Covid and the climate crisis show why we need a new social contract between old and young
Covid-19 continues to bring many inter-generational tensions to the fore. Older people bear the brunt of the disease’s impact on health; younger people have to make economic and social sacrifices to protect them. But the pandemic is just one reason why the social contract between the generations is under pressure.
Within families, the social contract between the generations is easy to understand. Parents want to give their children the capabilities and means to have a good life; children want their parents to have a comfortable old age. But at a societal level, the social contract between the generations is more complex. The legacy we leave to future generations has many dimensions – the stock of human knowledge and culture, inventions, infrastructure and institutions, and the state of the natural world. We owe a great deal to previous generations and most would agree that we also owe something to future generations we will never meet, and that each generation should leave the next at least as well off, and preferably better off than they were.
In many advanced economies, those born between the end of the second world war and the early 1960s benefited from decades of sustained economic growth, secure jobs with benefits and major gains in health and social conditions. The generations that followed have faced a world of more flexible and precarious work, rising house prices and a period of fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis that reduced social spending in many countries. Many carry large debt burdens from student loans and credit cards, which limit their ability to afford a mortgage to buy a home, or start a family. The income gains and the prospect of security in old age experienced by past generations have stalled and, in some countries, reversed. The risks of poverty are shifting from older people to younger people. Today, there are many in advanced economies who believe the next generation will be worse off than their parents.
Meanwhile, so-called Generation Z (those born after 2000) are at the forefront of the youth protest about the climate crisis. “You will die of old age; we will die of climate change,” read the sign of a young protester at the climate strike in London in September 2019. These young people are not convinced that older generations are doing enough to leave them with an inhabitable planet or viable livelihoods.
How, then, can we rebalance the social contract between the generations? The best way we can improve the economic prospects of future generations is through education. A massive investment in early years is the most effective way to equalise opportunity for all young people. Ideally, each young person would start with an educational endowment to enable to them to develop skills throughout their lives. More investment in re-skilling is also needed to enable people to adapt as jobs change over time. The resulting economic gains would also help pay for the elderly care needs of an ageing population and make debt more sustainable in the future.
To reduce the fiscal burden on future generations, today’s older people will need to work longer. In most middle- and high-income countries, workers today can expect to spend about a third of their adult life in retirement. The basic problem is that the years in retirement relative to the years in work have grown too much. By 2060, all the G20 countries will have shrinking populations and the number of people over 65 who need to be supported by the working age population will have at least doubled. To avoid an undue burden on today’s young people, we need to link retirement ages explicitly to life expectancy, so that the ratio of time working and time in retirement comes into better balance. There must be a sensible way to finance social care that prevents destitution in old age and asks the better off to contribute.
We must also do as much as we
can to redress environmental damage. A good start would be to eliminate the $4-6 trillion in annual government subsidies to agriculture, water, fisheries and fossil fuels that actively encourage the exploitation of the environment. These subsidies mean it is not just free for companies to deplete the natural world, the taxpayer actually pays for them to do it. There needs to more investment in conservation and restoration of the biosphere, such as planting trees. Current public and private spending on conservation is about $91bn, less than 2% of what is spent on subsidies to degrade the environment. The next step is to measure things properly: where market prices do not convey the true value of environmental services, we must find other ways to factor them into our calculations and decisions. Finally, governments should use fiscal policy to change incentives, such as taxing carbon or incentivising green technologies.
Finding cohesion between the generations is complicated by the fact that older people tend to be more effective at exercising political power than young people. Research has shown that the share of older people in the population has a significant impact on the pattern of public spending. Put simply, more older people means more spending on pensions and less on education. Older voters are more averse to policies, such as low interest rates, that are intended to increase economic demand and maintain full employment but that lower returns on savings and risk more inflation. Having retired, they generally care less about unemployment, relative to the average citizen. Political parties in ageing societies are increasingly forced to cater to these demands.
One way or another, we must find a way to give more weight to the voices and interests of younger and future generations. Otherwise the social contract that shapes the future will be designed exclusively by those who will not live to see it, without the input of those who will. Investing more in education and skills, finding ways to
Friday 26 February 2021 manage the costs of pensions, health and social care, and redressing environmental damage would be enlightened investments by one generation in the next: this would benefit all of us and provide a new social contract for our time.
•Minouche Shafik is director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author of What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract
the hands of relatively few landowners. Established in 2013 by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and the non-profit group Greenhorns, which supports young farmers, the trust is guided by the notion that farmland should be held as part of a “commons”.
They used as their building blocks the most well-known model of land commons in the US today: community land trusts (CLTs). Black farmers and civil rights activists pioneered the model in the US in 1969, forming what is widely considered the nation’s first CLT: New Communities. The 5,000-acre (2,000-hectare) farm community that existed in Albany, Georgia, until 1985, collectivized the burdens of land and business ownership, and maximized individual efforts.
Under a CLT, a non-profit organization acquires land – either by purchasing it, receiving it by donation, or acquiring it from the government – then places it in trust, permanently removing it from sale and speculation. The trust is governed in part by its tenants and community members, who decide how to use it, whether for housing, businesses, cultural space, parks, gardens or farms.
Tenants – private homeowners and businesses – then lease the lands for renewable, inheritable 99-year terms, and at below-market rates. But most of the 260 CLTs in the US are concerned with creating affordable lowincome housing. “There was just no focus on agriculture,” said Ian McSweeney, the Agrarian Trust’s organizational director.
Trust staff members told Libah that they would fundraise to buy land for the Somali Bantu community to farm, but there was a catch: they would continue to rent the land from the landholder, the newly incorporated Agrarian Commons. “There was a lot of hesitancy from the community to not own the land outright,” recalled Balkhow. But unlike private ownership, CLTs and the Commons democratize control over the land to tenants, including the tasks of budgeting and setting rent. Once Libah and the Somali Bantu farmers understood this, they signed on.
They located a 107-acre farm, complete with weathered plywood barns, for sale in the town of Wales, near Lewiston. The trust raised $367,000 to buy the property, and purchase irrigation, soil and building supplies. In September, the Little Jubba Maine Agrarian Commons bought the land, and in October, the Somali Bantu farmers began migrating to their new home.
The Agrarian Trust has now begun to fundraise for the other nine Agrarian Commons, scattered throughout the continental US, from Tennessee to Montana. Each one is differently composed, depending on the local farmers and the organization spearheading it: in West Virginia, land that a community farm is already leasing from the county government will be placed into the commons; while in Minnesota, farm, environmental and Native justice activists are designing their Commons from scratch. Their eventual goal is “increasing the number of Agrarian Commons across the land, and increasing the landholdings in each of the commons,” said McSweeney. But despite the trust’s paternal role, power is ultimately decentralized to the commons then shared within the community, meaning that each commons will remain locally grounded.
The scale of the effort is notable, said Jim Oldham, the executive director of Equity Trust, an organization that works to protect farmland and keep it affordable. Just a handful of organizations in the US, including Equity Trust, have sought these goals through community control of land, and usually only in isolated cases. Most work to prevent development on farmland by attaching “conservation easements”, a legal restriction, to private property deeds. But the “high visibility, large impact” national network created by the Agrarian Trust has the potential “to do this work at a scale that is meaningful”, Oldham said.
“Making land affordable – that’s one way of addressing the racial wealth gap,” said Neil Thapar, co-director of Minnow, a new land justice project in California. (Thapar gave early advice to the Trust on creating the Commons.) The racial disparities in private land ownership are stark: white farmers own 97% of farms, 94% of farm acreage, and 98% of net farm income in the US today. And the Commons can provide stable land access to “communities of color who are locked out of land ownership”, he said. But while conservation easements are “focused on maintaining individual private property ownership”, CLTs and the Commons are driven by the notion that “land shouldn’t be owned for private benefit or private profit”.
This idea has already compelled others to take up the model. “Ownership gives you permanent power over the land,” said Leah Penniman, a food sovereignty activist and author of Farming While Black, in 2018, as she and her network of Bipoc farmers in the north-east were forming their own commons. “But, to be clear, we don’t believe the land can be ‘owned’,” she said, and she observed that most farmland organizations were “all about preserving the land, not engaging the land for people”.
So with guidance from the Agrarian Trust, they launched the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust in 2019, bringing an explicit racial justice focus to the Agrarian Commons model, and tweaking it to include protocols for collaborating with tribes that have historically inhabited the region. “The land question has been at the center of our black liberation movement, and the fact that we needed to acquire and also be thinking about land ownership in a collective way – I don’t think it was ever a question.” A land trust was one of “the ways that a community can collectively build wealth in a way that restores the land and nature”, she said.
And there is much to restore. Intensive industrial monoculture farming is depleting America’s soil, polluting its lands and contributing to an outsized portion of global carbon emissions, thanks to a dependence on global supply chains and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. As Libah sauntered through their Lewiston community plots in August, he pointed to the bean plants interspersed between corn stalks. “When we were in Africa, we always used to do this, but nobody knew the science,” he said. He only learned recently that agronomists also support this method: beans fix nitrogen in the soil, while corn requires nitrogen to grow. It lives in the toolbox of regenerative farming: permaculture, poly-cultures, or agro-forestry, which combine complementary plants, prioritize soil health and even sequester carbon.
Centuries ago, Wabanaki farmers also planted crops in this region in a “three sisters” formation: corn plants next to the beans, with squash or pumpkin offering ground cover and reducing weeds. Now, the Bantu farmers will bring this tradition to their permanent land base in the Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons.
“Everything is planted in the corn,” said Libah, pointing at the scallions, peppers, cabbage and tomatoes in their midst. All the families grow it. It doesn’t even require irrigation. The iskashitofarmers sell it dried to a local tortilla company. But just as land is “not only for farming”, corn is also not just a recipe ingredient or source of nutrition and profits. Libah still remembers the experience of planting his first corn on US soil in 2014. “It was emotional,” he recalled. “I never thought I would put seeds in the ground again.”
The racial disparities in private land ownership are stark: white farmers own 97% of farms, 94% of farm acreage, and 98% of net farm income in the US today
cheekbones and wide-set eyes give her something classy, almost blueblooded. It was her above-the-title star quality that made sure her career survived – and thrived – when the film crashed and burned.
12. Dangerous Minds (1995)
A big and self-consciously serious role for Pfeiffer as the inspirational teacher in a tough school with a class full of disadvantaged African American and Latinx pupils. Such a role is always a little preposterous, and nowadays film-makers are warier of “white saviour” narratives, but this film makes things even hokier by making Pfeiffer a Marine Corps veteran, with some tasty karate moves that she busts out under pressure, earning a bit of muchneeded respect. But Pfeiffer sells it as hard as she can. Perhaps without meaning to, she does suggest something teacherly and grand in her address to the slouching, sneering, soon-to-be-redeemed kids.
11. Into the Night (1985)
Whatever else you say about it, this was the movie that gave Pfeiffer a scene with David Bowie, who had a bad-guy cameo. Into the Night is an example of a recurring Pfeiffer persona: the mobster or mobster’s girlfriend, a type she plays with entertaining gusto, her refined beauty contrasting well with her gum-chewing, wise-ass criminality. John Landis directed this romp and filled it with celebrity walk-ons (including Bowie). Jeff Goldblum is the bored office worker who discovers his wife is cheating on him and heads out to the airport with a vague notion of flying off somewhere. Pfeiffer crashlands on the bonnet of his car, being chased by some scary individuals, and fiercely orders the mousy Goldblum to drive her to safety. After this meet-cute, they are off. It is chaotic, but Pfeiffer’s tough-broad routine holds up well.
10. Ladyhawke (1985)
Michelle Pfeiffer fans – and devotees of the offbeat 80s film you might have accidentally rented on VHS back in the day – have an enormous affection for this medieval fantasy from the screenwriter Edward Khmara and the director Richard Donner. In some ways, Pfeiffer’s ethereal beauty and style makes her a shoo-in for this kind of role: it is a pity she showed up too late to be cast in John Boorman’s
Excalibur. In medieval France, there is a comely young noblewoman, Isabeau of Anjou (Pfeiffer), who is sometimes in the company of a wolf. She is perhaps in love, from afar, with the gallant captain of the guard, played by Rutger Hauer, who is often seen with a hawk. The awful truth is that a curse has been placed on them, which turns Isabeau into a hawk at night and the captain into a wolf during the day, which means they can never be together as humans. It is hilariously bizarre – and Pfeiffer’s face, with its patrician hauteur, is just right for it.
9. Batman Returns (1992)
The 90s have dawned and here was Pfeiffer’s career second-act in superhero movies, playing Catwoman, a slinky-sexy role that could have been a poisoned chalice, but wasn’t. She gained iconic status in this faintly underpar Batman film, at least partly because of her truly outrageous blackleatherette outfit plus mask, designed by Bob Ringwood and Mary Vogt, rivalled only at the time by the safety-pin dress Liz Hurley wore to the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral two years later. In fact, the movie gives Catwoman a great backstory and transformation scene, wittily suggesting that this supremely predatory and confident villain used to be a dowdy, depressed “cat lady” living all on her own in a dull apartment.
8. Frankie and Johnny (1991)
Audiences relaxed into a warm bath of romantic schmaltz with this film directed by Garry “Pretty Woman” Marshall, adapted from the Terrence McNally play. Al Pacino is the shortorder cook, Johnny, who falls in love with the hardbitten waitress, Frankie, played by Pfeiffer. The two have a definite chemistry, although perhaps of the actorly sort. Pfeiffer has a great scene when the besotted Johnny persuades her one evening to open her robe so that he can gaze at her naked body for 15 seconds; Frankie has to keep talking to ride out the embarrassment and finds herself nervously monologuing on the bizarrely unerotic subject of a pet parakeet that she had to throw in the rubbish bin when it died. A big Broadway-style role for Pfeiffer; the sort she didn’t often get.
7. Mother! (2017)
Darren Aronofsky’s bizarre and bonkers horror fantasy made some people very cross and upset. It is fair to say this film is an acquired taste that a proportion of its audience found themselves unable to acquire over its running time. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a creatively blocked writer and his young wife, who allow a strange couple into their house, played by Ed Harris and a superbly witty and confident Pfeiffer. She is an urbane older woman who starts taunting and goading poor, polite Jennifer about the fact that she doesn’t have children; she also gives inappropriately intimate advice about lingerie. It is a rich and juicy role – she is a brittle, obnoxious alcoholic and chain-smoker – although perhaps Pfeiffer’s performance got lost amid the freaky maelstrom of the film and the critical argument that detonated around it.
6. Scarface (1983)
Pfeiffer plays the beautiful Elvira, the lover of Pacino’s cruel and violent gangster Tony Montana in Brian De Palma’s remake of the Howard Hawks original that starred Paul Muni. She is at first a gorgeous and haughty creature who boldly asks him to dance in a nightclub and mocks his Cuban background. Finally, Elvira is intrigued by Tony’s candid declaration of interest in her and they get together. Then, when the truth of their lives together is revealed to her, she retreats into a torpor of cocaine addiction, depression and self-hate. It is a difficult, unsympathetic role, made odder by her distinct facial similarity to Tony’s sister Gina, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. In danger of being upstaged by Pacino and Mastrantonio, Pfeiffer maintains the frangible veneer that the character needs.
5. Love Field (1992)
Pfeiffer boldly tackles an emotional movie that comes close to Sirk-ian melodrama, earning her one of her three Academy Award nominations. She plays an unhappily married 60s Dallas housewife called Lurene, who fan-worships Jackie Kennedy. When poor, lonely Lurene hears in 1963 that John and Jackie Kennedy are to make their fateful visit to Dallas, she makes sure she is going to see the mega-celebrity couple in the flesh. When she is caught up in the terrible calamity, she is overwhelmed by a sense of purpose and resolves to go to Washington for the state funeral and in doing so becomes involved in a strange situation with an African American man, played by Dennis Haysbert. It is a strange film – overcomplicated, overwrought; the kind of movie that had not been popular for decades – but Pfeiffer gives an earnest, heartfelt performance.
4. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Pfeiffer has a very difficult role, perhaps the most difficult, in Christopher Hampton’s elegant and languorous adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel of sexual intrigue, directed by Stephen Frears. She is the beautiful, sensitive and virtuous Madame de Tourvel, to whom the dissolute, predatory Vicomte de Valmont, played by John Malkovich, starts making his sinuous advances. Valmont’s lizardly character is pretty well fixed (at least at the beginning), as is that of the heartless Marquise de Merteuil, played by Glenn Close. But Madame de Tourvel has to change, gradually: she has to be credibly pure and scandalised by Valmont, but must also plausibly thaw and glow and be amused and finally overwhelmed by his candid overtures. She has to fall in love with the jaded Valmont, and he with her. Pfeiffer is impeccably cast and gives a very welljudged performance, bringing an aristocratic mien to the film.
3. Married to the Mob (1988)
Here is the one movie that proved Pfeiffer can play comedy and that her beautiful movie-star face can be animated by the thrill of delivering funny lines. In this offbeat caper, Jonathan Demme dramatised the mob-wife scenario that Martin Scorsese was to address later in Goodfellas, although the ironised comic tone is closer to The Sopranos. Pfeiffer is Angela, the wife of “Cucumber” Frank De Marco, played by Alec Baldwin, and a stressed mum to their little boy. But she is sick of hanging out with all the other mafia wives and dismayed at the bad habits that her little boy is getting into, such as rooking all the other kids in the neighbourhood with the three-card monte. When “Cucumber” is brutally whacked, Angela wants to get out of the whole business, with their boy. She is a widow, but she wants to divorce the mob. That isn’t easy, especially as she appears to have fallen for the goofily innocent lawman Mike, played by Matthew Modine. It is a great performance, helped by the kind of smart and beguiling script that was not to come along all that often.
2. The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
Pfeiffer’s great singing voice is showcased in a movie that many devotees consider the high-water mark of her Hollywood output. Jeff and Beau Bridges are the Baker boys, Jack and Frank, a cheesy piano lounge act who are grinding tiredly through their routine in the clubs and decide they need a singer to perk things up. After the traditional audition montage of hilarious no-hopers, Pfeiffer shows up chaotically late and, having removed her gum, blows them away with More Than You Know. Her character is Susie Diamond, a high-price escort who wants the redemption of showbusiness. Susie turns their duo into an emotionally fraught trio and Frank feels upset and fraternally betrayed when he realises that Jack is falling hard for Susie. And who wouldn’t, considering her showstoppingly slinky performance of Makin’ Whoopee in a red dress, slinking all over the piano, whose ivories Jack is tickling? Pfeiffer comes close to Marilyn Monroe status with her open, sexy and warm-hearted performance.
1. The Age of Innocence (1993)
Overt passion and adult sexuality have rarely been demanded of Pfeiffer, but it is here, in Edith Wharton’s story of high-class New York society manners of the late 19th century, a world in which feelings are coded and concealed. Impressively, she makes her mark opposite the mysterious and exquisite Daniel Day-Lewis. Pfeiffer plays Ellen, a beautiful and sensitive woman who has returned to New York in despair, having escaped a disastrous marriage to a grasping and unscrupulous Polish aristocrat. She is a controversial and divisive figure in high society, where some are reluctant to accept her, but the lawyer Newland Archer (Day-Lewis) agrees to act for her. In any case, Ellen is a relative of his fiancee, May (Winona Ryder). Soon, Newland falls for Ellen – he is forced to gratify his erotic and romantic obsession with something as fanatically fetishistic as peeling off her glove and kissing the inside of her wrist. Pfeiffer becomes his amused confidante at first, listening to his tortured confidences about how he does not wish to rush into marriage, but she is someone who has a worldly wisdom and a knowledge of the human heart far in excess of Newland, who is a little callow. Pfeiffer raises Day-Lewis’s game as perhaps none of his co-stars have ever done in an excellent and thoroughly grownup performance.