Jared Diamond: How societies can grow old better

To give me an idea of how many of you here

may find what I'm about to tell you

of practical value,

let me ask you please to raise your hands:

Who here is either over 65 years old

or hopes to live past age 65

or has parents or grandparents who did live

or have lived past 65,

raise your hands please. (Laughter)

Okay. You are the people to whom my talk

will be of practical value. (Laughter)

The rest of you

won't find my talk personally relevant,

but I think that you will still find the subject

fascinating.

I'm going to talk about growing older

in traditional societies.

This subject constitutes just one chapter

of my latest book, which compares

traditional, small, tribal societies

with our large, modern societies,

with respect to many topics

such as bringing up children,

growing older, health, dealing with danger,

settling disputes, religion

and speaking more than one language.

Those tribal societies, which constituted

all human societies for most of human history,

are far more diverse than are our modern,

recent, big societies.

All big societies that have governments,

and where most people are strangers to each other,

are inevitably similar to each other

and different from tribal societies.

Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments

in how to run a human society.

They constitute experiments from which we ourselves

may be able to learn.

Tribal societies shouldn't be scorned

as primitive and miserable,

but also they shouldn't be romanticized

as happy and peaceful.

When we learn of tribal practices,

some of them will horrify us,

but there are other tribal practices which,

when we hear about them,

we may admire and envy

and wonder whether we could adopt those practices

ourselves.

Most old people in the U.S. end up living

separately from their children

and from most of their friends

of their earlier years,

and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly,

whereas in traditional societies,

older people instead live out their lives

among their children, their other relatives,

and their lifelong friends.

Nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly

varies enormously among traditional societies,

from much worse to much better

than in our modern societies.

At the worst extreme, many traditional societies

get rid of their elderly

in one of four increasingly direct ways:

by neglecting their elderly

and not feeding or cleaning them until they die,

or by abandoning them when the group moves,

or by encouraging older people to commit suicide,

or by killing older people.

In which tribal societies do children

abandon or kill their parents?

It happens mainly under two conditions.

One is in nomadic, hunter-gather societies

that often shift camp

and that are physically incapable

of transporting old people who can't walk

when the able-bodied younger people already

have to carry their young children

and all their physical possessions.

The other condition is in societies

living in marginal or fluctuating environments,

such as the Arctic or deserts,

where there are periodic food shortages,

and occasionally there just isn't enough food

to keep everyone alive.

Whatever food is available has to be reserved

for able-bodied adults and for children.

To us Americans, it sounds horrible

to think of abandoning or killing

your own sick wife or husband

or elderly mother or father,

but what could those traditional societies

do differently?

They face a cruel situation of no choice.

Their old people had to do it to their own parents,

and the old people know

what now is going to happen to them.

At the opposite extreme

in treatment of the elderly, the happy extreme,

are the New Guinea farming societies

where I've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years,

and most other sedentary traditional societies

around the world.

In those societies, older people are cared for.

They are fed. They remain valuable.

And they continue to live in the same hut

or else in a nearby hut near their children,

relatives and lifelong friends.

There are two main sets of reasons for this variation

among societies in their treatment

of old people.

The variation depends especially

on the usefulness of old people

and on the society's values.

First, as regards usefulness,

older people continue to perform useful services.

One use of older people in traditional societies

is that they often are still effective

at producing food.

Another traditional usefulness of older people

is that they are capable of babysitting

their grandchildren,

thereby freeing up their own adult children,

the parents of those grandchildren,

to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren.

Still another traditional value of older people

is in making tools, weapons, baskets,

pots and textiles.

In fact, they're usually the people who are best at it.

Older people usually are the leaders

of traditional societies,

and the people most knowledgeable about politics,

medicine, religion, songs and dances.

Finally, older people in traditional societies

have a huge significance that would never occur

to us in our modern, literate societies,

where our sources of information are books

and the Internet.

In contrast, in traditional societies without writing,

older people are the repositories of information.

It's their knowledge that spells the difference

between survival and death for their whole society

in a time of crisis caused by rare events

for which only the oldest people alive

have had experience.

Those, then, are the ways in which older people

are useful in traditional societies.

Their usefulness varies and contributes

to variation in the society's treatment

of the elderly.

The other set of reasons for variation

in the treatment of the elderly is

the society's cultural values.

For example, there's particular emphasis

on respect for the elderly in East Asia,

associated with Confucius' doctrine

of filial piety, which means obedience,

respect and support for elderly parents.

Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people

contrast with the low status of the elderly

in the U.S.

Older Americans are at a big disadvantage

in job applications.

They're at a big disadvantage in hospitals.

Our hospitals have an explicit policy

called age-based allocation of healthcare resources.

That sinister expression means that

if hospital resources are limited,

for example if only one donor heart

becomes available for transplant,

or if a surgeon has time to operate

on only a certain number of patients,

American hospitals have an explicit policy

of giving preference to younger patients

over older patients

on the grounds that younger patients are considered

more valuable to society

because they have more years of life ahead of them,

even though the younger patients have fewer years

of valuable life experience behind them.

There are several reasons for this low status

of the elderly in the U.S.

One is our Protestant work ethic

which places high value on work,

so older people who are no longer working

aren't respected.

Another reason is our American emphasis

on the virtues of self-reliance and independence,

so we instinctively look down on older people

who are no longer self-reliant and independent.

Still a third reason is our American cult of youth,

which shows up even in our advertisements.

Ads for Coca-Cola and beer always depict

smiling young people,

even though old as well as young people

buy and drink Coca-Cola and beer.

Just think, what's the last time you saw

a Coke or beer ad depicting smiling people

85 years old? Never.

Instead, the only American ads

featuring white-haired old people

are ads for retirement homes and pension planning.

Well, what has changed in the status

of the elderly today

compared to their status in traditional societies?

There have been a few changes for the better

and more changes for the worse.

Big changes for the better

include the fact that today we enjoy

much longer lives,

much better health in our old age,

and much better recreational opportunities.

Another change for the better is that we now have

specialized retirement facilities

and programs to take care of old people.

Changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality

that we now have

more old people and fewer young people

than at any time in the past.

That means that all those old people

are more of a burden on the few young people,

and that each old person has less individual value.

Another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly

is the breaking of social ties with age,

because older people, their children,

and their friends,

all move and scatter independently of each other

many times during their lives.

We Americans move on the average

every five years.

Hence our older people are likely

to end up living distant from their children

and the friends of their youth.

Yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly

is formal retirement from the workforce,

carrying with it a loss of work friendships

and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work.

Perhaps the biggest change for the worse

is that our elderly are objectively

less useful than in traditional societies.

Widespread literacy means that they are no longer

useful as repositories of knowledge.

When we want some information,

we look it up in a book or we Google it

instead of finding some old person to ask.

The slow pace of technological change

in traditional societies

means that what someone learns there as a child

is still useful when that person is old,

but the rapid pace of technological change today

means that what we learn as children

is no longer useful 60 years later.

And conversely, we older people are not fluent

in the technologies essential for surviving

in modern society.

For example, as a 15-year-old,

I was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers

because I had memorized the multiplication tables

and I know how to use logarithms

and I'm quick at manipulating a slide rule.

Today, though, those skills are utterly useless

because any idiot

can now multiply eight-digit numbers

accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator.

Conversely, I at age 75

am incompetent at skills

essential for everyday life.

My family's first TV set in 1948

had only three knobs that I quickly mastered:

an on-off switch, a volume knob,

and a channel selector knob.

Today, just to watch a program

on the TV set in my own house,

I have to operate a 41-button TV remote

that utterly defeats me.

I have to telephone my 25-year-old sons

and ask them to talk me through it

while I try to push those wretched 41 buttons.

What can we do to improve the lives of the elderly

in the U.S., and to make better use of their value?

That's a huge problem.

In my remaining four minutes today,

I can offer just a few suggestions.

One value of older people is that they are

increasingly useful as grandparents

for offering high-quality childcare

to their grandchildren, if they choose to do it,

as more young women enter the workforce

and as fewer young parents of either gender

stay home as full-time caretakers of their children.

Compared to the usual alternatives

of paid babysitters and day care centers,

grandparents offer superior, motivated,

experienced child care.

They've already gained experience from raising their own children.

They usually love their grandchildren,

and are eager to spend time with them.

Unlike other caregivers,

grandparents don't quit their job

because they found another job with higher pay

looking after another baby.

A second value of older people is paradoxically

related to their loss of value

as a result of changing world conditions and technology.

At the same time, older people have gained

in value today precisely because

of their unique experience of living conditions

that have now become rare

because of rapid change, but that could come back.

For example, only Americans now in their 70s

or older today can remember

the experience of living through a great depression,

the experience of living through a world war,

and agonizing whether or not

dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible

than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs.

Most of our current voters and politicians

have no personal experience of any of those things,

but millions of older Americans do.

Unfortunately, all of those terrible situations

could come back.

Even if they don't come back,

we have to be able to plan for them

on the basis of the experience of what they were like.

Older people have that experience.

Younger people don't.

The remaining value of older people

that I'll mention involves recognizing that

while there are many things that older people

can no longer do,

there are other things that they can do

better than younger people.

A challenge for society is to make use of those things

that older people are better at doing.

Some abilities, of course, decrease with age.

Those include abilities at tasks

requiring physical strength and stamina,

ambition, and the power of novel reasoning

in a circumscribed situation,

such as figuring out the structure of DNA,

best left to scientists under the age of 30.

Conversely, valuable attributes

that increase with age include experience,

understanding of people and human relationships,

ability to help other people

without your own ego getting in the way,

and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases,

such as economics and comparative history,

best left to scholars over the age of 60.

Hence older people are much better than younger people

at supervising, administering, advising,

strategizing, teaching, synthesizing,

and devising long-term plans.

I've seen this value of older people

with so many of my friends in their 60s,

70s, 80s and 90s,

who are still active as investment managers,

farmers, lawyers and doctors.

In short, many traditional societies

make better use of their elderly

and give their elderly more satisfying lives

than we do in modern, big societies.

Paradoxically nowadays,

when we have more elderly people than ever before,

living healthier lives and with better medical care

than ever before,

old age is in some respects more miserable

than ever before.

The lives of the elderly are widely recognized

as constituting a disaster area

of modern American society.

We can surely do better by learning

from the lives of the elderly

in traditional societies.

But what's true of the lives of the elderly

in traditional societies

is true of many other features

of traditional societies as well.

Of course, I'm not advocating that we all give up

agriculture and metal tools

and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

There are many obvious respects

in which our lives today are far happier

than those in small, traditional societies.

To mention just a few examples,

our lives are longer, materially much richer,

and less plagued by violence

than are the lives of people in traditional societies.

But there are also things to be admired

about people in traditional societies,

and perhaps to be learned from them.

Their lives are usually socially much richer

than our lives,

although materially poorer.

Their children are more self-confident,

more independent, and more socially skilled

than are our children.

They think more realistically about dangers than we do.

They almost never die of diabetes, heart disease,

stroke, and the other noncommunicable diseases

that will be the causes of death of almost

all of us in this room today.

Features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases,

and features of the traditional lifestyle

protect us against them.

Those are just some examples of what we can learn

from traditional societies.

I hope that you will find it as fascinating

to read about traditional societies

as I found it to live in those societies.

Thank you.

(Applause)