too young to need mobility aids or to experience chronic pain and fatigue, and also the assumption that the kind of inadequate provision made for old people is suitable for them. Again, they don't need to participate fully in society because old people are supposed to be retired and expected to live somewhat limited lives.
What if we counted old people as disabled? And what if we made it a priority for people to be able to participate in all parts of society and culture and leisure, at any level of functional ability? And at any age? Sure, younger people are more likely to want to be in paid work and may be more likely to be parents of young children, but their needs and wants aren't fundamentally opposed to the needs of older people. Instead of assuming that young people want to have fun and make a meaningful contribution to society, and old people want to be passively cared for, we could facilitate everybody to have fun and make meaningful contributions. Then it would be a lot more obvious that the same things are good for younger people are also good for older people.
