There is significant variation in wealth and poverty among the nation’s older people. Some individuals and couples find themselves poor in part because of fixed pensions and skyrocketing health care costs (see Chapter 18). Nevertheless, as a group, older people in the United States are neither homogeneous nor poor. The typical elderly person enjoys a standard of living that is much higher than at any point in the nation’s past. Class differences among the elderly remain evident but tend to narrow somewhat; Those older people who enjoyed middle-class incomes while younger tend to remain better off after retirement than those who previously had lower incomes, but the financial gap lessens a bit (Arber and Ginn 1991; Duncan and Smith 1989).