The Impact of Poverty on Older Persons

Abstract

is considerable evidence that in the past, in many societies around the world, older persons had a special role and were accorded prestige for their wisdom and experience. As the historian David Hackett Fischer (1977) points out in Growing Old in America, for many centuries Western society remained agrarian in its economy, extended in its family and rural in its residence. Within the extended family, its elderly members were honored and exercised power; within the economy, they controlled the land. A traditional culture endowed them with authority. In recent times, the status of older persons was transformed: they lived longer and so were more numerous. The agricultural society gave way to an industrial one. This in turn created pressure for introducing the concept of retirement, which, once in place, forced older persons out of valued and regarded roles, curtailing their income and lowering their status. More recently, the expansion of physical and social mobility has caused an even greater erosion of traditional patterns by factors such as smaller family size, the movement of younger family members away from their homes of origin - often to great distances - and the increasing participation of women in the labor force. In short, the tables turned demographically. From a time when youth was economically dependent on age, age often became dependent on the younger generation. The issue of financial insecurity arose when work was no longer available. As early as 1903, there were efforts in the United States to develop old-age pensions because, to quote Edward Everett Hale in an article in Cosmopolitan magazine in that year, There is now no place in our working order for old men (E. E. Hale, as cited in Fischer, 1977, pp. 158-159). In 1910, the first serious attempt to describe the economic status of elderly people in Massachusetts found that nearly one out of four were on the dole (Squier, 1912). Moreover, the elderly at that time made up the large majority of residents in state pauper institutions: 60% in Ohio, 62% in Pennsylvania, 87% in Wisconsin, and 98% in Massachusetts (Epstein, 1922). At the turn of the 20th century, the problem of old age was primarily a problem of poverty. It was a problem that grew increasingly worse over the first decades of the 1900s, finally culminating in the enactment of the Social Security program. We now have a complex web of private pensions, personal savings, and Social Security that provides resources for those no longer in the labor force for whatever reason. And their condition has dramatically improved. However, though poverty diminished, it did not disappear. DEFINING POVERTY Poverty is more than a lack of financial resources; it is a serious threat to health, well-being, and dignity. Poverty isolates and marginalizes. While the empowerment of older persons in general has been affected by the societal changes mentioned earlier, for those living in poverty, it can present an impenetrable barrier to the ability to participate fully in society. is no question but that the United States has made tremendous strides in reducing poverty at older ages over the past several decades. A half century ago, 35.2% of those who were 65 and over had incomes below the poverty threshold. By 2006, the poverty rate for this age-group had fallen to 9.4%. Put another way, poverty among older Americans has fallen from 1 in 3 persons in 1960 to 1 in 10 today. This success cannot be denied. Unfortunately. however, this has been accompanied by a perception that, thanks to the success of programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which indeed have been instrumental in alleviating poverty among the elderly, older persons are receiving adequate assistance. As a result, in recent years the issue of elder poverty has become increasingly invisible despite the fact that it has actually increased in many areas of the country. Possibly because of this widespread misperception, when a mayoral commission on economic opportunity was created in New York City in February 2007 to develop new ideas to address poverty among the city's youth and working families, elder poverty was not included. …