Youth unemployment has reached crisis levels in several European countries: 39% in Italy, 55% in Spain, and 60% in Greece. Now, early retirement, a so-called economic fix that I'd hoped was dead and buried, is being exhumed and put forward as a viable solution. It's a zombie idea, and we need to ...

It’s graduation season and young people everywhere are listening to speeches rife with promises of new beginnings. With one baby boomer turning 67 every seven to eight seconds, many older adults are embarking on a new adventure as well – retirement. While age, experience, and bank accounts may ...

It is happening...but as the quote often associated with discussions of innovation suggests, "the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed...." For years, I’ve predicted, promoted and pleaded for radical change in the way we think about old age. Now that more of us are living longer, a ...

Associated Press reports that two Americans are somehow still receiving Civil War veterans’ benefits. Although I’m guessing that a good deal of the media coverage devoted to this discovery will deal with the long-term economic costs of war, I’m fascinated for another reason: the Union Army plan was ...

Cancer deaths in the US are down 20% since they peaked in 1991, a new American Cancer Association study reports. That’s very good news, no matter how you assess the data. But it raises a question: how did this improvement happen? Are we developing cancer less frequently? Are new treatments ...

In most countries, if an elected official told older adults to “hurry up and die” in order to save the state money on their medical care, it would border on political suicide. But in Japan, where people above age 60 comprise almost a quarter of the population, such a gaffe crosses the line of tone ...

How does nearly six decades of work sound? We have all read the promising stories – ‘60 is the new 30’. According to some observers, 60 year olds may be just hitting their stride in work, relationships and ‘what’s next’. People are more youthful, have more expectations for their later years and are ...

We all know that America (and everyone else in the world) is aging. Aging thus far has been a story of ‘more’. More older adults, the need for more services, more challenges to health and well-being, but there is another dimension – the need for more innovation. The next generation of old – the ...

As anyone who's been watching the presidential debate series knows, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid comprise some of today's pivotal political talking points, even if it's not always clear what a given candidate plans to do about them. The use of entitlement programs as a political lever is ...

Today, I had the dubious pleasure of discovering that one of the research associates working at the MIT AgeLab has 1392 unread messages in his primary email inbox. 1392! As in, 100 more and Columbus could sail the ocean blue of his Gmail. I'd say this number was egregious – it's easy enough to set ...

It's no secret that future disruptive demographic changes will have profound implications for the relationship between employers and employees. But what's less well known is that some of those demographic shifts have already arrived. Luckily, employers already have the tools to deal with some of ...

When societal change happens there is rarely a moment of thunderous applause. Real change is typically incremental and then one day a shift in attitudes or lifestyles is so apparent that historians start reverse engineering dates or events marking ‘when’ the change occurred. The media reflects ...

Driving down the Massachusetts Turnpike I came up behind a small sporty coupe. What was striking even from a distance was the color. It was a neon green that I had not seen since playing with my favorite Hot Wheels model cars as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. Even 40-plus years ago the color was so ...

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on healthcare reform put more than health policy on the public agenda – it triggered a recurring debate in the United States on the power of government. After all, how much ‘government power’ is enough is one of the questions that led to the birth of the nation ...

Most of us are fortunate enough to never have to ask where our food comes from. When we are young it just seems to materialize. A trip to the grocery store and a little of (typically) mom’s magic a meal appears. Despite our daily experience and the distance most of us have from its origins – meat ...