Money and Later Life

This chapter examines the cultural turn in gerontology as it illuminates our understanding of money in later life. Access to money in later life is determined by a combination of individual and family resources, and welfare state provision especially in the fields of pensions, benefits, health, housing and social care. The Chapter begins with an overview of functionalist and structuralist (particularly political economy) approaches to understanding economic resources and consumption in later life, and how these have constructed our understanding of money and poverty in old age from macro and micro perspectives. However, as identity politics and the sociologies of consumption have found purchase with theorists in understanding social behaviour, so have our understandings of money in later life also begun to change, causing us to ask new questions about why some people seem to have greater access to financial resources than others.
The influence of neo-liberal economic theories of competition in the politics of pensions, health, housing and social care provision is leading to growing inequalities within later life cohorts. Even in countries with long established welfare states, financial welfare in later life is increasingly dependent on individual behaviours and decision making throughout the life course. However, left to their own devices, people seem not to behave in politically desired ways: notably they do not increase saving and reduce consumption earlier in the life course by way of planning ahead for later life. Economists have therefore become interested in how and why people make the financial decisions that they do, focussing on changing human behaviour through a series of small economic incentives, sometimes referred to as ‘nudgenomics’. This focus on individual behaviour means that cultural gerontologists have an important contribution to make since people are often motivated by complex influences that are not financial, including family, peers, neighbourhoods, ethnicity and identity, as well as notions of legacy and generativity. Both when accumulating assets and income, and in later life when making spending and consumption decisions, culture plays an important role in the relationship that people have with money, influencing their individual welfare across the life course and impacting on wider societal outcomes such as poverty and inequality.