Career Development : Calendar

Adapting to an aging society: Challenges and opportunities

12/04/12     Online

Click here for a recording of the webcast and resources mentioned.

Webcast explores aging adults’ contributions, widening disparities, creating ‘synthetic families’

Today, Americans are living 30 years longer than their ancestors did just four generations ago. Yet policymakers have been slow to recognize the implications of this unprecedented increase in longevity.

As a result, social institutions of all kinds – workplaces, communities, families, educational organizations, health care providers – haven’t yet adapted to the challenges and opportunities posed by America’s aging population. Nor is there any consensus over what successful adaptation might look like.

The mission of the MacArthur Foundation Network on an Aging Society, established in 2008, is to articulate a framework that can guide effective responses to the aging of America and to promote policy options that help achieve this objective.

In this webcast, on Dec. 4 at 4 p.m. ET, three members of the MacArthur Network will discuss noteworthy trends and research in aging, including a recent study on troubling disparities in life expectancy that was featured on the front page of The New York Times. Judith Graham, AHCJ’s topic leader on aging, will moderate.

Toni Antonucci is a research professor at the Life Course Development Program and the Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on social relations across the life span, including multigenerational studies of the family and comparative studies of social relations across the life span in the United States, Europe and Japan.

S. Jay Olshansky is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a research associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The focus of his research has been estimates of the upper limits to human longevity; the health and public policy implications associated with individual and population aging; forecasts of the size, survival, and age structure of the population; and the pursuit of the scientific means to retard aging in peoples.

Julie M. Zissimopoulos is an associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy at the University of Southern California. She is also the associate director of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. She specializes in the economics of aging. Topics of special interest are medical expenditures at older ages, savings and wealth, labor force behavior, and financial and non-financial support between generations of family members.