The Aging in American Society

Abstract

American society is by no means so new that it has not yet experienced the problem of adjustment to the full cycle of the relations among the generations.' There is, however, a sense in which the problem of the status of the oldest age groups has been coming to be increasingly salient in recent times. For one thing, the long history of expansion has-in conjunction with a system of values which has stressed activism-been one in which an accent on youth has been natural. Not only have we expanded territorially and industrially, but we have had a rapidly increasing population, both by natural increase and by immigration. Therefore, relatively speaking, through most of our history we have had an abnormally low proportion of older people in the population. Several processes of change have combined to alter this emphasis. The most obvious is the demographic change which has resulted in a large increase in the proportion of older persons in the population. For example, the proportion over 65 will have risen from 4.1 per cent in i900 to about double that-namely, 8.2 per cent in i95o-and the trend is still upward. Not only has the proportion of older people greatly increased, but their average state of health has greatly improved. The increase in the proportion of the old is all the more important because of the baby boom of the last twenty years. Hence the fact that we have a population which bulges at both ends of the life cycle while, for the time being, it is relatively thin in the middle years. A second major set of changes concerns certain aspects of the structure of the society on levels affecting most directly the positions of individuals. The two most fundamental foci in this respect are the household and occupational work. The tendency in both respects has been towards progressively increasing differentiation, though the two cases are very different. In the case of the household, the central trend has been that of the isolation of the nuclear family. More and more, the typical household has come to consist in a married couple and their own children. In particular, two categories of * A.B. I924, Amherst College; studied at London School of Economics, 1924-25; Ph.D. I927, Heidelberg University. Professor of Sociology, Harvard University. Chairman, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1946-56. Author, THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION (2d ed. 1949); THE SOCIAL SYSTEM, ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY (rev. ed. I958); STRUCTURE AND PROCESS IN MODERN SOCIETIES (I960); co-author, [with Robert F. Bales & Edward A. Shils] WORKING PAPERS IN THE THEORY OF ACTION (I953); [with Robert F. Bales] FAMILY SOCIALIZATION AND INTERACTION PROCESS (1955); [with Neil J. Smelser] ECONOMY AND SOCIETY (1956); editor, [with Edward A. Shils] TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF ACTION (195I); [with Edward A. Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele & Jesse R. Pitts] THEORIES OF SOCIETY (I96I); translator, MAX WEBER, THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM (1956), and THE THEORY OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION (ist Am. ed. 1947). 1 Cf. Talmon, Aging in Israel-A Planned Society, 67 AM. J. SOCIOLOGY 284 (196I), for an interesting discussion of the impact of this problem on the Kibbutzim in Israel.