Tags
bbc, discourses of ageing, downsizing, equity release, grandparents, house-blocking, housing, intergenerational conflict, Intergenerational Foundation, intergenerational transfers, media, old age, redistribution
I have found myself Dr Angry over the last two days. I mean Dr Really Angry. It started with the amount of airtime given to a new outfit, The Intergenerational Foundation, which describes itself as having been established to research ‘fairness’ between current and future generations in the UK. They published a report that suggests that everyone over 65 (where old age begins, apparently) should really leave their homes so that young people can move in, because by hogging, hoarding and house-blocking they are being really unfair to younger generations (errrr, those under 65). Shame on the BBC and numerous (all?) other media outlets for perpetuating this depiction, the language, the discourse of how intergenerational relations works. These powerful players in society repeating these phrases over and over again – well, it gets into public consciousness, and serves a particular kind of politics that marginalises the welfare of older people. It was eight angry tweets (@GerontologyUK) before breakfast, but then I couldn’t move for hearing the story repeated everywhere, in the same language, and it was repeated again today.
In our research on the ‘Behind Closed Doors‘ project, we found many older people are happy to downsize, sometimes repeatedly, but its a highly complex human and social issue. It’s not an intergenerational war. It’s a highly complex mix of geography, family, health, emotions and housing markets. And it’s not about age. If you want to redistribute from rich to poor there are better ways to do it. Inheritance tax, for example. Funnily enough, rich and poor weren’t mentioned. Nor any concept of appropriate lifetime housing, nor any notion that many people don’t want to leave homes and communities, and even if they would like to move into a more modern, easy to keep house, finding one that doesn’t disrupt all their social networks is nigh on impossible. Our current research on Grandparenting in Europe is highlighting the absolutely critical role that grandparents have to play in caring for grandchildren (errrr, often in their *houses*), often enabling the intermediate generation to participate in the labour market. Research over decades has now shown that financial transfers are mostly *down* the generations not up, and of course this is even more accentuated with inheritance. To adopt the pithy summary of my colleague @lynnelqr, ‘framing current housing and socio-economic problems in simplistic terms of old-versus-young is naive, dangerous and politically convenient’, and she also points out the highly selective use of aggregate statistics in the report.
Ageing Issues 
Well, that’s all tremendously sound, and skewers very well the amalgam of basic cultural literacy and statistical corner-cutting the IF have gone in for. But I need to tread carefully here! I was actually at the Intergenerational Federation launch in the House of Commons yesterday. By their invitation, in response to my taking a diplomatic poke at a recent blog on their website. I hadn’t read the report – wasn’t even aware they were launching it – and had turned up partly to open up negotiation about future debates between them and us as gerontologists. (And this isn’t new – Paul Higgs has already been involved in a debate with Angus Hanton, chaired by John Macnicol at the LSE.) I think there’s got to be some engagement for four reasons: the material circumstances of young people across Europe; the level of anger you see among (mostly) younger commentators in the comment threads (which I read as an emerging cultural phenomenon and not as a media construction); the recent failure (with the demise of BGOP) of social democratic proposals for older people’s representation in political/public life; the fact that cross-generational engagement of any sort will require us to live with political conflict (goodwill encounters won;t be enough). We can’t afford as gerontologists to turn our backs – we have to help examine what a long life is going to mean in the future. The political thrust of the IF (sort of utilitarian, Fabian, and environmentalist – just check the rage against them in today’s Daily Mail) and the moral questions they ask (about the historical advantages experienced by some at least among my cohort, including me) mean they will be unsettling opponents, however badly they’ve shot themselves in the foot this time. If things turn really nasty (which I admit is by no means certain) they are more likely to emerge as allies than enemies. Getting a working dialogue will require what Biggs and Lowenstein have been calling generational intelligence and some very uncomfortable conversations and discomforting trails, with very peculiar shifts of direction between left and right cropping up all the time. Ironically, the IF launch, inevitably graced by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, was a distinctly 50+ event with several people who I’d guess were in their eighties. I was reminded of Peter Laslett’s angry contempt for his contemporaries’ lack of political engagement with the greater good at times!
LikeLike
Should have been cultural illiteracy, of course!
LikeLike
Well John, I think it’s tricky. By engaging in the debate, we allow them to set the terms of the debate. And those who control the language have enormous power over the way the issues are framed and how they play out ultimately in culture and policy. Which partly accounts for my irritation at the amount of (continuing) airtime that this report has had.
But, as in opening sentence, it’s tricky. If we don’t engage, perhaps we simply lose. I feel this somewhat with Willett’s book. You talk about the views of the “young”. When I used to have groups of young students, I would ask them to tell the class about an older person they knew. The stories were full of love and respect, whether it was grandparent or landlady or shopkeeper. Engaging politically with people who engage in aggressive polemical tirades stereotyping a group by virtue of a characteristic they have no control over is tiring and depressing.
LikeLike
The strirring up on intergenerational conflict is the issue I profiled on page one of the last (October) issue of Generations Review. I remain keen to get the views of members about how BSG can best confront and challenge this pernincious trend
LikeLike
I think one way is by first understanding and then exposing it for what it is, with research based evidence. I’ve just returned from San Diego, Gerontological Society of America Annual meeting, where various British Gerontologists: Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard, John Macnicol, and Lynne Livsey and myself all presented papers on how this debate is playing out and being used in the UK. Interestingly, the American academics felt that it had had its day in the States and was no longer a main feature of the rhetoric or politics of ‘now’ even in the recent election. That is not to say that social security (USA state pension) is not viewed as under threat, but that intergenerational warfare is not being invoked as a political discourse to justify those welfare cuts. Our Irish colleagues (who also ran a symposium on this issue) felt that the issue was not playing out this way in Ireland either. We need to understand what it is about the British context that is both fuel and oxygen to this debate, which will enable us to mount to necessary counter discourse.
LikeLike
This is yet another example of ‘blame the victims’ and ‘shift responsibility on to the individuals not governments’. People who are today’s older generations (let’s say, 60+) did start their careers in more prosperous times (though they have also weathered some bad times). If they are homeowners, they have also experienced house price inflation in the UK. It is also true that opportunities for young people nowadays are fewer than they were say in the 60s and 70s. This can hardly be said to be the fault of today’s 60+ generations. And who decided to increase university tuition fees to their current impossible levels? Not older individuals, but the present UK government whose leader is aged 46!
Instead of fanning the flames of an intergenerational conflict, why don’t these commentators come up with ideas about how individual multi-generational families can help each other? For example, instead of accusing us of ‘hoarding housing’, why not develop some practical ideas about how parents can help their children get homes of their own? If downsizing is ‘stagnating’, as they claim, hasn’t this got something to do with the dearth of mortgages? Who is pressurising mortgage lenders to come up with products where older generations can help their children (or grandchildren)? If my 28 year old son can pay £600 a month for rent, why can’t he pay £600 a month towards a mortgage? At say 4% interest, £600 a month could pay a mortgage of up to £180,000, and I could help towards a deposit. But because of current lending criteria, even with my help he won’t be allowed to borrow enough, on his salary, to buy a home in or near London, where he works.
The ‘IF Index’ takes the following indicators: “housing, government debt, the pensions burden, the environment”. I don’t doubt their figures. What I object to is the tone in which they couch their report, and indeed their whole website. In what way have I, aged 60+, personally created these problems? Of course I haven’t. I and my generation have done our best to create wealth during our working lifetimes, not only for our own (and our families’) security but also for our employers and the country. Successive governments have overlooked the existence of the ‘baby boomers’ and now behave as if we were literally ‘born yesterday’. Well hello, I’ve been here for over 60 years, and you’ve only just noticed. Where was the advance planning to cope with the ‘population timebomb’?
As individuals we can all try our best to ensure that we and our descendants are provided for. It would be great if these commentators could: stop using the language of blame, and start making constructive suggestions as to what older individuals could further do; pressurise the government to enable older people to help their children and grandchildren without penalty; and urge mortgage lenders, and the relevant regulators, to relax lending criteria enough so that the average working person can afford to buy themselves a home.
LikeLike
The UK experience may not be the US experience, but I think it shares many similiarities, as western allies during the last century. I remember JFK’s America. A nation of 180Million ponied up $100B in federal spending. That America paid for SS. That America built IKE’s interstates. That America led the world to the moon. That America righted old civil rights wrongs. But most importantly that America sent the graduating class of 1962 into economies of opportunity, and we were inspired and proud by our government… before Vietnam, LBJ, Nixon, and the 50 years of freak show that has ensued since. When we now ask the graduating class of 2012 about the economies they are entering, or what their government does that inspires them, they stare blankly or laugh, if they can. (And yet, poor things, most of them are begging for yet more not knowing any different.) They know our nation is fouled up but are unclear why. And yet, it was the generations who came before who tolerated what its government did, who raised and educated the class of 2012 and delivered them to these economies, so where does the blame lie for the current mess? In America, the perps are long dead, and all that remains is the last fleeced generation and a pile of unpaid bills — ironically after a long term period of demographic surplus subsidy. Well, all those extra long fleeced Boomers are just leaving the peak of their earnings and taxpaying years, and will simply represent the vehicle by which earlier generations bled the future dry, dumping them into their old age having labored under an extra 10% payroll tax their whole lives(and thus less able to plan for their own pension needs; our government forcefully took that over on their behalf…and immediately spent that surcharge surplus decades ago. The government has been trying to make up for this borrowing from the future by accelerating the borrowing from the future, and that can only make the inevitable worse. We could adjust our national pension programs/SS to be defined contribution instead of defined benefit; that would define intergenerational fairness, and allow SS to function forever. But in the US, the hidden borrowing(SS is the number one treasury debt holder)left a huge hole to fill. A practical impact is that as Boomers retire, far more of them will be sharing multi-family.extended family arrangements if they can, or if not, simply committing suicide. But the solution can’t be “hose over our children and the future generations even more.” We should be thankful that the graduating class of 2012 can only read about the 60s. If they actually understood the nature of those times, they would hunt down and hang us all for delivering them into this mess, and rightfully so.
LikeLike
Pingback: Pensions and the triple lock – some context for the debate | Ageing Issues