It’s a Golden Age for the Golden Years

A recent spate of news coverage has fueled a growing narrative of hardship among seniors. Familial estrangement, in which adult children cease contact with their aging parents, has drawn headlines. A tearful Florida grandmother attracted attention for publicly imploring the government to step in after her adult daughter kept her from seeing her grandson for weeks over a babysitting dispute. Other headlines emphasize allegedly rising rates of poverty among older Americans.

One might get the impression that things have never been worse for the elderly. But older adults once faced far more familial mistreatment and financial hardship. In fact, it’s arguable that today represents something of a golden age for the golden years, especially in the United States.

First, consider the financials. The Baby Boomers are entering their later years with more wealth than any previous generation in U.S. history, by trillions of dollars. More than 70 percent of the country’s wealth is held by Americans aged 55 or older.

The richest generation of retirees to ever live is seeing its finances further boosted through government spending. Amazingly, a senior household can take in almost $120,000 a year from Social Security, even as the program has faced a shortfall since 2010 and become unsustainable. Many states don’t tax Social Security payments, allowing seniors to keep even more of that income.

The government’s tax-and-transfer system favors older Americans to such an extent that any honest assessment must admit, as John Puri evocatively wrote for National Review, that “seniors are devouring the federal budget.” Many states and jurisdictions also favor seniors; in Texas, for example, most senior citizens pay lowered property taxes. Washington, D.C., also offers property-tax relief to seniors.

This financial situation becomes rosier still when one considers that Medicare Advantage benefits can now cover golf clubs and ski resort passes, as well as other perks. Some have labeled this phenomenon of taxpayer-subsidized retirements “total boomer luxury communism.”

For centuries, the last years of life were practically synonymous with poverty. Social Security was first enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to provide “some measure of protection to the average citizen [. . .] against poverty-ridden old age.” The vast majority of people once worked until they became bedridden or died, owing to the extreme penury of the past. Today, the extraordinarily — indeed, unsustainably — high level of social spending on the elderly reflects how deeply modern societies value their lives.

As the historian Pat Thane notes in A History of Old Age, “Insofar as old age is thought to have a history, it is presented as a story of decline. . . . [In the past, the elderly] were valued, respected, cherished and supported by their families as, it is said, they are not today.” Yet preindustrial people were less likely than modern people to have surviving children to care for them in old age. According to Thane, in the 18th century, only one-third of Europeans had a surviving child at age 60, partly because high childhood mortality often left parents outliving their children. Today, by contrast, more than 83 percent of Americans age 55 and older have living adult children.

And despite what the headlines suggest, there is no evidence those adult children are cutting off their parents in a new “epidemic” of estrangement: The truth is that “no study has tracked estrangement rates over time, and nothing in the existing data shows that it is skyrocketing,” as Rin Reczek, a sociologist who studies estrangement, notes.

Moreover, lonely last years are hardly unique to the modern world. In preindustrial England, only about one in 20 households were multigenerational, contrary to the romantic idea that extended, support-providing families were the norm in the past. Elderly people without surviving children often ended up in overcrowded, unsanitary poorhouses and hospitals. Many died alone.

Far from enjoying social respect, older adults have long faced prejudice. Historian Lynn A. Botelho claims, “The 17th-century stage, elite literature and the sayings of peasants belittled and mocked the old in ways that few groups are targeted today.” In 16th-century Germany, a popular description of the stages of life called a 90-year-old man “the scorn of children.” The ancient Greek satirist Lucian, in his work On Grief, opines, with dark humor, that an upside of a man’s untimely death is that “by dying young, he will not be scorned in old age.”

Today, later life is often when people are wealthiest, have the most free time, and can enjoy watching their grandchildren grow. For all the talk of a crisis facing the elderly, while the golden years may not be perfect, by almost any historical measure they have never been more golden.