One of the greatest threats facing developed economies today can often be summarized in a single, striking figure: the rapidly rising old-age dependency ratio. Many projections show this ratio, the proportion of those 65 or older who are reliant on the working-age population, surging towards 48.6% by 2060, a 16% increase from Canada’s 2023 dependency level. Economic analyses typically frame population aging as a story of constraint and liability. The numbers point to declining labor force participation rates (LFPR) and skyrocketing pension costs, what some call the fiscal price of longevity.
Yet what if the “dependent elder,” viewed purely as a drain on national income, is actually an eccentric revolutionary?
Marian Leatherby, the 92-year-old protagonist of Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, embodies that question. Carrington’s surrealist classic aging is familiarly cast as toothless, deaf, and faintly bearded, traits that land Marian in a home for “senile females.” To her family, she’s a quantifiable burden; to economists, she would be the embodiment of fiscal liability. She is even described as a “drooling sack of decomposing flesh.” However, Carrington stages a powerful counternarrative to traditional economic thought: Marian’s exile becomes an act of liberation, her supposed decline a portal to radical transformation. In this world, the limitations of old age are not a phase of diminishing returns or heightened financial risk, but a form of creative agency that challenges the rigidity of economic models.
Traditional economic frameworks tend to focus on what can be measured: the costs of pensions, the pressure on labor markets, and the ripple effects on capital accumulation. As the dependency ratio climbs, pension systems strain, tax rates rise, and savings rates fall. Moreover, demographic imbalances between elderly and younger populations often result in lower savings rates and slower investment in innovation. As vertical and horizontal socioeconomic mobility contract, societies risk growing inward, becoming less flexible and less imaginative. Many economists sound the alarm over declining LFPR and its long-term drag on productivity.
Yet such analyses, however precise, often fail to capture what Carrington understood intuitively: that the experience of aging cannot be reduced to a fiscal equation.
Even within economics, the story is more nuanced than it seems. Macroeconomic models predict dramatic declines in savings, while microeconomic studies of household spending suggest the opposite: that dissaving in retirement remains relatively modest, implying the overall impact of aging on aggregate savings may be less severe than feared. This tension between macro pessimism and micro realism hints at something deeper: that the real “value” of aging might lie beyond what markets can quantify.
Carrington’s novel stages an explicit rebellion against purely economic assessments of aging. Through Marian’s sharp wit and dreamlike transformation, The Hearing Trumpet counters the logic of diminishing returns. Her deafness, symbolized by the hearing trumpet itself, opens an inner world of memory and creative agency, countering her social invisibility. As the story unfolds, Marian undergoes an alchemical rebirth, transforming from a “drooling sack of decomposing flesh” to someone “as spry as a mountain goat.” This renewal becomes perceptible the moment Marian retrieves her hearing trumpet, which grants her access to conversations and buried truths others overlook, transforming supposed decline into a heightened capacity for insight. Carrington dismantles the fatalism of aging, demonstrating instead how decline can morph into vitality and invisibility into vision.
In this way, The Hearing Trumpet echoes the economic idea of “productive aging,” but expands it far beyond the labor market. Carrington’s women in later life possess intuition and wisdom that resist commodification. Their creativity stands as an unpriced asset, one essential to the vitality of both human and economic systems.
Demographic data may shape our real-life policy responses; however, Carrington’s surreal lens reminds us of what purely fiscal approaches miss: the imaginative, the unquantifiable, the deeply human. If economics teaches us to manage scarcity, her fiction teaches us to see abundance where others see loss.
To navigate the changing demographic landscape, we need both fiscal discipline and cultural imagination, and a recognition that old age is not merely a deficit to balance but a realm of renewal, agency, and enduring value.
