We are all prisoners of our image of the past, especially of the past through which we have lived. Our memories are real and potent. It is difficult for us to accept that they are coloured by hindsight, misunderstanding and myth and that as we remember we compress, distort and reinterpret events. We think of features of our society and economy as unchanging when in fact they are transient, the product of particular circumstances which are unlikely to be repeated.

Such myths are particularly dangerous when they form the unstated background to policy decisions, which are often hasty responses to short-term problems. The role of the family in society and the economy is an example. Most of us think of the "traditional' family of two parents and two children, an association of mutual support lasting through generations. Parents feed, clothe and educate their children and later in life, after retirement, can look to their children and grandchildren for support and help in old age. Throughout, relations and friends support the family and rally round in time of crisis.

This is the implicit or explicit basis of proposals to reduce state support for children and old people and to increase the responsibility of the family for its members. Yet the "traditional' family is actually a creation of the recent past and is already beginning to disappear. It filled the short gap between the disappearance of one scourge of marriages, death, and the appearance of another, divorce. The chances of being the child of a broken home through divorce today are very similar to the chances of being one through death ninety years ago. Then as now, marriage break-up was a major cause of poverty. Only in the interim period, the halcyon days of the inter-war years, did marriages survive in the way that the myth proclaims.

The Human Resources research programme of the CEPR is particularly concerned with changes in another form of family support, that of the elderly. A second myth about the family of the past is that it was an effective agent of care for the elderly. In fact, old age at the beginning of this century all too often brought pauperism, resort to the Poor Law and the workhouse; at least as many of the old were cared for in this way as are cared for in institutions today. Once again, the declining death rates and relatively stable marriages of the middle years of the century saw a change, but family care of the elderly thus has a very complex history. Its future must be uncertain in a period of increasing divorce and great increases in the average age at death.

What happens to the elderly is not only a matter of family support. There are two questions: who are "the elderly' and what financial arrangements are made for them, either by state or private provision? The idea of retirement as 65 or 60 is now well established in our society. It is financed by state pensions and massive encouragement to private savings. Research Fellows in the Human Resources programme are now showing, however, that retirement and the pension are creations of this century. Moreover, a pension at age 60 or 65, and the automatic assumption that men and women should leave the workforce at that age arose at a time when average life expectancy at those ages was much lower than it is today. If we continue to define those over 60 or 65 as "the elderly' and to treat them as if they do not, or must not, continue to play an important economic role, we lock ourselves into the past.

Inadequate attention to history and to long-term changes in our society can also lead us to pay far too much attention to particular striking events. The contraceptive pill has been blamed for almost everything in our society; but in particular for two changes since the 1960s, a declining birthrate and an increase in the proportion of married women at work. CEPR Research Fellows have, by contrast, investigated the long-term determinants of fertility and female participation in the British workforce and have demonstrated the close connection of both, not with a particular form of contraception, but with the wage that married women can command in the labour market. Their work and that of others demonstrates that in this as well as previous centuries demographic events have been inextricably entangled with the economy. Unless this is realised and reflected in the examination of policy choices, policy-makers once again risk being trapped within a false image of the past.

Another problem facing both policy-makers and historians is that of becoming transfixed by statistics about the past or present which are easily available but which may not reveal the full truth. This danger arises, for example, in the use of mortality statistics. These have often been taken as the main, or even the only, indicator of the health of the population and the effectiveness of medical care. The decline of the great killer diseases of the past, most recently tuberculosis, and the comparative failure today to control mortality from cancer and coronary heart disease, are elevated in importance. Other forms of illness which do less to threaten life but still greatly affect the welfare and economic productivity of the population are given less emphasis. As people live longer, so in many ways the particular reasons why they die assume less significance.

CEPR Research Fellows are, therefore, investigating long-term changes in the health of the British population and their relationship to the economy. Studies of the average height of the population and of sub-groups within it are providing reliable evidence of nutritional status and of the effects of improved incomes, on the one hand, and of setbacks to that improvement caused by such factors as unemployment, on the other. Medical care and the organization of the health services also have a part to play, and the study of the many attempts to plan health services is an important guide to the possible benefits and pitfalls in future changes.
This research programme is therefore examining myths about the family, ageing, fertility and health, and about education and the nature of labour markets. In order to make policy for the present we must know what the past was really like.

Roderick Floud

This is one of a series of articles describing research relevant to economic policy undertaken by CEPR Research Fellows. Roderick Floud is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck College, London, and Director of the CEPR research programme on Human Resources since 1900. Further details of the research can be found in the HR Discussion Papers and in the reports of HR workshops in the CEPR Bulletin.