Quality of Life in Old Age, Inequality and Welfare State Reform: A Comparison Between Norway, Germany, and England

The ageing of societies has strong implications for social security and for social gerontological analysis, while diversity, social inequality, and social justice are traditional core themes of sociology and social policy. Both perspectives are interrelated, as demographic transitions may, on the one hand, be influencing the social status attached to age and cohort membership. On the other hand, current reforms of welfare state systems – partly in reaction to demographic shifts, partly motivated by changing ideologies and ongoing processes of globalization – may have effects on the average welfare situations of people of different ages and cohorts and the distribution of these situations within age groups and cohorts. In the current debate, distributive relations between generations as age groups as well as birth cohorts are discussed as a crucial problem of inequality and justice in modern society. The role of generational equity in this debate is becoming increasingly dominant, both in Germany and in other European societies (Schmähl, 2004). However, the meaning of this term is still unclear and is used quite arbitrarily in current debates. Popular societal discourse in particular is characterised by a muddle of disparate ideas about social justice, distributive norms, and patterns (Tesch-Roemer and Motel-Klingebiel, 2004; Clasen and von Oorschot, 2002). Beyond doubt, there are problems with distribution and equity in most modern welfare states, as demonstrated by contemporary disputes; the assumption is often found that the young could be disadvantaged by the setting up of modern welfare regimes, while the old face enormous gains from the expansion of social security systems (Bommier et al., 2004; Price and Ginn, 2003).