societies succeed in enforcing food taboos and access to young wives. When I first heard of those customs, I found myself wondering, “Why doesn’t an individual young tribesman just grab and eat food delicacies like marrow and venison, and marry a beautiful young woman of his choice rather than wait until age 40?” The answer is: he doesn’t, for the same reason that young adults in our society rarely succeed in seizing property from their parents against the parents’ will. Our young adults don’t, because they would be opposed not just by their weak old parents but by our entire society that enforces the rules. And why don’t all young tribesmen rise simultaneously in revolt and say, “We are changing the rules, so that from now on we young men can eat marrow”? Young tribesmen don’t, for the same reason that all young Americans don’t rise in revolt and change the inheritance rules: in any society it’s a lengthy, difficult process to change the basic rules, old people have plenty of leverage for opposing rule changes, and learned deference and respect for the elderly don’t vanish overnight.
Better or worse today?
Compared to the status of the elderly in traditional societies, what has changed today? One set of factors has changed enormously for the better, but many other factors have changed for the worse.
The good news is that older people enjoy on the average much longer lives, far better health, far more recreational opportunities, and far less grief from deaths of their children than at any previous time in human history. Life expectancy averaged over 26 First World countries is 79 years, with the highest expectancy being 84 years in Japan—approximately double the value in traditional societies. The well-known reasons for this surge in lifespan are public health measures (such as provision of clean drinking water, screening of windows, and immunizations) to combat infectious diseases—plus modern medicine, more efficient food distribution to combat famine (Chapters 8 and 11), and (believe it or not, even despite two world wars) proportionately reduced death tolls from war in societies with state government compared to traditional societies (Chapter 4). Thanks to modern medicine and means of travel, old people can now enjoy a much higher quality of life today than in the past. For example, I recently returned from a safari in Africa on which 3 of the 14 other participants were between 86 and 90 years old and still able to undertake moderate walks. Far more people live to see their great-grandchildren—57% of those American men and 68% of those American women who live past the age of 80—than in the past. Over 98% of First World babies survive infancy and childhood, while the proportion is as low as 50% in traditional societies. Hence the formerly common experience of grieving over the death of one’s child is now rare in the First World.
Offsetting that good news is much bad news, some of it a straightforward consequence of demography. The ratio of old people to children and productive young workers has soared, because birth rates have dropped while survival rates of the elderly have risen. That is, the population pyramid is becoming inverted: we used to have lots of young people and few old people, but at present we have lots of old people and fewer babies. It’s no consolation to us of the current generation to reflect that it won’t be so bad 80 years from now, when today’s shrinking cohort of babies finally becomes a shrinking cohort of the elderly. For instance, the percentage of the whole population that is at least 65 years old is now only 2% in the poorest countries, but 10 times higher in some First World countries. Never before has any human society had proportionally so many old people to deal with.
One obvious negative consequence of those demographic facts is that society’s burden of supporting the elderly is heavier, because more older people require to be supported by fewer productive workers. That cruel reality lies at the root of the much-discussed looming crisis of funding the American Social Security system (and its European and Japanese counterparts) that provides pensions for retired workers. If we older people keep working, we prevent our children’s and our grandchildren’s generation from getting jobs, as is happening right now. If, instead, we older people retire and expect the earnings of the shrinking younger cohort to continue to fund the Social Security system and pay for our leisure, then the financial burden of the younger cohort is far greater than ever before. And if we expect to move in with them and let them privately support and care for us in their homes, they have other ideas. One wonders whether we are returning to a world where we shall be reconsidering choices about end of life made by traditional societies—such as assisted suicide, encouraged suicide, and euthanasia. In writing these words, I am certainly not recommending these choices; I am instead observing the increasing frequency with which these measures are being discussed, carried out, and debated by legislators and courts.
Another consequence of the population pyramid’s inversion is that, insofar as older people continue to be valuable to society (e.g., due to their long and varied experience), any individual old person is less valuable because so many other old individuals offer that same value. That 80-year-old Rennell Island woman who remembered the hungi kengi would have been less useful if there had been a hundred other hungi kengi observers still alive.
Aging plays out differently for men and for women. While women in the First World enjoy on the average longer lives than do men, that of course means a much higher likelihood of a woman becoming a widow than of a man becoming a widower. For instance, in the U.S. 80% of older men are married and only 12% are widowers, while less than 40% of older women are married and over half are widows. That’s partly because of longer female life expectancy, but also because men tend to be older than their wives at the time of marriage, and because widowed men are more likely to remarry (to considerably younger new wives) than are widowed women.
Traditionally, old people spent their final years living with the same group, or (in a sedentary society) in the same settlement or even in the same house, in which they had spent their adult lives or even their whole lives. There, they maintained the social ties that had supported them throughout their lives, including ties with surviving life-long friends and with at least some of their children. They generally had their sons or daughters or both living nearby, depending on whether the custom of their society was for a bride to move to the groom’s parents or for the groom to move to the bride’s parents upon marriage.
In the modern First World that constancy of social ties into old age has declined or disappeared. Under our own custom of neolocal residence, bride and groom don’t live near either the groom’s parents or the bride’s parents, but they instead go off to establish a new separate residence of their own. That gives rise to the modern phenomenon known as the empty-nest syndrome. In the U.S. in the early 1900s, at least one parent of a couple often died before the youngest child’s leaving home and thus never experienced an empty nest, and the duration of the empty nest for an average parent was less than two years. Now, most American parents will survive to experience an empty nest for more than a decade, often for many decades.
Old parents left to themselves in our empty-nest society are unlikely to find themselves still living near life- long friends. About 20% of the American population changes residence each year, so that either old parents, their friends, or probably both will have moved repeatedly since childhood. Common living circumstances for old people are that they go to live with one of their children, but thereby become cut off from their friends because their child has moved from the original family house; or they live by themselves as long as possible, with some friends nearby but not necessarily with their children nearby; or they live separately from both life-long friends and from children, in a retirement home, where they may or may not receive visits from their children. This is the situation that caused my Fijian acquaintance whom I quoted in the first paragraph to upbraid us with the accusation, “You throw away your old people and your own parents!”
Another factor contributing to the social isolation of the modern elderly besides neolocal residence and frequent shifts of residence is formal retirement from the labor force. This phenomenon became common only in the late 19th century. Until then, people just worked until their bodies or minds wore out. Now, retirement is almost universal as a policy in industrial countries, at an age ranging from 50 to 70, depending on the country (e.g., younger in Japan than in Norway) and on the profession (e.g., younger for commercial airline pilots than for college teachers). Three trends of modern industrial societies joined to favor retirement as a formal policy. One trend is our increased lifespan, such that many people live to an age at which they can no longer continue to work. There was no need to have formal policies mandating retirement at 60 or 70 in an era when average lifespan was less than 50 anyway. A second trend is increasing economic productivity, such that a workforce composed of a smaller fraction of the population has become capable of supporting a large fraction of the population no longer working.
The remaining modern trend favoring retirement is the various forms of social insurance to provide economic support for retired older people. Government-mandated or government-supported pensions arose in Germany under Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880s, spread in the following decades to other western and northern European countries and New Zealand, and reached the United States in 1935 with the passage of our Social Security Act. This is not to claim that mandatory retirement is an unmixed blessing: many people are required to
