In the coming decades, the proportion of people of working age in the EU will continue to shrink (solid rectangles) while the elderly population will grow (bordered rectangles). One study surveying American workers aged 45 and older estimated that in 2017 nearly two out of three respondents had seen or experienced age discrimination on the job.Įuropeans are living longer than ever before.
While there is a rationale for favoring the young - they have more years of life ahead of them - there’s also evidence of widespread ageism beyond imagined binary choices of life and death. As the program went viral, decisions to sacrifice men or women, the healthy or sick, jaywalkers or pedestrians, among other groups, were submitted by millions of people from 233 countries and regions.Īlthough the experiment aimed to survey moral decisions more broadly, it garnered the most attention for something many might have assumed already - that people in general prefer to sacrifice the old before the young. Either way, the car would run over someone. The game-format online survey presented participants with car-accident scenarios, asking them to decide whether a self-driving vehicle should plow ahead or swerve - and forcing them to choose between two categories of casualties. There is a general lack of research on the social status of the older population across cultures, but the results of a 2018 survey called the Moral Machine offered interesting insights. Some aging advocates say that the West is facing a crisis of systemic ageism, in which older people have become invisible. The debate over how we value the lives of older people isn’t limited to Sweden: It has grown louder in many countries with expanding elderly populations. Even the rhetoric around older people during the pandemic - lumping them in one category - is a symptom of long-standing ageism where they’re no longer seen as individuals with different health and experiences, says Westerholm, who is 88. She argues that a century-old system of dividing society by chronological age categories dehumanizes the 1.6 million Swedes aged 70 and older. To Barbro Westerholm, a member of Swedish Parliament and Liberal Party spokesperson for older people and for LGBTQ issues, the answer is clearly yes. But today, as criticism of authorities has shifted from failed containment to slow vaccination rollouts, another question has loomed over me and my fellow Swedes: Is there an inherent disregard for older people in my country, a supposed bastion of social welfare and equality? Society American individualism and our collective crisisĪt the time, the failure sparked an intense debate about who was to blame and whether a lockdown would have helped.
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