Aging and Inequality
There are significant racial differences among the elderly in the United States. Whites, on average, live five years longer than African-Americans, largely because African-Americans have much higher rates of poverty and therefore are more likely to suffer from inadequate health care and poor health behaviors. As a result, a much higher percentage of whites are elderly than other racial groups.
The combined effect of race and sex is substantial. White women in the U.S. live, on average, twelve years longer than African-American men. Hispanics are graying the least, partly because this category includes many young immigrant workers with large families. According to the U.S. Census, about 3.8 million of the elderly population in the United States is foreign born.
In California, New York, Hawaii, and other states that receive large numbers of immigrants, as much as one fifth of the elderly populations were born outside the United States. Most elderly immigrants either do not speak English well or do not speak it at all. Integrating elderly immigrants into U.S. society poses special challenges: some are highly educated, but the majority are not. Many require special education and training programs.
Most elderly lack a retirement income, so they depend on their families or public assistance for support. Among those who arrived in the United States during the 1990s, 22 percent of individuals sixty-five years and over were living in poverty in 1999; which is over twice the rate of elderly people born in this country. In 2005, approximately 632,000 (16.2 percent) foreign-born elders were living below the poverty level in the United States (Pew Hispanic Center 2006).
If you consider the elderly as being divided into three life stages, you can discern just how the elderly are comprised comparing males to females. It is useful to distinguish between different age categories of the elderly, such as the:
- Young old - ages sixty-five to seventy-four
- Old old - ages seventy-five to eighty-four
- Oldest old - ages eighty-five and older
The young old (ages 65-74) are most likely to be economically independent, healthy, active, and engaged in life. The oldest old (ages 85 and older), which is the fastest-growing segment of the elderly population, are most likely to encounter difficulties such as poor health, financial insecurity, isolation, and loneliness. One reason for this is because women, in most countries of the world, have a higher life expectancy than men, and therefore are the larger proportion of oldest old.
Life expectancy is the average number of years a person born today may expect to live.
The U.S. life expectancy today is about 80 for females and 75 for males (worldwide it is 70 for females and 66 for males). Life expectancies have increased dramatically over the last 50 years in the Western nations of Canada, United States, Australia, Japan, and Western Europe. Overall, men and women can expect to live longer than they did in the 1940s-1990s.
The baby boomers, the nickname given to the generation born between 1946 and 1964, represent 76.4 million US citizens as of 2012. This large birth cohort is moving on mass into the ranks of the elderly. This group represents about one-quarter of the U.S. population, so their decisons about when to retire will have a large impact on job openings and government help for the elderly. One issue for gerontologists is the financial strain the baby boomers will place on the rest of society once they are retired. Most speculate that baby boomers will not receive the same from the Social Security Administration benefits as their parents and grandparents enjoyed. Read more about the number of baby boomers:
PRB: Just how many baby boomers are there?
A birth cohort is a collection of all people who share a particular experience, particularly through being born during the same time period.
Children of baby boomers are called Generation X children or "Baby Bust" because they were born in post-boom low fertility rate years (1965-1979). Generation X has a very different childhood than their parents; they grew up with the computer age and came to computer technology much like an immigrant comes to a new country. This cohort grew up in an economic state of greater posterity than did previous generations.
Generation Y, or "Millennials," were born between 1980 and late 1990s. They have also become known as "Internet Generation or Screenagers" because they grew up with TV, video games, cell phones, PDAs, and movie screens. There is a good chance that the children of Generation Y will be better skilled than their parents with a technology that has not yet been invented. Such has been the case comparing the last three generations. Each generation is culturally distinct compared to the previous ones even though much still remains in common.
Overall, the elderly of the future will be expected to live longer than any elderly in the history of the United States and world. Being born in the U.S. affords the average member of society a longer life. On the following slide, you can see that North American children are born a higher life expectancy than other children around the world, but by far, Japan and Hong Kong provide the absolute highest life expectancy at birth!
2007 World and Regional Life Expectancies
| Region | Total | Male | Female |
| World | 68 | 66 | 70 |
| Africa | 53 | 52 | 54 |
| N. America | 78 | 70 | 81 |
| L. America | 73 | 70 | 76 |
| Asia | 68 | 67 | 70 |
| Europe | 75 | 71 | 79 |
| Oceania | 75 | 73 | 78 |
