James Chappel is an associate professor of history at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. He is the author of Catholic Modern, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and The New Republic.
What’s the big idea?
Aging in America is becoming one of our country’s most important policy arenas. With more old citizens than young ones, the relevance of elder members in society has never been greater. Despite great progress in the quality of old age over the past century, there is much need for growth in terms of practical policy and cultural perceptions.
Below, James shares five key insights from his new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. Listen to the audio version—read by James himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Population aging is one of the biggest historical transformations of our time.
We think about population aging as an issue for medicine and finance, but we don’t usually think about it historically. From the broadest perspective, population aging is one of the biggest changes that has happened to American society in the past century. Many people think of politics, iPhones, or AI when considering dramatic societal change, but those things matter less than major demographic changes. Human life is not what it was a century ago—it’s twice as long!—and that deserves much more attention.
2. We’ve only been seriously contemplating population aging for a century.
Most of the major things we deal with as a society (education, politics, health, war, gender) are topics we have publicly debated for centuries. We have reflected long and hard on many subjects, but no one really paid attention to population aging until about the 1930s.
“What to do with old age and how to pay for old age are areas of reflection with a lot of space open for creativity.”
Even people thinking very hard about social reform and progress, like Karl Marx, weren’t thinking about aging at all. So, aging is an issue that has a pretty short history. What to do with old age and how to pay for old age are areas of reflection with a lot of space open for creativity. It’s an exciting, vibrant, fresh avenue for collective contemplation.
3. There have been many different approaches to aging.
We often think of aging as something non-ideological. Education is ideological, and the military is ideological, so we have robust public debate about the meaning of these things. But old age is kind of like, well, you get social security and Medicare, and we don’t want to think about it too much beyond that. Old age is in a moment of ideological stasis. But for most of the past century, there’s been much debate about what it means to age well: socially, politically, and justly.
There has been socialist aging, conservative aging, green or eco-conscious aging, etc. One tradition I look at is critical race theory. From that perspective, the history of aging looks quite different. There actually was a robust tradition of Black thought about aging. A lot of inspiring Black leaders said, essentially, that racism and prejudice follow Americans through the whole course of life. Older Black Americans have all kinds of negative outcomes, and Black activists suggested specific reforms to bring the insights of the Civil Rights Movement into old age politics and policy.
We need to reinvigorate and re-politicize old age. We should remember how political and divisive it was (and therefore, how exciting it was) to debate old age just a few decades ago.
4. 20th-century solutions to old age are very good.
Historians are often quite down on American history. They tend to focus on the persistence of inequality, violence, or disenfranchisement. But when it comes to old age, the situation is much better than it was a century ago.
A century ago, older people often lived in squalor, in one room shacks with dirt floors. There were only a few elders because public health was so bad. Now, older people are quite economically privileged, and they have access to the best poverty reduction program in the country, which is social security. They’re the only age bracket with something like socialized medicine through Medicare. There’s a lot to be grateful for as aging Americans, but there’s also a lot left to be done.
“Many American middle-aged couples, especially women, are financially or emotionally devastated by caring for older relatives.”
There are failures in old age policy, especially for people over 80, the old old. Issues of frailty, nursing home care, and things like that. Many American middle-aged couples, especially women, are financially or emotionally devastated by caring for older relatives. This is a result of a policy decision that could have been approached differently. There were approaches on the table that would have lessened the burden on unpaid caretakers, and it is not too late.
When we think historically about old age, it’s important that we tell an optimistic story. I’m excited to get old. There will be way more social programs for me when I’m 65 than I have available to me now. But there’s also room for growth, especially in dealing with policy for the old old. Nursing homes and extended care will be the most important policy arenas in the near future.
5. Getting old is an adventure.
Old age in America can be very good. It can be very fun. You have access to so much when it comes to opportunities for leisure and health. But what I mean by the adventure of old age is a bit different.
As Americans, we tend to believe that we make our biggest contributions as citizens when we’re young, that politics is a young person’s game: green energy, Black Lives Matter, and other movements are for younger people, and old people can step back. I think that is absolutely not true. That is a completely outdated way to think about American politics. I think the age of youth has eclipsed.
There are more older people in America than younger ones. The decisions we make about how to age and think about old age policy will matter now more than ever. Being provocative, I might even say that decisions about aging are going to matter more than decisions about youth because I think the age of the youth is over. There’s been a major demographic transition in this country and many others. As we age, we should not think of ourselves as becoming less relevant. We should think of ourselves as becoming more relevant.
To listen to the audio version read by author James Chappel, download the Next Big Idea App today:
