250 RüdigerKunow
animated by pithy slogans about "golden ponders" spending "our"
money are not exclusively, perhaps not even primarily, about fiscal
issues but rather about the proper "place" for the elderly in the United
States. Surveying this debate so far makes it highly probable that the
preferred place for the elderly will in the near future not be the public
service sector but the market in which they are supposed to function as
consumers, especially financially well-endowed consumers (Gullette,
Agewise8-15;Magnus113-53).
IntheUnitedStates,GreatBritain,andmanyothernationsstates,the
civic identity of later life has become increasingly precarious: "If
welfare and social security provision created... a new identity for old
age,itispreciselythetransformationoftheseinstitutionsthathasposed
a major challenge to the position of old people" (Estes and Phillipson
281). Like the earlier pathologization of "age" in the sciences, its more
recent pathologization in the context of governance is based on a
perception of late life as deviation from a norm, this time the norm of
the self-made, self-sufficient individual: "God helps those that help
themselves"(asBenjaminFranklinfamouslyputit).Andthistheelderly
did, or had to do. Many pension plans traditionally offered and
underwritten by corporations have been replaced by investment-based
individual retirement accounts (the 401Ks)—many of which lost their
valueinthe2008financialcrisis(Hardin110-14).
Allthisdidnottempertheongoingsocialpathologizationoflatelife.
Amilestoneinthisdevelopmentwassetbythe1994WorldBankpaper
AvertingtheOldAgeCrisis(supplemented in 2005 with a statement on
"Old Age Income Support in the Twenty-First Century"). Here, the
argumentthat"[aged] bodies givesubstanceto citizenship" (Beasly and
Bacchi 337) is reversed: aged bodies are seen as depleting citizenship
(and, by extension, the rest of the population) of its substance, even its
feasibility. In the wor(l)ds of the World Bank, the growing numbers of
olderpeopleinthewakeofthelongevityrevolutionarea"pressureona
country'sresourcesandgovernmentbudgets[which]hinder[s]economic
growth" (World Bank xiii). This set the tone for many "expert"
pronouncements like those of former Chairman of the Institute for
International Economics and a Trustee of the Committee for Economic
Development, Peter G. Peterson (quoted below). In public debate, not
only in the United States, but most intensely there, the costs of health
care for the elderly and the alleged "Social Security Crisis" became a