Critical Perspectives on Aging

The Political and Moral Economy of Growing Old

Meredith Minkler, Carroll Estes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351868426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

This unique volume brings together 20 critical essays on aging within the context of the broad social, political, and economic factors that help shape and determine the realities of growing old. Rather than viewing aging in isolation, it explores the social creation of old age dependency and the profound influence of race, gender, and social class on what it means to grow old. It looks too at such topics as the "biomedicalization" of aging; the role of business and the media in changing societal images of the old; the fact and fiction behind "senior power"; the multibillion dollar nursing home industry; and the role of advanced capitalist nations in creating economic dependency among elders in the Third World.

PART I. INTRODUCTION

The introductory section of this book attempts a two-fold objective. First, it provides the reader with a detailed introduction to the book’s primary theoretical framework, the political economy of aging. Second, it introduces the concept of moral economy and suggests how incorporation of the latter may enrich political economy analyses and lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of aging and old age.

In Chapter 2, Estes presents the political economy of aging as a broad interdisciplinary perspective which examines how economic, political, and sociocultural factors interact to shape and determine the meaning and experience of old age. In contrast to more traditional gerontological theories which focus primarily on the micro level, the political economy approach views aging in structural rather than individual terms. By broadening the unit of analysis, and clearly linking “private troubles” with “public issues,” such a perspective is seen to facilitate work in such key areas as: variations by class, gender, and aging in the “lived experience” of old age; the social construction and management of dependency by societal institutions; the role, function, and relations of the state and capital and how these affect the elderly; and the nature and consequences of our social policies for the old.

In addition to presenting a broad overview of the political economy of aging, Chapter 2 introduces three particularly promising areas of investigation and theorizing: the state, social class, and gender and aging. Each of these is seen as representing a major underdeveloped area within the political economy of aging, yet one central to a comprehensive understanding of both the experience of old age and the nature and significance of our health and social policies for the old.

While the political economy perspective has greatly enriched our understanding of the interconnections between the personal and the structural dimensions of aging, additional work is needed in surfacing and examining the often implicit norms, cultural beliefs and values that underlie societal policies and practices affecting the old.

In Chapter 3, moral economy is presented as a concept particularly useful in this regard. Defined as the shared assumptions underlying norms of reciprocity in which an economic system is grounded, moral economy is seen as helping explicate such phenomena as the evolution of retirement and social security systems, and recent debates over generational equity and the allocation of resources between age groups.

Chapter 3 describes the origins and contemporary usage of moral economy, and then demonstrates its relevance to a variety of policy and related issues within the political economy of aging.

While Chapter 3 presents a unitary notion of moral economy, an alternative perspective is presented in the final chapter in this section, which suggests that the norms implicit in moral economy vary with changes in the social context. Hendricks and Leedham thus present two ideal types of moral economy—those grounded in exchange value and in use value respectively—and argue that the latter may contribute to a conceptual framework for empowerment of the old. For unlike moral economies grounded in exchange value, which tend to discount contributions outside the labor market and hence devalue the old, moral economies based on use value are seen in Chapter 4, as attempting to structure a society that maximizes the possibilities of a decent life for all, regardless of age.

As noted in Chapter 1, scholars are just beginning to explore the relevance of moral economy for the study of aging. Alternative ways of viewing this concept are presented in this first section of the book so that readers can weigh for themselves the relative merits of different approaches in terms of their ability to enrich a broader political economy of aging framework.

CHAPTER 1 Overview

Meredith Minkler

In the past decade, increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding the ways in which the individual experience of aging emerges from the social, political, and economic structure of society. Research in this tradition is based on the premise that the phenomenon of aging cannot be understood in isolation from the larger sociostructural issues that shape and condition “the status, resources and health of the elderly, and even the trajectory of the aging process itself’ (Estes, Chapter 2, p. 21).

The political economy of aging represents a framework for inquiry based on this perspective, and committed to viewing the experience of aging in structural rather than individual terms (Chapter 2). This conceptual approach provides the primary theoretical framework for the critical examination of aging undertaken in this volume.

The purpose of the book is threefold. First, we attempt to apply a political economy of aging framework to the analysis of such diverse problems and issues as the politics of generational equity; the “biomedicalization” of old age; and the intersections of race, gender, and class that influence how aging is experienced. In this way, the book may be seen as complementing and extending our first volume, Readings in the Political Economy of Aging, by applying this conceptual approach to new areas of inquiry and facilitating an in-depth analysis of such previously introduced areas as the social creation of dependency, the multibillion dollar nursing home industry, and the economics of women and aging.

The book’s second goal lies in the area of theory building. As Estes notes in Chapter 2, “the central challenge of political economy is to move beyond mere critiques to develop an understanding of the character and significance of variations in the treatment of the aged and how these relate to policy, economy, and society” (p. 19). Toward this end, the book begins by looking at the state of the art of the political economy of aging as a theoretical approach, highlighting recent developments, and suggesting areas in which further refinement and expansion may be useful. Subsequent chapters build upon this base by providing new political economy analyses within the field of aging, which, we believe, are themselves contributory to the further conceptual development of the approach, as well as to its concrete application in gerontology.

The third purpose of the book is related closely to the second and involves the exploration of a particular avenue of theory development. We explore the concept and uses of moral economy as an under-utilized but fruitful perspective that can enrich the political economy of aging. Defined as the collectively shared moral assumptions underlying norms of reciprocity in which an economy is grounded (1), moral economy helps to surface and make explicit the often implicit cultural beliefs and values underlying societal policies and practices affecting the old. A moral economy perspective thus enables a deeper exploration of such issues as the evolution of pension systems, what a society perceives is “due” its older members, and current debates over the allocation of resources between generations.

Political and moral economy perspectives share some important similarities (see Chapter 3), among them the fact that both ground their analyses of topics such as aging in considerations of broader sociohistorical processes. While political economy focuses in particular on the social structural context of aging, moral economy is primarily concerned with the related context of popular consensus defining norms of reciprocity as these affect the old and resource allocation across age groups. The explicit integration of a moral economy perspective within a broad political economy of aging framework, therefore, makes possible a richer and more thorough analysis than either can achieve independently (2).

In Chapter 2 of this volume, Estes provides a comprehensive introduction to the political economy of aging, noting that the central task of this theoretical approach is “to locate society’s treatment of the aged in the context of the economy national and international, the state, the conditions of the labor market, and the class, sex, race, and age divisions in society” (p. 29). In contrast to psychological and other micro-level approaches that legitimate “incremental and individualistic approaches to public policy,” a political economy perspective suggests that issues such as the health and the dependency of the old are embedded within the structure of the labor market and other macro-level considerations. Estes sees special relevance in such an approach for an understanding of how the elderly have come to be “homogenized” and labelled a social problem; how the social status and treatment of the old and of subgroups within the elderly population have developed; and how resource allocation policies affecting the old have been set.

Special attention is devoted in Chapter 2 to three critical and as yet underdeveloped areas within the political economy of aging: the state, social class, and gender. Most scholars have tended to view the questions of aging as peripheral to state and class theorizing since the old are no longer in the “productive” or work sector of the economy. The fallacy of this oversight is demonstrated in Chapter 2, which places aging squarely within the domain of both state and class investigations. The power of the state in allocating resources and shaping and reproducing social patterns, and the continuing role of preretirement social class in shaping the experience of old age, underscore the importance of developing these key areas of study specifically with reference to aging.

Yet, as Estes suggests, “theories of the state and class that do not explicitly and adequately address the subordination of women and the ‘privileging of men’ fail as comprehensive frameworks for understanding social phenomenon such as aging” (p. 27). Focus is therefore given to aging and gender both in Chapter 2 and throughout this volume, with gender, class, and racial/ethnic divisions in society examined in terms of how they influence and condition the experience of aging on both the macro-level and the individual or micro-level.

The multiperspectival nature of political economy, and its consequent ability to move across narrow disciplinary boundaries, enable it to integrate related conceptual approaches. In Chapter 3, Minkler and Cole propose one such integration, introducing the concept of moral economy and suggesting its usefulness as an adjunct to political economic analyses. As noted above, Thompson’s view of the moral economy as the shared assumptions underlying reciprocal relations (1) is employed in Chapter 3 and in several subsequent chapters. Following a consideration of the ambivalence surrounding moral questions that has tended to characterize the “Scientific Marxism” tradition in political economy (3), Chapter 3 makes a case for acknowledging the importance of exploring moral issues and introduces the notion of moral economy as an appropriate tool for analysis.

While Thompson (1) and others (4, 5) have argued that the concept of moral economy has relevance primarily to the study of premarket societies, Chapter 3 argues, with Kohli (Chapter 17), that this construction also holds considerable promise for enriching understanding of contemporary arenas of moral conflict, particularly in the area of aging. The creation and evolution of pensions systems, the reality versus the rhetoric of “generational equity,” and the recent “senior revolt” against the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act in the United States are among the topics introduced in Chapter 3 as meriting further analysis within a framework combining political and moral economy. Each of these topics is explored further in the book through such a joint political and moral economy perspective.

While Minkler and Cole (Chapter 3) employ a unitary conceptualization of moral economy, an alternative perspective is offered by Hendricks and Leedham (Chapter 4). These analysts suggest that because the norms implicit in moral economy vary with changing cultural and social contexts, several forms of moral economy may exist side by side in highly fragmented societies, competing for hegemony. Two “ideal types” of moral economy are proposed in this chapter. Moral economi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgement
• Acknowledgment of Sources
• Introduction: The Unique Contributions of This Volume
• Contents
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: New Images of the Old and the Debate over Resource Allocation
• Part III: Apocalyptic Demography and the Biomedicalization of Aging
• Part IV: Critical Perspectives on Market Economy Health Care
• Part V: Race, Class, Gender, and Aging
• Part VI: Retirement, Social Security, and Economic Dependency
• Part VII: Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Contributors
• Index