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Population Aging, Automation and Economic Growth: Robots to the Rescue?
A lot has been written about the economic and fiscal challenges associated with the aging of populations. Many studies point to negative consequences of aging such as labor shortages, lower product...
Procedural ways to ensure intergenerational justice
Intergenerational justice is becoming an increasingly important subject on the political agenda. Population ageing, which is beginning to generate visible strains and tensions in many countries, is...
History, life-course, family: a lesson from my grandfather
In 2005, the UN designated 27th January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Movies and documentaries about the shoah are regularly shown on TV, reminding us of the horrors that took place d...
Has the Bauhaus aged well?
The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus – the legendary German design school widely acknowledged to be the fountainhead of modern design and architecture – is currently bei...
Oldushka
I get excited when I hear about empowering stories involving older people or meet young people who genuinely see older people in a non-trivial way and free from ageist stereotypes. It is particular...
A new set of life expectancy projections
NHS England estimates that in 2016 16% of all deaths in England were attributable to smoking. This is the Population Attributable Fraction (PAF) of mortality for smoking. A similar PAF estima...
AGE: NOT JUST A NUMBER
Rejoice, my fellow Italians! We should celebrate. It was announced two weeks ago that our lives as plain “adults” - without age qualification - are longer than we had thought and ...
Why all the fuss about declining fertility?
Should we be encouraging young women to have more children? This was the question I was being asked recently by journalists from media around the globe, from BBC News to the Voice of Islam. The sud...
The happiness of the caregivers
Increased longevity is one of the most remarkable success stories in human history. However, it leads to several challenges. One of them is the rise in the number of older people in need of long-te...
THE ‘I’ GENERATION™
I want to talk about the ‘I’ generation. This is the leading edge of the Baby Boomers, who have defined the Western world for the past 50+ years. Influential, based on their numbers alo...
The Longevity Forum
It's been a long time since I attended a conference where I found myself looking forward to every panel discussion. But that was precisely the feeling I had this past Monday, when I attended th...
Ageing Canadians: AGE-WELL & Canadian Association on Gerontology Annual Scientific Meeting Recap
Canada is unique in having a relatively small and very geographically diverse population of older adults. Ageing Canadians do, however, benefit from several dedicated groups of gerontologists, nota...
FLEX: the quality required from housing for older people
At a time when young people are struggling to get a foot on the housing ladder and there is a fierce debate going on about intergenerational fairness and finding a place to live, it is hard to make...
Killer heatwave
“Air conditioning heating up election campaign....Almost all of the deaths were of elderly people, almost of whom were living in places without air conditioning (A/C)” This headline ...
Older people’s campaigning comes of age
Earlier this year I wrote about the movement that has built up calling on the United Nations to pass a Convention on the rights of older people. In this 70th anniversary year of the Universal Decla...