2022 Conference Abstract | Efficiency, Obsolescence, and the Human Scrap Heap: Aging and Labor in the Space Between
This paper argues that the early decades of twentieth-century America birthed a cultural narrative of aging as obsolescence. One part of this narrative emerged from the space of labor, where older age was increasingly associated with lower productivity. While some argued declining productivity with increasing age was a natural law, many instead explained the phenomenon as a particular consequence of the modern world; they saw it as the inevitable outcome of industrialization and modernization. The narrative of aging as obsolescence merged with other narratives of the modern world: concerns that the world was “speeding up,” worries that machines were making human workers obsolete, and calls for the need for greater “efficiency.” In the context of Frederick Taylor’s promotion of “scientific management” and the “efficiency craze,” the narrative of aging as obsolescence found concrete scientific grounding for judging older bodies to be inefficient and obsolete. As the narrative of aging as obsolescence circulated throughout a variety of professional and popular spheres, it wrought multiple consequences. The perceived obsolescence of older workers in the modern Machine Age was linked to discriminatory hiring and firing practices. Practices of mandatory retirement, the development of pension plans, and ultimately Social Security drew heavily upon this narrative—as well as upon the culture of scientific management and the push for efficiency—to justify the need for their existence. And the “obsolescent old,” those older workers thrown on the “industrial scrap heap,” were identified as a needy population, especially visible in the increasing numbers of older people in poorhouses. This narrative of aging as obsolescence is one that still today supports labor practices and federal policies related to old age and that continues to shape, problematically, our view of what it means to grow old in America.
Lamb invites those interested in this topic to read W. Andrew Achenbaum's "The Obsolescence of Old Age in America, 1865-1914," which appeared first in The Journal of Social History (vol. 8, no.1, 1974) and later became chapter 2 of his 1978 book Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790.
Erin Gentry Lamb, PhD, is the Carl A. Asseff, MD, MBA, JD, Designated Professor in Medical Humanities, Faculty Lead of the Humanities Pathway, and Associate Professor of Bioethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Trained in literature, her research interests include aging and ageism, death and dying, disability, health care and social justice, and the pedagogy and field formation of health humanities and age studies. She co-edited Research Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019) and holds leadership roles in the Health Humanities Consortium and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
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