The impact of poverty on older persons.

摘要

There 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.