A report published on 19 February 2025 by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, entitled ‘The Rights of Older People’, argues that ageism is ‘widespread and culturally embedded in the UK’, and ‘is associated with … individual and societal harms’. The report highlights the use of ‘catastrophe language’ to describe how older people are perceived as a ‘burden’ on resources as the share of older people in the population increases through falling fertility and mortality rates. The owner of social media website X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, has deployed such language of late, posting in October 2024: ‘Birth rates continue to plummet. Population collapse is coming’. He has also asserted: ‘[The real] issue will [be] an aging & declining population by 2050’, along with the debunked claim that these factors posed ‘a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming’.
With a report from the 2021 census noting that the share of those aged 65 years and over surpassed those aged under 15 years in England and Wales, the media’s depiction of the older population as ‘an economic time-bomb ticking away under the health and welfare system’ will resonate with many. However, rather than expressing newborn anxieties to unprecedented demographic changes, Musk and the media are merely echoing the language of the past. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the first demographic transition took hold, people became increasingly concerned with falling birth rates and the steadily rising ageing population. The idea of older people as a group that lacks the capacity to contribute to our society and is thus a drain on the public purse is nothing new. These perspectives have been shaped by our history, and governments, economists, and policy makers should seek new approaches that can redress our views on old age as a ‘problem’.
Social historian Pat Thane has shown how population projections made throughout the twentieth century, while originally convincing to those at the time, are now laughable. The sensationally titled The Menace of Underpopulation, published in 1935 by Enid Charles, documents how falling fertility and mortality would reduce the population of Great Britain to 4 million by 2035. Contrastingly, the Office for National Statistics has recently reported a prediction of 72.5 million by 2032. However, with no ability to time travel, in the 1930s and 1940s economists and intellectual thinkers could only express apprehension towards Great Britain’s falling birth rate, as a shrinking, economically active younger population would mean reduced tax revenues, with a ‘less flexible, mobile and productive’ older workforce taking its place.
The tendency to equate youth with vigour and dynamism, while linking old age with decline and dependency, has long been ingrained in the British psyche. In the 1893 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour, Cecil M. Chapman, an assistant commissioner of the Buntingford Poor Law Union, Hertfordshire, commented on a ‘brain-drain’ of young agricultural workers: ‘The young men of intelligence have left the country, and nothing but oldish men, or men hampered by their circumstances, are left behind’. A poem by John Manners, ‘England’s Trust’ (1841), charts independence to dependence over one’s lifetime: ‘He dies, and leaves his sons their heritage / Work for their prime, the workhouse for their age’. In fact, it was through the New Poor Law of 1834 and its workhouses that older people were officially recognised as a collective in need. The ’able-bodied’, or what we would now call the ‘working-age’ population, were treated less generously for poor relief than the ‘not-able-bodied’. The latter group primarily comprised the ‘aged and infirm’, and represented between 68-69 per cent of all recorded relief applicants between the period 1900-1902.
Although the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 lifted many older people out of poverty, the Act may have further debased the status of older people by continuing the association between old age and welfare. When we use interchangeable terms for older people, such as the ‘old age pensioner’ or ‘OAP’, we unknowingly echo the language of our Victorian ancestors. Similarly, those who we would now group as ‘working-age’ were termed by the Victorians as ‘able-bodied’ in their undertaking of labour. Lacking these qualities, ‘the aged’ were intertwined with ‘the infirm’, and were perceived as expendable entities reliant upon poor relief and later, old age pensions. In fact, this language persists today through the Old Age Dependency Ratio (OADR) as an indicator of economic development, by measuring the numbers of older people per 100 of those who we deem likely working.
It is historical data, rather than historical language, which should shape our perceptions of how diverse and dynamic older populations can be. The census enumerators’ books of 1851 and 1891 shows that between 76-80 per cent of men and 18-25 per cent of women aged 60 years and over were actively recorded in employment. Then and now, older people have always contributed to our economy. Those aged 65 years and over were estimated to have generated £160 billion in 2016-2017. Between 1851-1911, a tiny proportion aged 60 years and over were recorded in workhouses; in fact, they were more likely to co-reside with their grandchildren. Recently, the role of grandparents as carers for their grandchildren is valued at £7.7 billion, relieving the middle generation of parents from the pressures of giving up work for childcare. History reminds us of the invaluable benefits an older population has on our society.
We need to create a new language accounting for our growing ageing population. Too often, the terminology is used from a time when the composition of the older population was smaller than in the present day. Only by stressing the capacity of older people to work and to care, rather than be cared for, can we break loose from the historical categorization of old age as a ‘social problem’, and promote the idea of old age in many cases as a period of ‘productivity’. We should only base our judgements on older people through reliable and robust data, and history teaches us that Elon Musk’s alarms about future demographic trends may be overstated. Instead of population catastrophe, we should think about greater life expectancy, improved health, and the many opportunities for older people to enrich our society. Now is the time to consign our disparaging attitudes of older people to history.
