Dehistoricizing identity

Talking rubbish about the pensions triple lock is a booming industry. Rachel Cunliffe says the likelihood of a big rise in the state pension “is an act of generational apartheid: socialism for the old, austerity for the young.” And Polly Toynbee says “one generation is destined for a mighty windfall from the government while the other gets nothing.”

Such claims are flat wrong. The triple lock, if it persists, actually benefits the young more than the old simply because young people can look forward to decades of rises in the pension and hence to a comfortable old age whereas the old will fall off their perch after only a few increases. The power of compound growth is a wonderful thing. To put this another way, a mean state pension hurts workers today because it means they’ll have to contribute more to expensive and risky private pensions to achieve a decent income in their dotage.

The issue of the state pension is not one of welfare policy, but of how to provide for our futures – whether to do so via private schemes or the state. And there’s a strong case for the latter.

Which poses the question: why do people not see this and prefer to frame pensions policy as a clash of generations?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that they dehistoricize identity, regarding it as something fixed in the moment. Which is of course not the case. We all have memories, hopes, expectations and changing circumstances. Edmund Burke famously described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Similarly, we are coalitions of our present selves, past selves and future selves. The triple lock benefits our future selves and hence is good for this coalition. Talk of pensions as a transfer from young to old ignores the fact that we exist in time.

And it is a common error. Here are some other examples of it.

 - “The unemployed” and “benefit claimants.” These are not, in most cases, identities but rather phases millions of us go through. ONS data show that between 2015 and 2019 an average of 301,000 people a quarter moved from work into unemployment – equivalent to over one per cent of those in work – and 439,000 moved from unemployment into work. Stigmatizing benefit claimants as scroungers rather people suffering temporary misfortune is just empirically wrong.

 - “Motorists”. Of course, this too is just something most of us are for only a short while. Traffic calming measures which might annoy us whilst we drive also help us when we walk or cycle. Constructing identities around this trivial fact is as sensible as dividing us between bath tub users and dry people.

 - “Leavers” and “Remainers”. Nobody knew what these were before 2015. Failing to ask how they emerged as such strong identities effaces important questions, such as: what went so wrong with the economy as to create a large mass of people discontent with the status quo? And how did this content come to be exploited by a handful of cranks?

 - Black and minority ethnic people are disproportionately likely to vote Labour – Ipsos Mori estimates that they split 64%-20% to Labour versus the Tories in 2019 – despite many having wealth and socially conservative views. Why? A big reason is that they remember – if only by word of mouth – the vicious historic racism of the Tory party. Yes, the Tories are more diverse now, but it’s not just the present that matters. So does the past. It’s for this same reason that I’m a Marxist even though I am now bourgeois in that I own enough capital not to need to work. Like all of us, I am shaped by my past: there’s a reason why they are called formative years.

 - Why statues matter. As Simukai Chigudu says, “statues are always about the present and not the past”:  

In modern Britain, colonialism has transcended its historical epoch. It exists in the present as a kind of nostalgia for the country’s hegemony on the world stage, while fuelling nationalism, buttressing white supremacy and generating anxieties about immigration and cultural change.

Our identities are formed by time. They are shaped by both distant and recent history as well as our changing personal circumstances. Memories matter. And by the same token, so do our expectations.

Which poses the question: how, then, can anybody ignore such an obvious fact?

I suspect that what we have here is the bastard child of the retarded parent that is retail politics. Segmenting the political “marketplace” into particular “demographics” gives us ahistorical abstractions. In this way “young” and “old” cease to be real people and become mere reifications such as Mondeo man or Worcester woman (remember those?) or the “red wall voter”. The art of bourgeois politics is to divide us along any line other than ownership of capital.

Now, you might object here that real youngsters do have a genuine grievance, in that they do not expect the state pension to continue to outstrip inflation and so anticipate an impoverished old age.

Such as expectation, however, has no economic foundation even if we consider the matter in the narrowest of fiscal terms. The OBR estimates that even if the triple lock stays in place the UK government will spend only 7% on pensions in 2064. Which is less than many European governments spend today. A generous state pension is as affordable as we want it to be. The threat to future state pensions doesn’t come from the public finances but from people talking rot about them. The solution to this is for young people to organize and resist attempts to divide them against older people.

Comments

[rsm]

Why can't government let me live entirely in the moment, if I so choose? Why force a time-bound point of view on anyone?

[JohnM]

Burke:

"To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude"

[Alasdair King]

Love the blog! However, you keep making this argument, that the young should like the triple lock, and I keep thinking "but the young don't think the pensions will be there when they get there." Can you or anyone really predict government spending priorities in forty years' time? No.

[Gregory Bott]

Vicious racism??? bhahahha. Most are here because of the Tory's. Labour on the other hand was far more a restrictive influence on immigration and other anti-worker agenda of the Tory's up until 1990.

Again, left wing politics is never going to revive as long as the obsession over the mud people continue. They are overbred, a threat to future ecological progress and against the working class. Capitalism is done. Its over. Now its time to cull the herd that "white science" created. Its the same as lbtg nonsense. What "enemy of the proletariat" didn't you get???

[stewart S]

This analysis on pension fairness doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Many pensioners rely on means tested top-ups and will get no benefit from the increases. Young people will increasingly rely top-ups as the proportion of house ownership declines. The increase will largely go to the comfortable and well off who also live much longer. A healthy 65 year old today may expect to live another 25 years. This has to be seen in the context of lower tax rates on pension income compered with wages plus a whole raft of other tax breaks ISA, IHT allowances etc, etc. The OBR analysis is likely to overestimate trend growth and underestimate life expectancy and the young are right to fear that pensions will be trimmed for the next generation.

[Blissex]

«The OBR analysis is likely to overestimate trend growth and underestimate life expectancy»

In some areas life expectancy at 65 is falling, in part because it depends on how affluent someone has been up to that point, and for other reasons. For example the premature death of 100,000 oldies because of the lack of adoption of test-trace-isolate by this government with the complicity of Keir Starmer etc.

«and the young are right to fear that pensions will be trimmed for the next generation.»

There are many already advocating that the state pension is "unaffordable".

The problem for the Conservatives (whether tory of whig) and New Labour is that electoral strategies based on extractive policies (property, finance, offshoring, ...) to buy off the votes of "Middle England" are unsustainable because a majority or even a large minority cannot live off everybody else's work in the long term, and after 40 years that long term is coming relatively soon.

[rsm]

"a majority or even a large minority cannot live off everybody else's work in the long term"

Aren't most jobs just creating artificial scarcity, though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.

> In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

> As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income [...]

[chris e]

"an you or anyone really predict government spending priorities in forty years' time? No."

The best time to stop a future change to the pensions system is the future. The second best time is now -- there's no route to a good pension provision in the future which consists of cutting it now.

Apply this to the NHS for instance, the best way to ensure it exists in the future, is to ensure that it doesn't get cut in the present.

If the issue at hand is the political power of the old, one thing I've observed is that young people tend to become older as time progresses.

[Dafis]

Exceptional times demand exceptional measures of a temporary nature. Hence furlough payments, enhanced benefits, inflated contracts for suppliers of key materials to government etc etc. Accordingly it is not an impossibility to select an indicator like the triple lock and take an average of the 3 components. Then in the following year(or 2) make another adjustment so that the "blip" gets evened out. After all this is the government that made much of flattening curves last year! No doubt somewhere along the line any perceived unfairness would get further "smoothing" especially if a General Election was upcoming.

[Nanikore]

"what went so wrong with the economy as to create a large mass of people discontent with the status quo? And how did this content come to be exploited by a handful of cranks?"

It is the critical question. Unfortunately even now, after Brexit and the GFC, I still see pitifully little such introspection, including by both ex-New Labour figures and Corbynites, and within the mainstream economics profession. They still think that they basically got things right. Perhaps they can't get beyond their formative years.