1 - Recognition of the economics of aging

Summary

The economics of population aging is essentially a new concern for economists as well as other social scientists. Individual aging, of course, has always been a concern of man, both as an observer and as an individual undergoing the process of aging. Belletristic and other literature relating to man is replete with references to aging concerning its incidence among individuals and within the family. Of this we find representative evidence, for example, in Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, in relevant articles in the July–September 1977 Educational Gerontology, and in many interpretations of individual aging and its treatment by poets, novelists, and philosophers.

Even so, important research on aging is of relatively recent vintage. Don C. Charles writes (pp. 237–8) that “research (other than medical) on old persons is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the post–World War II period, although some work began prior to that – as early as the 1920s. Philosophers did, of course, give some thought to what we today call man's life cycle (e.g., see Cyril P. Svoboda's account of “Senescence in Western Philosophy,” pp. 219–35). Svoboda reports, for example, that Aristotle, one of the classical world's most careful observers, “posited that it is natural for the body to reach its prime around age 35 and to ‘advance’ until about age 50,” and then begin to decline (p. 223). The “soul,” he said, reached its perfection at age 50.” Some authors mentioned the functional usefulness of older persons and their experience, but without always correlating this aspect closely with specific age. At the other extreme, we find descriptions such as that of mythological Tithonus or Jonathan Swift's “Struldbrugs.”