The Scholarship of Ageing : progress is being made!
Well, first of all, this is a book so well written that one’s faith in American non-fiction letters is almost restored in one go. (more…)
Sport, Competition and Extreme Ageing : a revolution in the making.
Prodded By Science We reference here, first of all, what we will call a new scholarship of empowerment. The by-now-long-since embedded realisation that millions of us, at the moment of once conventional retirement, have another twenty years+ of healthy living to fill has stimulated a new wave of self-help literature. (more…)
The Mega-Dilemma of this Third Age : Save or Spend
In the Summer of 2017, the Office for National Statistics in the UK produced fresh and compelling data on the finances of retired households. In brief: From the late 1970s, just as Mrs. Thatcher was about to ride into Downing Street to the opening of the tenure of Mrs. May in 2016, the disposable income of those retired households grew at an annual average real-terms rate of 2.8%. The mean gross income of this segment (including benefits) had thus swollen by a factor of 3 across this generation of time. Whereas just less than 50% of retired households enjoyed the benefit of a private pension in 1997 this had risen to 80% by 2016. Average disposable income for those with one of those private pension plans is now (2017) ca…
Aging : An Apprenticeship (Ed. Nan Narboe)
You are, one way or another, perhaps in the age business. Your company is trying to build a rich dialogue with older shoppers, tourists, students… Your campaigning organisation lobbies for better treatment for elderly patients, grey voters, the locally bereaved and bereft... Your political party has to consider how the sexa-septua-octogenarians ought to be addressed, captured and, the bitter thought, afforded... (more…)
Love and the Septuagenarians : they want it darker.
We learn in 2017 that only 18% of septuagenarian women and 12% of septuagenarian men consider themselves to be good-looking. (www.rinklifunstaz.com) Now read on…. (more…)
News of the New 70s, Lifestyle and Spend
Old Facts, Fresh Insights The business community probably knows quite a lot of facts about this 60-70-80 generation. The broad sweep of our demographics is a visual stalwart of every futurist’s presentation deck. Populist redtops, meanwhile, carry a headline every day about dementia, the victims, the cures, the lifestyle counsels. This month, many a Marketing or Communications Director will attend a scholarly seminar on our national/Western ageing, its consequences for the public purse, for the financing of care, for all those ejected too soon from the career market (with lots left still to give), etc, etc. Such quasi-academic conversations might well drift towards the future of intergenerational frictions and conflicts - over access to skills, revenues, concessions and, of course, political power. The grey hubbub is always in the air, broad outline…
Aspirational Longevity : It Rocks
Ageing By Numbers Imagine that you are Prime Minister and that this question is put to you by a journalist: Within a decade, the population of over-75s may well have increased by 2 million in the UK and the number of 60-74s by 1.6 million. Do you think these figures should invite some distinct policy innovations from HMG and, if so, what could they be? Imagine that you are Marketing Director of a national supermarket chain and that this question is put to you by a member of your team : Should we now be addressing the needs of an ageing population in our advertising, digital communications, NPD, store design, recruitment programmes - with a focus and a purpose not applied previously - in confident and exclusive pursuit of higher sales and stronger customer…
Towards a “Feminism” of the Third Age
“A Feminism”, Really? Once upon a forgotten time, the feminism (or feminisms) we now know and enjoy did not exist. But thanks to Betty and Gloria and Germaine and all the gang, the agitations of the 1970s created the foundation for a shared morality, a gendered etiquette that is (with major lapses still) socially well-policed, a presumptively universal demand for fairness / equity along with a natural celebration of we-can-do-anything female accomplishment. Hurrying to our point, we ask : for those Western world-ers aged over-60, is there to be an equivalent of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean-In or Samantha Ettus’s The Pie Life? Or The Beauty Myth? Or The Backlash? How could we transmute the phrase having-it-all into our modern cult of ageing? Is there a super-galactico-geriatrico coming along soon to proclaim…