Post-Fordism and population ageing

Two features of recent economic experience have been the transition to post-Fordism and the ageing of populations. Post-Fordism entails diverse production and consumption, flexible employment, privatisation and a smaller welfare state. Population ageing is predicted to cause financial problems for state pension schemes and could provoke an ageing crisis. Although post-Fordism and population ageing have similar expected consequences, with a stress on welfare retrenchment, they have been discussed as separate topics and few connections have been made between them; the present paper aims to bring them closer together and consider how they are related. Post-Fordism could be seen as resolving the ageing crisis and offering people better work and retirement choices in a new, post-Fordist life course, but this version of events is questionable. An alternative view is that post-Fordism and the ageing crisis are symptoms of the general movement towards privatisation and laissez faire, which is by no means guaranteed to improve the welfare of older people.