Growing Old Southern

Mary Lee Fielding, a lifetime resident of rural Arkansas, is in her early eighties. When her husband died ten years ago, she was forced to sell their small farm to pay his final medical bills. Now she rents a three-room frame house within a mile of three of her five grown children. She barely gets by on a Social Security check of $360 a month. 

Shirley and Morris Lauder are in their late sixties. They bought a two-bedroom condo a block from the beach in Tampa two years ago. Their income from pensions, investments, and Social Security is more than $30,000 a year — enough to support a comfortable lifestyle. Since they are newcomers to Florida, their memories and many of their investments remain in New Jersey. 

The hypothetical Fielding and Lauders represent the broad spectrum of older people in the South. Their circumstances demonstrate the widening gap between elders at either end of the income scale as the South increasingly becomes a mecca for Northern retirees. 

If you take the average of the financial circumstances of Farmer and the Lauders, you might conclude that older people are doing pretty well. Indeed, averages are often used as part of the Reagan administration's campaign to create an unrealistically positive stereotype of the older American. Many advocates who work with older people believe that this stereotype is being used to undermine public support of programs — such as Social Security and Medicare — that primarily benefit elders. 

Despite the averages, elders more than any other group in the nation are likely to need financial assistance. This is especially true for those who experience severe or chronic health problems as they get further along into old age. 

Statistics that illustrate and accentuate differences among elders can be useful. They point out changes over time and demonstrate how older Southerners differ from elders outside the South. For example, people throughout the nation are living longer; the number of elders — particularly the very old — is projected to increase at a rate dramatically greater than that of the total population. Between 1980 and 2030, the number of people aged 85 and over is expected to almost quadruple (Table 1). Projected changes in the ratio of people over 65 to people aged 18 to 65 also are especially important (Table 2). 

These two demographic changes have far-reaching implications for the future solvency of programs that provide financial and medical assistance to elders. These programs will have to help increasing numbers of older Americans, and they are funded primarily by working-age people. 

Several unique features distinguish elders in the South. The average age of people in the South is increasing at an even greater rate than outside the South as Northern retirees continue to move south and as increasing numbers of older blacks return to the Southern communities where they were born. The rate of increase of Southern elders is about one and a half times the rate for the nation as a whole. 

Elders already comprise a larger proportion of the population in the South (12.5 percent) than in the non-South (11.4 percent). This small difference is expected to increase significantly. It is predicted that by the year 2000 almost 14 percent of Southerners will be 65 or older, compared to only 11.5 percent of those outside the South. There will be about 2.9 million more people 65 and over in the South in the year 2000 than there are today, and 1.8 million of them will be women. 

Southerners 65 and older have completed fewer years of schooling than elders outside the South. One-fifth of older whites and more than half of older blacks in the South have completed no more than five years of schooling — a level of education that often leaves a person functionally illiterate. Thirty percent of all those 75 or older have completed no more than five years. Comparable percentages outside the South are only about half as high. 

Functionally illiterate elders are very likely to have inadequate incomes. Their Social Security benefits, which are based on earnings over a lifetime, are likely to be small; they are less able to obtain employment to supplement their Social Security checks; and they are likely to have a harder time taking advantage of government entitlement programs with requirements they are often unable to read. (See table on education levels by age, South and non-South, on p. 138.) 

If we were deciding whether to cross a river, we wouldn't rely on knowledge that the water — on the average — is only four feet deep. It's equally dangerous to rely on averages in making decisions about the needs of our nation's elders. Southerners especially should be aware of this danger because Southern elders are most likely to be hurt by reliance on averages. In looking at income figures, and especially poverty figures, the danger becomes very clear. People in the South are more likely to be living below the poverty level, so it's not surprising that elders in the South are poorer than their peers elsewhere (Table 3). In 1980 more than 10 percent of our white elders and almost 25 percent of our black elders had total incomes that placed them below 75 percent of the official poverty line (Table 4). These figures are about twice as high as the percentages of equally poor elders outside of the South. Significantly, no Southern states have chosen to supplement the meager monthly Supplemental Security Income stipend allowed the poorest of the elderly poor. 

Perhaps one of the most important differences between people 65 and older in the South as compared to the non-South is the contrast between the incomes of older and younger people. Unlike their peers in other regions of the nation, Southern elders, especially those living in rural areas, are more likely than younger people to have low incomes (Table 5). 

Southern elders also are more likely than their counterparts outside the South to live in rural areas. In 1980 one out of every three people 65 or older in the South lived in a rural community (population 2,500 or less), compared to only one out of five elders in the non-South (Table 6). Almost all of the rural black elders in the U.S. — 94 percent — live in the South. 

The statistics show that Southern elders differ from older Americans outside the South in several significant ways. But the nation's elders share some circumstances also, including the twin burdens of the physical effects of aging and society's negative stereotypes of older people. 

In sheer numbers the population of elders in the South is growing rapidly and at an increasingly fast rate. The extent to which these numbers lead to more political power depends in part on the degree to which elders and others determined to create a more humane society recognize their common bonds and work together.