Senior Citizens And The Economy

While much of the current literature on the economic consequences of an aging population focuses on the negative aspects, this enlightening book argues that seniors can bring significant benefits such as vitality and competitiveness to an urban economy. The authors illustrate the ways an aging population can have a positive impact on urban centers, including the move by large numbers of seniors from the suburbs to the city, where their disproportionate consumption of education and the arts helps rejuvenate city centers. Given this, the authors conclude that a large and active senior population has the potential to assist a city in the achievement of its strategic economic objectives. The book includes analyses of the effects of population aging on best practices in 40 cities in the US and EU, with surprising results, as well as interviews with city officials and leaders. Academics, researchers and public officials in the areas of urban development, public policy and aging will find much in this original approach to interest and provoke debate.

The Economics of Aging presents results from an ongoing National Bureau of Economic Research project. Contributors consider the housing mobility and living arrangements of the elderly, their labor force participation and retirement, the economics of their health care, and their financial status. The goal of the research is to further our understanding both of the factors that determine the well-being of the elderly and of the consequences that follow from an increasingly older population with longer individual life spans. Each paper is accompanied by critical commentary.

Although we inevitably grow old, the social, cultural, and economic characteristics associated with aging are neither natural nor inevitable. James Snell brings a historian’s perspective to the problems of aging and the discourse that surrounds it, a discourse that affects both public policy and the way we think about older people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the elderly were coming to be thought of as a distinct group in society, whose members were inherently weak, sick, and dependent. Poorhouses were slowly being converted to old age homes, and new laws tried to force families to support their elderly parents. The state would supply only limited assistance to those who needed it. The Old Age Pension program, initiated in Canada in 1927, began to change society’s approach to the elderly. Over time individual pensioners learned to manipulate the program to their best advantage and, as a group, they began to assert their common interests, forming the first ‘grey lobby’ to pressure state bureaucrats and politicians to improve both policy and practice. The economic troubles of the 1930s and the early war years reinforced new views of the state as well as a culture of entitlement among the elderly and their families, and many other groups. By mid-century the redefinition of old age was reflected in state policies that offered the elderly new status as ‘senior citizens’ and provided them with new forms of support – particularly universal pensions and health care – captured in the phrase ‘a citizen’s wage.’