Here Are 50 Questions About Aging, the Welfare State, Japan, and an Irreversible Future (Part 2) | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑭

An aging society is coming. What does it mean to face it squarely, and how do we do that?

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been swayed by large questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the voices of intellectuals have gone missing, or been drowned in noise, which only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to show itself. In any era, clear thinking is scarce, and people with insight are our best guarantee of seeing the road ahead.

So in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" we want to introduce as wide a range as we can of books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, our editors have read every book that came within our view, and they introduce each one to readers in good faith.

We also had help from contributing writers, who catch new currents first and see further than we do. Our thanks to them.

This is the tenth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it continues the discussion of social aging and population. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is an editor at QDaily.

In the first part, we looked at aging and population in Japan and other countries, and argued that societies age not mainly because people live longer, but because fewer babies are born.

As infant mortality fell and children's lives became safe, the emotional investment of something like a mother's love was no longer likely to be lost to accident, so a family no longer needed more children to hedge the risk. Love for children became more concentrated; parents cannot, or will not, spread it over more offspring, and that too lowers the wish to have them. Every culture, religion and ethnic group in the world faces the same thing: poverty is not the reason people are cautious about childbearing or have fewer children. What raises the birth rate is a household's or a clan's need for labor — more family members bringing money in.

That raises a series of questions. Women freed from housework: taking a job also cuts the chances to have children. Education: fewer children means more schooling, and more schooling means schooling that takes longer. And, of course, the most important question of all — welfare.

We'll take them one at a time.

Changes in family structure, in how households earn, and the weight put on education... all of them explain today's predicament

24.

Why did the baby boom stop? What was its most direct result?

In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that married couples had the right to control their own childbearing, on the ground that personal privacy is protected by the Constitution — though in 26 states, millions of unmarried women were still denied the right to use the birth control pill. Not until 1972 did the Supreme Court establish in law that every citizen could control their own childbearing, married or not. The pill was an important factor in ending the 1947-1964 baby boom, and it also let women control how many children they had and when, so that they could enter the labor market. Women's labor force participation grew fastest in the years 1965-1985, shortly after the pill came into wide use in the early 1960s.

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth

25.

Tim Harford, known for the Undercover Economist books, accepts the same reality. Women's liberation is likewise irreversible in the course of human civilization: more education, more employment, more energy released from the household. One result is a falling birth rate and a changing population structure.

A few years ago an economist named Amalia Miller used a range of clever statistical methods to show that if a woman in her 20s delays having a child by one year, her lifetime earnings rise by 10 percentage points — a huge advantage for women who finish their education and secure a job before having children. But women in the 1970s did not need to read Amalia Miller's research: they already knew it was true. As the pill spread, they enrolled in long professional courses in numbers beyond anything imagined.

Tim Harford, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

26.

That more women working means fewer births is a well-known fact. But on the question of whether to pin the larger predicament of aging on women's liberation, political correctness has left almost no one willing to say so out loud. What can usually be said is, first, that the correlation is real enough, and second, as we have argued all along, that in the face of an irreversible process of civilization, what we should be thinking about is how to deal with the fact as it stands, not how to restore women to their old reproductive role.

That is also why we dislike Liang Jianzhang's radical proposals.

Economic pressure and career ambition leave women too breathless to have as many children as they might want. Even so, we should not imagine that Spanish women — or the immigrant women who come to Spain, who soon discover that they too cannot have children as easily as they had hoped, just like Spanish women — will give up their independence and go back to the traditional female role. Women, especially women with fewer children, are the backbone of Spain's workforce today, and as the country ages, society as a whole needs even more women at work. In 2008, seven out of every ten childless working-age women had jobs. About half of mothers with one or two children had jobs. But Delgado found that going from two children to three makes a large difference: once a Spanish woman has three children, balancing work and family becomes impossible. Among Spanish mothers of three, only four in a thousand have jobs.

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

27.

One more point. Women's liberation, longer years in school and later marriage have pushed back the age at which both men and women have children. That is a population question too.

Population growth depends not only on how many children people have but also on when they have them, a point that even people who care about population sometimes miss. Because each generation tends to grow at a certain rate, stretching the gap between generations lowers the annual growth rate of the population. We could just as well change the slogan on the banner from "Have only two" to "Start at thirty."

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

28.

As more women went to work, urban employment in the United States changed too: services created more jobs, manufacturing fewer. That is a large question of its own, and outside the scope of this piece. Here we look only at what it does to the public mood.

As manufacturing work shrank, the United States also saw, for the first time, women workers outnumber men. The reversal came mainly from two trends: women's labor force participation rose while men's fell. Women better suit the needs of a service economy, including health care, an industry that has also grown as the elderly population grows.

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

29.

Fragile men! In a book like Hillbilly Elegy you can see the delicate relationship between men's frustration at losing work and women's gains in the job market. Deindustrialization is common in late-developing countries and economies: the old chain that produced blue-collar workers and, out of them, a middle class, snaps, and in that process it is more often men who play the loser. It is also why the decline of big employers like Toyota worries Japanese scholars, as we said earlier about Japan.

In the long run, though, car and steel production cannot be expected to rebuild the local landscape of economic power. Employment changes around Weirton and downriver Detroit confirm the national trend toward service jobs and a female workforce, especially in health care, schools and retail. Changes across generations and households reflect these shifts. In the family of one McLouth steelworker, for example, the men moved downward over three generations. The husband, in his 40s, was a union activist, and his father had been a skilled worker too; the son was a young steelworker laid off in 1980. But the wife had an administrative job in the public sector, and the daughter worked at a nearby retail store. This is a typical household at McLouth and at many other manufacturing companies: concessions on wages and benefits, and layoffs, sent more wives and daughters into the workforce. More kinds of jobs will be created in the future landscape of deindustrialization.

Sharon Zukin (the Taiwan edition transliterates her name as Xuelun Zhujin), Landscapes of Power

30.

A thornier question still is education. Japan is thought to have gained little from the wave of educational industrialization sweeping the world, and The Credential Society argues that the United States did not benefit from that upgrading either. Turning education into a commodity works like any other self-expanding industry in a commercial society: seize on a need, make yourself irreplaceable, manufacture more need, refine and differentiate, upgrade the need... All those dazzling messages — "you must have an XX education," "you must hold an XX degree" — belong to the same forced feeding of consumer ideas as "A Diamond Is Forever."

Most developed countries have of course now raised the retirement age. Perhaps the most puzzling thing is that Europe's policy of universal education has not made it easier for young people to find work. One line of criticism holds that most young Europeans have had too much education, which makes many workers too expensive, so European firms cannot offer them the jobs to match. On this argument, Europe has put too many resources into sending young people to higher education, paying for universities and other post-secondary schooling out of precious public funds. The argument goes on: education policy has delayed the point at which most people enter the labor market, so that even as natural lifespans lengthen, working lives are shortened by schooling. If people do not start work until they are nearly 30, then work flat out until nearly 60, then retire and live into their 80s or beyond, you can imagine how much pressure they are under to earn.

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

31.

The question worth thinking about here may be this: can the world really support so many people with a bachelor's degree or more? Even in the United States, the modern service economy does not support that many openings. Otherwise how did Donald Trump win the Rust Belt?

Another way to put it: does the world really allow so many cities to give up manufacturing and find a living, and a competitive edge, in modern services like finance?

Both questions connect to another classic and interesting one, the kind environmentalists ask all the time: can the world's resources support Chinese people living the way Americans do?

This is a digression, but it concerns China.

A family in Rwanda often has eight children; Italy's birth rate is low, and without immigrants Italy's population would shrink. So is the world's resource-management problem mainly caused by poor countries with high birth rates? Absolutely not. Population size is not the only thing that controls the rate of resource consumption. The rate of resource consumption is the product of two factors: a country's population multiplied by its per capita consumption of resources such as timber, oil or metals. Per capita resource consumption in Europe, the United States and other rich countries is 32 times that of poor countries. Italy's 60 million people already consume twice as much as the one billion people of Africa combined.

Jared Diamond, Why Some Countries Are Rich and Some Are Poor

There is no free lunch: a pension system is, at bottom, a demographic dividend

32.

Most of what feels self-evident in society today has a very short history. You can marvel at how brief modern civilized society is, or you can lament that most of our problems and predicaments are being met for the first time, which makes it hard to find answers by holding history up as a mirror.

Population problems — the dividend running out, too few workers, aging and the rest — also cannot be solved by borrowing another economy's answers, because every economy is at a different stage of development, under a different political system, with a different capacity to mobilize its people. Who could have guessed that China, on the strength of brute policy, would really have several hundred million fewer births in 30 years? Or that the only-child generation would not only carry its own heavy burden but also make the generations after it live with what its odd, selfish, self-centered character does to social structure and moral standards? No one should be expected to have a solution ready. What people usually come up with are idealized optimal answers, nine times out of ten built on some model. In real life the changes are far too tangled, and a model is in the end only a model.

To follow the earlier question: the division of labor lets a country like a Nordic state move its whole population into knowledge work easily enough, but in an economy as large as America's, shifting manufacturing elsewhere is bound to produce a middle-class crisis and a large population of newly poor whites.

In the same way, the Nordic countries can keep their welfare systems solvent through high taxes and high accumulation. But for countries whose timing was worse — that began copying the welfare state before they had accumulated enough to cover the huge spending to come; or whose population is complicated and whose tax base cannot carry a growing elderly population; or that, like China, grew old before growing rich; or again like China, where regional gaps are enormous and yet everything is highly centralized and unified...

The generation born in the postwar baby boom was the largest Europe had on record. Within a few years they would stop paying taxes into the treasury and start consuming large amounts of public spending instead. Some of it directly, by drawing state pensions; some of it indirectly, by increasing the demand for government-funded health care and social services, a pressure no smaller than the first. What is more, this generation had better living conditions than any before it, so it is almost certain that they would live longer. Given that, the cost of unemployment benefits would also keep rising; by 1980, unemployment insurance had become a major item in the budget calculations of every Western European government.

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

33.

Looking back now, Western countries made the middle class the foundation of the nation, and so changed the 19th-century idea of the working class and class struggle. Judged by half a century of postwar practice, it worked. The welfare society reshaped the way a middle class emerged from blue-collar workers, and at the same time the middle class and the welfare state fit together perfectly.

The genius of building the welfare state was that its main beneficiaries were the middle class (in the European sense, including professional and technical elites). It was the middle class's income that was suddenly released, because it now had access to free education and health care. And it was the middle class that gained real personal security through publicly provided insurance and pensions. In that sense the welfare state created the middle class, and the middle class defends the welfare state. Even Margaret Thatcher felt this when she began talking about privatizing health services and found that the loudest objections came from her own middle-class voters.

Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century

34.

But that partnership, each side propping up the other, has become hard to keep going.

The crisis of the welfare state is the third reason the EU's past achievements and promises cannot continue indefinitely. Western Europe's population is aging. Since the mid-1960s the general trend has been for families to raise fewer children, to the point that some countries' populations are falling rather than rising, most obviously Italy and Spain. In 1993, Spain's birth rate dropped to 1.1 per thousand, a historic low. Europeans now have to support a large and growing elderly population, and the burden falls on a shrinking number of young people, many of whom do not even have jobs. Designing so generous a system of social services rests on preconditions: that the economy keeps growing strongly, that the old, weak, sick and disabled are a relatively small share of the population, and that their social needs can be met by a large number of young workers. At present the system is under enormous strain.

Tony Judt, When the Facts Change

35.

Tom G. Palmer, a think-tank scholar wary of the welfare society, clearly does not share Tony Judt's yearning for a "social democracy of fear." He names the problem the welfare state faces a "tragedy" outright, and calls the welfare society a "Ponzi scheme." He is something of a cynic.

Governments have promised so many benefits to so many voters, all at one another's expense, that these systems cannot be sustained — and not one of the beneficiaries is willing to give up their own share. We could have done this in exchange for lower taxes, but we do not even have that choice. Governments can borrow money and push taxation back, to the far side of the next election, at which point they will promise still more, paid for by still more borrowing. Pension recipients demand higher state pension payments, and even believe this is merely repaying what they themselves paid in. These pensions are funded on a "pay-as-you-go" (PAYGO) basis, which means the taxes collected from today's workers are paid out to today's recipients. A state pension plan is built exactly like the classic "pyramid scheme," also known as a "Ponzi scheme" or a "chain letter," which needs the base of payers to expand without limit; when the base stops growing, the pyramid collapses. Governments can put off this doom by printing money or borrowing, but it is only a postponement, and each postponement makes things worse.

Tom G. Palmer, "The Tragedy of the Welfare State," collected in After the Welfare State

36.

Palmer also notes, in passing, the welfare state's other ills: "a cycle of mutual plunder that repeats itself, in which most of the winners become losers once a cycle is complete."

The farmer demands subsidies for his crops, at the expense of taxes paid by autoworkers; auto companies and autoworkers demand "protection" against cheaper imported cars, and bailouts for bankrupt firms. Trade restrictions raise the price of vehicles for farmers, and bailouts for auto companies raise the taxes farmers pay. For the sake of farmers' interests, autoworkers are plundered; and farmers are plundered for the sake of autoworkers' interests.

Tom G. Palmer, "The Tragedy of the Welfare State," collected in After the Welfare State

37.

A quick look back at the history of the welfare society is worth the trouble. The pension system came from Bismarck, designed at the start as a guard against socialism. But there is no denying that it rested on accumulated social wealth: compare the population structures of Germany and Britain at the moment it was born and you can dimly make out its designers' confidence that growth would continue.

The great transformation grew out of the pressure of socialist ideas, mainly through the efforts of reformers inside parliaments and Fabians outside them. The great transformation means liberalism turning into its own opposite. It appeared quietly in Germany in 1880, when Bismarck introduced old-age pensions and other social legislation, a move observers called "stealing the socialists' thunder." By the turn of the century, liberals widely recognized that in every respect — economic, social and political — the law had to provide help to the many people who could no longer support themselves: the old, the sick and the unemployed. Ten years into the new century, Lloyd George's budget set Britain on the road to the welfare state.

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

38.

America built its pension system with the New Deal after the Great Depression, out of both a fear that the United States might turn toward European Nazism or Soviet socialism and a Roosevelt-style design ideal: hold back the swollen financial capital of the years before the slump, and reach a more equal society through wider federal power and high taxes.

The first step of the pension revolution came in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act, which provided a nationwide pension system. All workers paid insurance premiums during their working years, and in return they were entitled to Social Security pension payments to see them through old age.

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth

39.

Japan's pension system was first built in the 1960s. Looking back, its designers built protection around the family, so when the nuclear family changed, the pension system ran into trouble.

The National Pension system, in which every citizen joins the pension insurance scheme, first appeared half a century ago, in 1961. At that time the share of households with three generations under one roof — grandparents, parents and grandchildren — was still high; the father went out to work as the family's mainstay, and the grandparents' pensions worked like "pocket money." Compare then with now: in 1980, three-generation households were 60% of the total; by 2013 the figure had fallen to around 10%. In other words, pensions are no longer "pocket money" but have gradually become the main source of living income. An elderly couple, or an old person living with children, can still get by on two pensions; but someone living alone has no choice but to live on one. Professor Kawai Katsuyoshi of Meiji Gakuin University said: "The National Pension system itself was, to some degree, drawn up on the premise that family functions would keep working." The share of old people living with children and grandchildren has been falling all along and is now no more than about 10%. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that by 2035 about 35% of old people will live alone; within Tokyo, the figure will reach 44%. In the 1990s, when per capita income was at its highest, the average household's annual income was above 6.5 million yen; by 2012 it had slid to 5.5 million yen, and more than 30% of households had an average income below 3 million yen.

NHK Special Program Production Team, Old-Age Bankruptcy

40.

This finding also answers why so much wealth sits with the elderly and they still have no sense of security. Once they are living alone, a pension is no longer a "supplement" but their entire income. As the share of Japanese who are single and old rises, their poverty is magnified as well.

In a sense this is close to the state of China's "left-behind elderly" in the countryside. In many cases they are single-person households in all but name, and they have far less in the way of a pension. He Xuefeng, in The Last Mile Village, his book of rural fieldwork, notes: "The state's New Rural Pension pays every rural resident aged 60 or over a minimum subsidy of 55 yuan a month, 110 yuan a month for a couple — more than what their children give them for support."

He Xuefeng's fieldwork concludes that "this mere 55 yuan a month of New Rural Pension is enough to make rural old people feel the state treats them better than their own sons do, and to leave them deeply grateful — the very opposite of the view, held by some, that the New Rural Pension gives farmers too little protection and breeds resentment in them."

We believe He Xuefeng's fieldwork is rigorous and accurate: farmers have not grown resentful over this. But we clearly cannot accept his "stability maintenance" way of thinking, in which the absence of resentment means we can sleep easy. Set against what this group has given — in youth, usually working as migrant laborers in cities with no welfare to speak of; in old age, usually still farming — what society has given back is far too little. In a sense, to borrow Palmer's words, all society has done is take the welfare migrant workers were owed and use it to pad out the base of the Ponzi scheme, so that the scheme can catch its breath a while longer.

This is what we said at the start: many of the problems Japan has are, for China, only a matter of time, and China's problems are much more complicated. On the good side, China's economy is huge, and its uneven development will keep producing opportunities — the competitiveness of a central Chinese city like Zhengzhou is instructive — while the sheer scale of the economy will keep generating demand and chances to innovate; this is a matter of probability. On the bad side, the rural problem He Xuefeng describes is plainly a large one that cannot be avoided, and it may also be, as He Xuefeng's own thinking suggests, that we simply have no policy and institutional system that puts people first. In the direction it takes, China may be governed by an opportunistic, instrumental frame of mind, crossing the river by feeling for the stones; and when it comes to respecting people, we may not deign to feel for the stones at all.

The aging society that is coming: what does it mean to face it squarely, and how do we do that

41.

The writer Norman Mailer was already an old man when The Paris Review interviewed him. He said: "I think if you get older and you're not objective, you're in trouble. What makes old people stronger is objectivity. If you say to yourself, since I now have less than I used to, my accounts are balanced, that gives you something to stand on. In the end you develop a sensitivity, a writer's sensitivity, to what has been lost."

Those few short sentences may say very precisely what an old person has, what part they should play in the world, the awkward problems they run into, and how, as an old person, to face them.

As you grow older you only become a wiser writer. Every year you learn more about human nature. But will you write as well, as brilliantly, as before? No, not necessarily. You may drop a notch or two. I think it is simply the brain declining, nothing more; the brain deteriorates. Why can't an old car match a new one? You just have to accept the fact. You don't pound on an old car and shout, "You betrayed me!" The more cheerful way to put it is that you know exactly where every one of that old car's noises comes from.

The editors of The Paris Review, The Paris Review Interviews, II

42.

We are not the rescuers of old people, just as any effort of ours to change the fact of aging is bound to come to nothing. If we recognize that aging is irreversible — as women's liberation is irreversible, as changes in family structure are irreversible, as the falling birth rate is irreversible, as social progress is irreversible (that one is arguable) — then we should honestly face whatever problems arise in an aging society. Old people do not pound on an old car and shout "You betrayed me!" That is Norman Mailer's reminder to us, and to Liang Jianzhang in particular.

43.

The world is not designed around old people, severe as aging already is. Age discrimination turns up at every step, and in places no young person would imagine. Frédéric Martel, who observes French and American culture, points out that the "creative industries" — red-hot the world over, as though owning them meant owning the future — reject the old.

Europe's aging population has cost the creative industries their main entertainment market, the youth market. This is a rule borne out everywhere in the world: the success of the creative industries is closely tied to demographics. The endless demand for cultural products from young people in India, Brazil and the Arab countries, where most of the population is under 25, is the decisive factor in the future success of the entertainment industry in those regions. Conversely, it is one reason for Japan's slump in this field. Once a population ages it closes the door to the future; a young population, by contrast, opens limitless prospects for the entertainment market.

Frédéric Martel, Mainstream

44.

Aging seems to have opened a great many jobs to old people — that is what has happened in Japan, and it is starting in the United States too, at, well, McDonald's. But not every old person is going to work at McDonald's, or as a doorman, or a security guard. Richard Sennett looks at the workplace role of middle-aged and older people from the angle of the "shelf life of skills." Seen another way, a former engineer picking up shifts at McDonald's is as deflating as wearing a label that says "I'm past my expiration date."

Once we take the shelf life of skills into account, age touches the question of talent more directly. If you are an engineer, how long do the skills you learned in college stay valid? The period keeps getting shorter. This accelerating extinction of skills happens not only in technical work but in medicine, law and other fields. It is estimated that computer repair technicians must relearn their skills three times over a career; doctors need to do it about as often. In other words, even once you have mastered a skill, your mastery does not last. An employer can retrain a 50-year-old employee to keep up with the times, or hire a sharp 25-year-old who is already current. Hiring the smart young person is far better value, because older employees command a higher base salary and retraining existing staff costs a great deal in itself.

Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism

45.

When people — neighbors, colleagues, new colleagues, any kind-hearted person — treat a "loser" with tolerance, they have in fact stepped into a larger context of discrimination. In an aging society, that "loser" may well be an old person.

The most painful interview subjects researchers like Katherine Newman and I meet are middle-class, middle-aged men who, having cut their ties to the old corporate culture, find it hard to secure a new place in a company. Of course we should not let feeling color our understanding of their problems. Few of the people Newman and I interviewed wallow in self-pity. Once they became, like so many others, their own consultants, they searched tirelessly for every avenue they could find; as Newman puts it, they carry a "fear of falling," and most of them are determined to fight it. But within their social circles these marginal people become invisible. Others avoid asking them too much, afraid of raising a useless subject. "Your friends talk to you about sports and about the kids, but not about work," a middle-aged computer programmer once told me. When those pushed to the margins try to use the connections they built at their old companies, "it's as if nobody knows you," another said. The silence around their marginal status embodies America's greatest social taboo: failure is not a subject that can be discussed.

Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism

46.

"You lack potential"! Clearly, the worship of merit and the social machinery of evaluation are incompatible with an aging society.

When Michael Young coined the word meritocracy, he sketched only a rough picture of a small elite controlling all of society. Foucault drew that picture of domination in more detail: an elite group would exert its influence by making ordinary people feel they could not understand themselves or explain their own experience. Tests of potential show exactly how deep a knowledge system can reach. In essence, a judgment of potential is far more personal than a judgment of achievement. Achievement combines social setting, economic factors, opportunity and the self. Potential focuses on the self alone. "You lack potential" hurts more than "you screwed up." It denies your nature more directly. It says more completely that you are useless.

Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism

47.

The economist George Akerlof and the Nobel laureate Robert Shiller write in Phishing for Phools that the free market produces enormous gains by offering people a vast number of choices. Old people, in a sense, have dropped out of that choice-rich "free market": measured by the range of choices open to them, retirees, compared with the young, in fact "were born in a country poorer than Mexico is today."

By standard economic theory, at any given moment the free market produces enormous gains by offering people a vast number of choices. In today's global economic life, the free market lets most of the world's adults trade with one another, directly or indirectly. That yields an enormous number of choices: 2.5x10^19 potential pairings of adult buyer and seller in all. But there is another very important factor about free markets we cannot overlook: new products and services based on new ideas keep widening the range of further choices open to people. In a free market, such profitable new products and services are constantly discovered and put to use. Over the past century, if every adult in the world produced one new idea a month, that would add up to more than 3 trillion new ideas. These new ideas matter enormously: over a single lifetime, in a typical developed country, output per person rises sixfold. So America's elderly retirees were in fact born in a country poorer than Mexico is today.

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools

48.

In short, being an old person is an embarrassment. Susan Sontag said: whatever is associated with youth and masculinity is treated as the standard of human value.

It should be said that people's ideas about what a person can do at different ages, and about what age even means, are quite arbitrary — as arbitrary as gender stereotypes. I think the young/old and male/female pairs may be the two conventions that imprison human beings most. Whatever is associated with youth and masculinity is treated as the standard of human value; everything else is at best less valuable, or simply inferior. Old people have a strong sense of inferiority. They are embarrassed just because they are old.

Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview

49.

There are finer details as well. In his interviews on aging around the world, Ted Fishman always turns up something small and precise — for instance, why the money old people spend does not shrink along with their social activity but grows: "What many people don't know is that you spend more money after you retire than while you were working. The reason is that you have more time." For all their experience of life, old people still often misjudge their own long-term needs on the most crucial decision of all, where to live. "When old people choose where to live, they often misjudge their own long-term needs. Retirees are one cause of the general shift in America's population, moving away from urban cores to the suburbs and cutting themselves off." One old person told Fishman in an interview: "We don't understand the value of what we've put into social ties and social capital. Too often we take connections built up over a long time for granted."

"As parents grow more dependent, their children often want them to move in, and overlook the relationships the parents have built over 50 years and more with the local church, the market and the neighbors."

This is exactly the situation in China. Fishman says that in old age people often cut their own social ties without meaning to. He tells a sad story from an interview in Ritan Park in Beijing.

The woman said that whatever life a Chinese grandmother has left evaporates the moment a baby is born. "You lose about ten years. I can't see my old friends. They have grandchildren to look after too, and the moment they start minding children they seem to vanish. I moved to where my son lives, and they moved wherever they had to move. Sometimes it's a different city. We all scatter. Then ten years go by and you have no idea who will turn up, because nobody has seen anybody for ten years."

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

50.

A joke. But if anything can make us face what an aging society really needs, and what would really solve it, instead of thrashing about, nothing suits better than this parable.

Malcolm was out for a walk when he saw a frog in the gutter. The frog suddenly spoke to him, which gave him a fright. The frog said: "Old man, if you kiss me I'll turn into a beautiful princess, I'll be yours forever, and we can make passionate love every night." Malcolm bent down, picked up the frog, put it in his pocket and walked on. The frog spoke again: "Hey, I don't think you heard me. I said if you kiss me I'll turn into a beautiful princess, and we can make passionate love every night." Malcolm said: "I heard you perfectly well. But at my age, I'd rather have a talking frog."

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates

Cover image: a still from the film 45 Years, via Douban.