Public Policy & Aging Report
cite as: Public Policy & Aging Report, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2, 42–47
doi:10.1093/ppar/prw005
Advance Access publication April 23, 2016
Article
Late-Life Inequality in the Second Gilded Age: Policy
Choices in a New Context
Stephen Crystal, PhD*
Center for Health Services Research, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, NJ
*Address correspondence to Stephen Crystal, PhD, Center for Health Services Research, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging
Research, Rutgers University, 30 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Manuscript received January 15, 2016; Accepted January 20, 2016
Decision Editor: Robert B. Hudson, PhD
Keywords: Income, Wealth, Inequality, Social Security, Cumulative advantage
Over the decades, the topic of income inequality has had
its ups and downs in public policy discourse in the United
States. During the Great Society period of the Kennedy and
Johnson Administrations, the plight of those lowest in the
income distribution was a focus of attention under the rubric
of the “war on poverty.” From the 1980s into the early years
of the twenty-first century, discussion of inequality was to a
significant extent displaced by themes of economic growth
and the burdens of taxation, with explicitly redistributional
benefit and taxation policies losing favor. In some quarters,
attention to issues of inequality was criticized as a distraction, or worse; for example, in 2004, an influential Chicago
School economist wrote, “Of the tendencies that are harmful
to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion
the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” (Lucas, 2004). During this period, the progressivity
of the income tax system was reduced through reductions
in top marginal tax rates and capital gains taxation, and
there was a significant shift from traditional defined-benefit
to defined-contribution retirement plans in the retirement
income system. During this period, as well, the cost of entitlements became increasingly contested, with the “generational equity” narrative increasingly promoted in support of
policy changes to reduce these costs.
As Beard and Williamson note in this issue of the Public
Policy and Aging Report (PPAR), this narrative has been
particularly prominent in calls to reduce the benefits payable under current law to the cohorts of individuals who
will reach late life in coming decades—calls that, while
historically more identified with Republican legislators, have
received considerable support among national elected officials on both sides of the aisle. Even President Obama, in his
2014 budget proposal, included a proposal to shift future
cost-of-living increases for Social Security from the standard Consumer Price Index to a “chained CPI” formula that
would reduce benefits by approximately 2% over the course
of individuals’ retirement (Calmes, 2013; Van de Water &
Ruffing, 2013), although this proposal included some protections for beneficiaries with lower benefit levels and was
not included in his subsequent budget proposals. More substantial, recurring proposals call for increasing the age of
eligibility for full Social Security benefits, which would have
the effect, for each year of postponed eligibility, of a roughly
7% across-the-board cut in benefits, regardless of whether a
worker files for Social Security before, upon, or after reaching the full retirement age (Van de Water & Ruffing, 2013).
Within gerontology and social science, more generally,
attention to economic inequality over the life course, including late life, has also had its ups and downs. As noted by
Beard and Williamson in this issue of PPAR, long-standing
assumptions in gerontology asserted that economic inequality
narrows as we age, with benefit programs replacing the labor
market as income sources, but this assumption was contradicted by analyses by Crystal and Shea (1990a), who concluded that a process of snowballing economic advantage and
disadvantage over the life course is instead in play. Initially,
this process of diverging outcomes over the life course, leading to highly disparate late-life circumstances, was described
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
42
Public Policy & Aging Report, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2
as the “two worlds of aging” phenomenon by Crystal (1982,
1986); a related concept was described as the phenomenon of
“intracohort differentiation” by Dannefer (1987).
In a line of publications beginning with their 1990 paper
on “Cumulative Advantage, Cumulative Disadvantage,
and Inequality Among Elderly People,” Crystal and
Shea (1990a, 1990b) introduced into the gerontological
and social science literature the “cumulative advantage”
term to describe this process, in a theoretical model that
described and examined the process of production of
disparate life outcomes as one of iterative interaction of
initial advantages and societal institutions over the life
course (Crystal, 2006; Crystal & Shea, 1990a, 1990b;
Crystal, Shea, & Krishnaswami, 1992; Crystal & Waehrer,
1996). The “cumulative advantage” concept and terminology came to be widely adopted from the 1990s forward
(e.g., Dannefer, 2003; O’Rand, 1996), although much of
the attention to cumulative advantage processes focused
on cumulation of health disparities rather than those in
income. Nevertheless, the issue of income inequality has
been part of the cumulative advantage tradition in gerontology since its inception.
Recently, Crystal, Shea, and Reyes (2016) have updated
their earlier work on late-life inequality, finding further
increases in inequality in recent years. Between 1983–84
and 2010, the share of total income received by 65-to-74
year olds in the lower 40% of the income distribution went
down from 17% to 14%, while the share of the best-off 20%
increased from 46% to 48%. For people 75 and older, the
share received by the lower 40% decreased from 15% to
14%, while the share of the top 20% increased from 47% to
50%, with the lower 80% receiving only 50%.
Concentration of wealth among older people also
increased. By 2010, the top 20% accounted for 62% of
total annuitized value of wealth. Overall, inequality within
each birth cohort increased as its members moved from
early to mid to later life, both for the cohorts that make up
the current elderly and for the very high-inequality cohorts
now in midlife.
In broader public discourse related to inequality, although
there was limited focus on the issue in the last decades of
the twentieth century, the topic has gained renewed attention since the start of the twenty-first century, as evidence
has accumulated that the nation has entered a new, higher
inequality era. The unexpected rise of Thomas Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty, 2014) to the
top of national bestseller lists was one indicator of increasing concern with this growing problem, which also emerged
in 2015 as a central focus of Bernard Sanders’s campaign
for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Utilizing
income tax records that capture very high incomes more fully
than is typically the case with survey data on income, Piketty
and his colleague Emanuel Saez were able to highlight the
increasing concentration of income in the very top of the
income distribution, especially the top 1%, in a way that has
struck a responsive chord that has resonated with rising concerns about the deleterious social effects of growing income
43
inequality. As Piketty and Saez document, this trend is of international scope, although particularly marked in the United
States (Piketty & Saez, 2014). In contrast with the dominant
themes of the War on Poverty era in the United States, which
concentrated on the plight of the poorest, the more recent
wave of concern with income inequality has highlighted concerns with broader measures of income inequality and, in
particular, the growing economic and social gap between the
wealthiest Americans, whose income has sharply increased in
recent decades, and the circumstances of those with incomes
that are broadly in the lower part of the income distribution,
who have experienced income stagnation.
Although the growth in income inequality has affected
all age groups, the increased public attention to the issue
has focused predominantly on the nonelderly population,
with less attention thus far to implications for late-life inequality, the way in which it has been affected by economic
and social changes, and implications for future retirement
income policy. However, these implications are substantial
and have direct bearing on the consequences for equity
of key policy choices, including the financing and benefit
levels of Social Security, the shift from defined-benefit to
defined-contribution retirement plans (Johnson & Crystal,
2003), the role of substantial tax expenditures in supporting these plans, and many other policy choices.
It is now apparent that we are now in a period of higher
inequality than has been seen for almost a century—both in
the United States and in other developed countries—although
the United States is unfortunately in the “lead” (Piketty and
Saez, 2014). This development creates a new context for
retirement income policy in the twenty-first century as well as
for other policies affecting late life, such as the provision and
financing of health and long-term care programs. In hindsight, it appears that the four decades following World War II
were a period in which the benefits of economic growth were
unusually broadly distributed compared with both earlier
and later eras. For example, work by Piketty (2014) and Saez
(2013) has shown that across multiple measures of income,
the income share of the bottom 90% was quite stable during the post–World War II period up to the early 1980s and
markedly greater than the period prior to 1940.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present,
however, there has been a steady increase in the level of overall inequality, with the income share of the bottom 90% of
the population across all ages estimated to have declined from
the prevailing level of the postwar period (approximately
65%) to about 50%. After a slight dip in 2007 through 2009
during the recession, the trend to increased disparity resumed
during the 2009–2012 period. By 2012, the income share of
the top 10%, at 50.4%, slightly exceeded its previous peak in
1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the Gilded Age
of “roaring” 1920s (Saez, 2013).
The United States appears to have settled into a new economic era of higher inequality with lowering of trade barriers, reduced demand for less-educated lower skilled workers,
decline of labor unionism and well-paid industrial jobs with
few educational requirements, growing educational debt,
Crystal
44
reduced income, and inheritance taxes on higher income individuals among a host of contributing and converging factors.
With levels of inequality now comparable to those of the original Gilded Age, the current era could reasonably be viewed as
the Second Gilded Age.
The United States appears to have settled
into a new economic era of higher inequality with lowering of trade barriers, reduced
demand for less-educated lower-skilled
workers, decline of labor unionism and
well-paid industrial jobs with few educational requirements, growing educational
debt, reduced income and inheritance taxes
on higher-income individuals among a host
of contributing and converging factors.
This new “Gilded Age” high-inequality environment raises
new concerns about the potential impact of proposed policy
changes aimed at limiting the cost of “entitlements” for individuals in the lower part of the income distribution, among
the current elderly persons and, perhaps even more seriously,
among cohorts who will be reaching late life in the coming
decades. As Johnson notes in this issue, members of these
cohorts have been able, to some degree, to buffer the impact
of wage stagnation through delays in retirement age (reversing trends of earlier years) and through increased labor force
participation by women, resulting in higher proportions of
families having multiple earners. However, there are natural limits to the ability of these behavioral changes to offset
wage stagnation, and lower income workers have experienced
increasing difficulty in accruing meaningful retirement savings, particularly for less-educated workers whose prospects
have significantly declined. The projections from the Urban
Institute’s DYNASIM model, presented by Richard Johnson
in this issue, provide a sobering picture of the distributional
outlook for the cohorts that will be reaching age 70 through
the early 2040s. Although, as Johnson notes, overall improvement is projected to rise in inflation-adjusted terms for
these cohorts, income inequality is projected to increase for
these cohorts, consistent with the general pattern of broadly
increasing inequality documented by Piketty and others.
This new “Gilded Age” high-inequality
environment raises new concerns about
the potential impact of proposed policy
changes aimed at limiting the cost of “entitlements” for individuals in the lower part
of the income distribution, among the current elderly persons and, perhaps even
more seriously, among cohorts who will be
reaching late life in the coming decades.
Given the increased concentration of income and wealth
in the very top of the income distribution, and the welldocumented undercapture of income and wealth in this
part of the distribution in survey data (Crystal, 1986;
Piketty, 2014; Smith, 2003), the DYNASIM estimates of the
magnitude of increasing late-life inequality are likely conservative. Nevertheless, as Johnson notes, the projections
indicate a very high-inequality retirement income future,
with a seven-to-one disparity projected at age 70 between
those at the 90th percentile of income and those at the 25th
percentile, among those born between 1970 and 1974. Of
course, although more difficult to project with precision,
disparities between those in the top 5% or top 1% and
lower income cohort members will be much greater. The
increasing gap in circumstances and lifestyle between those
at the top and the rest of the older population may have
broad policy consequences, given the considerable influence of the most-advantaged group. For example, with
ample private resources, the most advantaged may have
declining stakes in publicly funded programs that support
long-term care, comprehensive coverage of medical services, and financial transfers such as Social Security retirement pensions.
Another concern about prospects for lower socioeconomic status (SES) elderly in coming years involves disparities in health status and other indicators of well-being. As
Johnson notes, it is well known that health problems are
more common among lower income than higher income
adults, and this disparity extends to the elderly as well.
These disparities will limit the ability of lower SES individuals to supplement their income with employment and
contribute to their out-of-pocket cost burden (Crystal,
Harman, Sambamoorthi, Johnson, & Kumar, 2000;
Johnson, 2013). Given the disparity in health status, disparities in out-of-pocket cost burden could increase if
widely discussed proposals to limit the growing taxpayer
costs of Medicare by shifting some costs to beneficiaries and increasing their “skin in the game” are adopted,
along the lines of current trends in insurance designs for
the nonelderly. Proposals to increase consumer choice in
Medicare benefit design, by tiering plans into more comprehensive coverage at higher cost to beneficiaries and limited coverage at lower cost, would likely leave lower SES
individuals with less protection against out-of-pocket costs
than more advantaged individuals.
Although the health–wealth association in late life is
well known, less well known but sobering data from recent
studies suggest that gaps in various indicators of well-being
may be growing among cohorts currently at midlife who
will constitute the elderly of coming decades. For example,
Phillips, Robin, Nugent, and Idler (2010) found that suicide rates for less-educated men and less-educated women
increased markedly between 2000 and 2005 among
40–49 year olds and especially among 50–59 year olds.
Suicide rates increased by 27% for men aged 50–59 with
high school or less education while remaining essentially
Public Policy & Aging Report, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2
flat for college-educated men. Educational disparities in
suicide rates increased; in 2005, the suicide rate for men
with a high school education or less was about 2.0 times
the rate among those with some college education and 2.6
times that of those with at least a college degree, with disparities by education almost as great among women.
In recent work, Case and Deaton (2015) reported rising rates of both morbidity and mortality in midlife (ages
45–54) among white non-Hispanic Americans in the
twenty-first century. Their analysis of National Center for
Health Statistics data (National Health Interview Surveys,
the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey)
reported declines between 1997–1999 and 2011–2013 in
self-rated health, days physical health was “not good,” pain,
mental health (Kessler-6 score), and measures of functioning in activities of daily living as well as obesity and heavy
drinking. These adverse trends are likely most severe among
the lower SES members of these cohorts. Cumulative advantage theory would predict that the adverse trends observed
in these cohorts at midlife would carry forward into the
retirement years, further increasing concern about retirement-age well-being among less-advantaged members of
the cohorts reaching late life in coming decades. These are
the same cohorts that are the targets of widely touted proposals to reduce the cost of future entitlements by increasing
the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits, reducing cost-of-living adjustments scheduled under current law,
or incorporating more defined-contribution elements into
Medicare, among other changes.
Examining data from the 1970s, Crystal (1982)
described the policy challenges posed by a pattern of latelife inequality characterized as the “two worlds of aging”
phenomenon. Subsequent work in the cumulative advantage tradition has highlighted the processes by which early
advantages and disadvantages have enduring effects on a
range of outcomes into late life. This now-robust body of
research demonstrates, among other factors, the pervasive
effect of educational attainment on outcomes throughout
the life course—an effect that is likely to be even more
powerful for coming generations of elderly because of the
broad societal and economic changes that have increased
financial returns to schooling and reduced life chances for
those with lower levels of education.
Thus, a decade and a half into the twenty-first century,
we find ourselves at a juncture where the effects of broad
economic changes leading to greater economic inequality
across the age spectrum—as vividly documented by Piketty
(2014)—are superimposed over an enduring pattern of
cumulative advantage and disadvantage over the life course
that has now been documented to be an obdurate tendency
within multiple cohorts over their life course (Crystal &
Shea, 2003; Crystal & Waehrer, 1996). The combined
effects of these forces presage a continuation and, indeed,
an exacerbation of the “two worlds of aging” scenario for
coming cohorts of elderly. These developments highlight
45
the importance of careful attention to policy mechanisms
that, to an extent, buffer the unequalizing forces both of
economic trends and life-course processes. Central among
these, in the United States, is the Social Security program,
which provides an economic lifeline that is especially vital
for lower income individuals, accounting for more than
half of the income of elderly individuals in both the lowest
and the second-lowest quintiles of income (Crystal, Shea,
& Reyes, 2014). In the United States, no other mechanism
has emerged that can realistically take its place, particularly for those of modest incomes, who gain only limited
benefit from individual retirement vehicles and are often
unable to accrue meaningful retirement savings, even when
tax-advantaged savings vehicles are available.
In light of the “one-two punch” of rising inequality
across the age span, and the persistent power of cumulative
advantage and disadvantage processes in shaping late-life
outcomes, there is reason to argue for strengthening rather
than reducing future Social Security benefits payable under
current law. For example, projected shortfalls in the Social
Security Trust Fund could be addressed by raising or eliminating the cap on the amount of income subject to the Social
Security payroll tax. Given the lower incomes and greater
expenditures for healthcare that are typical of retirees over
age 75, a special benefit increase might also be considered for
the oldest old, similar to a provision that was incorporated
as a “sweetener” into President Obama’s 2013 proposal to
reduce cost-of-living adjustments via the “chained consumer
price index” (Van de Water & Ruffing, 2013).
Other targeted initiatives aimed at the elderly who are
oldest, functionally impaired, or receiving the lowest Social
Security benefits, including strengthening the Supplementary
Security Income program, could also be feasibly considered
at costs that are relatively modest in the overall scheme of
federal retirement security expenditures. Such changes could
feasibly be financed by adjustments to the estimated $161
billion in current “tax expenditures” (forgone tax revenues;
Congressional Budget Office, 2015) that currently subsidize
individual retirement accounts, private pensions, and other
retirement income vehicles that disproportionately benefit higher income individuals. Although such changes are
clearly difficult in an antitaxation political environment, in
which tax effort as a percentage of GDP has declined in
the twenty-first century despite the aging of the population
(OECD, 2014), the politically impossible today may not be
the politically impossible of tomorrow, given indications of
increasing public unease about the consequences of growing
income inequality. Despite attacks on the “sustainability” of
current benefit levels, Social Security remains highly popular. In the meantime, “first do no harm” remains a good
principle, highlighting the importance for less-advantaged
members of upcoming cohorts of elderly of maintaining the
protections provided by currently scheduled Social Security
benefit levels.
Although growing income inequality is an international phenomenon, as documented by Piketty, policy
Crystal
46
decisions on the structure and financing of retirement
income institutions remain vital in buffering, or not buffering, the impact of these developments and of cumulative advantage processes that contribute to high late-life
inequality. As Stiglitz (2013) has noted, “Inequality is
a choice. . . . Of the advanced economies, America has
some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences . . .
American inequality . . . has worsened as we have underinvested in our infrastructure, education and health care
systems, and social safety nets. Rising inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our
democratic governance. . . . For these reasons, I see us
entering a world divided not just between the haves and
have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be
successful in creating shared prosperity . . . others will let
inequality run amok.”
Prospects for the evolution of relevant policies in the
future depend in significant part on how proponents of
competing policies are able to frame the issues of retirement income and other aging policies in the future. For
example, as Beard and Williamson note in this issue, the
“generational equity” framing of controversies about the
cost of entitlements has functioned to frame benefit cutbacks as being on the side of the equity angels, by defining
equity by comparison of averages between age groups, eliding the vast disparities within age groups. Arguably, however, the notion of equity pertains most logically to equity
among individuals, rather than between age groups.
Increased political attention to the challenge of economic inequality across individuals provides some reason
for hope that the prospect of increasingly disparate oldage outcomes, and bringing current distributional facts
to these debates, may achieve political resonance. Such
data can contribute to countering the image of the elderly
as a homogeneously “advantaged” population (Hudson
& Gonyea, 2012). Facts are often at a disadvantage relative to rhetoric in such debates, but gerontologists nevertheless have a role to play as speakers of inconvenient
truths in a political marketplace, where resistance to
publicly financed solutions to social problems is strong.
Particularly important will be continued work to track
evolving patterns of old-age inequality, using carefully
designed measurement strategies to address the typical
undercapture of financial inequality in survey data sets,
and to further explore emerging, if preliminary, evidence
of eroding well-being, on multiple dimensions, among
less-advantaged members of the cohorts that will constitute the elderly population in coming decades. There is a
continuing need for more, and more widely shared, data
and analyses that help to focus debates about retirement
benefits on equity among individuals, framing them as
issues of generational solidarity in place of “generational
equity” across highly disparate populations. Such analyses of the evolving current and future landscape of old-age
inequality have an important role to play in fostering an
informed policy dialogue about the continuing challenge
of retirement income adequacy, in a changing economic
and policy landscape in which the challenges of cumulative advantage and disadvantage within individuals’ life
courses intersect with the brave new world of increasing
overall income inequality.
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