The Aging of the World in a Neoliberal Epoch

The panic over aging populations that has been with us since today's sixtysomething was a twentysomething, of course, began with the neoliberal turn; and would seem to have reflected less any actual imminence of crisis than neoliberal hostility to the welfare state, and the readiness of neoliberals to lay hold of any club that they could use to attack it. Still, there is no question that, in line with the neoliberals' continued stranglehold on the discourse the insistence never went away, the more in as the cost of the health care system that was such a big part of the social safety net and especially its usage by the aged, just kept rising. The result is that even those unsympathetic to the neoliberals' Agenda had reason to worry that, especially with the system structured as it now was, the continued aging of the population (and the signs all pointed that way) would eventually mean challenges to that social safety net's viability that society would have to meet one way or the other in a way unlikely to be mere "business as usual."

Of course, where that was concerned those who shrank from more than "business as usual," especially in circumstances where the neoliberals so consistently had the upper hand, had some room to hope that "something would come along" to simplify the problem--perhaps enough so that the issue might be pragmatically negotiated without too much "drama." It seemed possible to them that the fertility rates, which of course have ups and downs across any significant length of time, would at some point recover to a more acceptable level, at least for a while, slowing the accumulation of fiscal or economic stress to the point of making significant reforms unavoidable that much longer. Possible that medicine would achieve breakthroughs that would extend the years of health and life and let the elderly work longer while needing less support and care from the rest of society. Possible that in the absence of that, or on top of it, productivity would rise dramatically, and the economy grow dramatically, making such burdens more affordable (by way of, for example, extensive robotization). Alas, none of this actually happened, birth rates staying down, as contrary to the stupid hype in the area, decade after decade went by without any grand breakthroughs in the relevant areas of medicine--or any other technological area--in an era of technological hype rather than technological progress, one reflection of which was that if the prevailing economic model enabled the rich to amass vast paper fortunes growth was on the whole anemic, just as skeptics of the model that elites have so relentlessly supported knew it would be. Indeed, things were so disappointing that way that even as the neoliberals steadily eroded the social safety net, and that quite enough to cause society's most vulnerable a great deal of pain, those stubbornly low fertility rates and that painfully slow economic growth (and of course, the absolute ruling out of any change of the tax code to the disadvantage of the privileged) sufficed to mean that the social safety nets' burden on the budget and the economy kept catching up with them as their publics only got older. (In North America and Europe the Total Fertility Rate, still a near replacement level of 1.9 in 1980, fell to 1.7 in 2010--and 1.47 in 2023--which fact helped raise the median age from 30.8 to 38.4 over 1980-2010, and then to 40.9 by 2023, and the proportion of the population over the age of 65, not much above a tenth here in 1980, was more like a fifth of it in 2023, with, again, every sign pointing to things only continuing in that direction.)

The result, as has so often been the case in this period, has been that rather than the problem being simplified it has been set before the public more starkly, with the situation in France exemplary. There the country's President provoked a constitutional crisis and nationwide protest with a neoliberal offensive whose most controversial feature was its raising the retirement age. He got his way in that fight, but like so much else to which he has been given, has also fed into a crisis of French democracy that has only worsened amid calls for elections that showed the center it cannot hold as Prime Ministers came and went in a manner more evocative of the tragic history of the Third Republic rather than what was hoped for from the Fifth; what pass for defenders of the social and economic rights of working people inspiring very little confidence indeed in said working people that they can offer any alternative; and those to the right of a center that has from the first been right-wing in all but name display every expectation that like their predecessors at Vichy, rise to power very, very soon.