Author: Janet C. Gornick
Publication: Allocating Public and Private Resources Across Generations: Riding the Age Waves—Volume 2. Chapter 8, pp. 201-226
Editors: Anne H. Gauthier, C.Y. Cyrus Chu, and Shripad Tuljapurkar
Publisher: Springer
Date: September 2006
Abstract:
This chapter assesses the allocation of public social welfare expenditures on the elderly versus children during a 15-year period—1980–1995—a period widely understood to be one of social policy restructuring and change across the industrialized countries. The analysis takes as its starting point a 1984 article by the American demographer Samuel Preston. In an influential article, Preston argued that, in the two prior decades, as the elderly share of the U.S. population grew and the child population fell, public resources shifted toward the elderly, because the elderly’s swelling numbers granted them increased political leverage—or as popularly coined, “gray power.” In this study, I revisit the Preston thesis, by considering trends in social expenditures on the elderly and children, against the backdrop of graying populations in a group of 14 industrialized countries, including the United States.