ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters, I have examined how the ‘ageing society’ became a useful and meaningful descriptor for contemporary, uncertainty-laden, technological polities. This was divided in two parts. I first suggested that the ‘ageing society’ denoted a ‘crisis’ in the knowledge formats and practices that had underpinned the development of welfare states, and the creation of old age was a matter of administrative concern. This led, I argued, to framing uncertainty within the ‘ageing society’ around technoscientific promises geared to modify health and productivity through a set of converging tools that range from the molecular to the sociological. I then explored how this focus on health and productivity has been resolved within population science and policies since the late nineteenth century. Here, I argued that the relationship between health and longevity has become central to the problem of population because of how the concern with the ‘quality of population’ itself disqualified immigration and then fertility as solutions to the problem of demographic ageing. There were, however, two key obstacles to this epistemic and political investment in what later became known as healthy ageing – and its re-evaluation of existing human capital within stable populations. One was the widespread belief that there was an inexorable inverse relationship between ageing and productivity or ‘vitality’. As this relationship became a matter of debate at the turn of the 1980s, another hurdle arose, which related to the methods used to explore this relationship. How should ageing be measured, and what is its relationship with health and functionality? In this chapter, I explore why and how the issue of age mensuration became central to the constitution of the ‘ageing society’. Doing this entails, first, understanding how chronological age (CA) – the number of years lived since birth – itself became a useful index for persons’ functional capacity or health. This, in turn, requires seeing CA as both a form of measurement and an institutional format (Desrosières, 1991) – an agencement, to be exact. CA developed as the marker for a specific assemblage I earlier described as the ‘insurance society’, that is to say, for the modern age-stratified system of public rights and duties that includes taxes, schooling, the military draft and access to welfare rights such as pensions (Kohli, 1986).
