Leading scholars focus on the economics of aging, with a particular emphasis on the economic future of the baby boom generation. Key themes include the influence of early advantages on later-life economic outcomes (the cumulative advantage/cumulative disadvantage hypothesis); the relationship between inequalities in economic status and inequalities in health status and access to health care; and the consequences of societal choices concerning retirement income systems and policies for financing acute and long-term health care. Contributors include Angela O'Rand, Edward Wolf, Edward Whitehouse, and James Smith.

This volume examines the importance of time and place, as applied to aging families. In the first section, chapters focus on the temporal dimension of intergenerational relations using frameworks from human development, sociology, social history, and social psychology. The second section focuses on the social ecology of intergenerational relations in terms of the national contexts within which families are embedded. The contributors demonstrate how the social, cultural, historical, and institutional forces that orient older and younger family members toward each other in both structured and adaptive ways.

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This volume addresses the extraordinary need to educate personnel at all levels in gerontology and geriatric medicine and in the design and delivery of health and social services. The historical development of gerontology and geriatric medicine and education issues are carefully considered with recommendations for curriculum design. The authors offer state of the art discussions on both gerontology and geriatrics, with implications for future research. The chapters, written by seminal figures in the field, address the critical need for well trained faculty and other professionals to: educate new and existing faculty and other professionals, educate researches to accelerate scientific knowledge, provide courses for all students that address life-span/life/cycle development and related materials, provide discipline specific courses on aging, and much more.

The dominant narratives of both science and popular culture typically define aging and human development as self-contained individual matters, failing to recognize the degree to which they are shaped by experiential and contextual contingencies. Our understandings of age are thereby "boxed in" and constricted by assumptions of "normality" and naturalness that limit our capacities to explore possible alternative experiences of development and aging, and the conditions – both individual and social – that might foster such experiences. Combining foundational principles of critical social science with recent breakthroughs in research across disciplines ranging from biology to economics, this book offers a scientifically and humanly expanded landscape for apprehending the life course. Rejecting familiar but false dichotomies such as "nature vs. nurture" and "structure vs. agency", it clarifies the organismic fundamentals that make the actual content of experience so centrally important in age and development, and it also explores why attention to these fundamentals has been so resisted in studies of individuals and individual change, and in policy and practice as well. In presenting the basic principles and reviewing the current state of knowledge, Dale Dannefer introduces multi-levelled social processes that shape human development and aging over the life course and age as a cultural phenomenon – organizing his approach around three key frontiers of inquiry that each invite a vigorous exercise of sociological imagination: the Social-Structural Frontier, the Biosocial Frontier and the Critical-Reflexive Frontier.

Enormous advances in our knowledge of genetic contributions to aging and disease, and in our understanding of the potential for manipulation of the aging process, have taken place during the past 20 years. This is the first volume in decades to consolidate this research in one place. It provides a broad and current overview of the most promising advances in genetic research on aging, current understanding of genetic contributions to the basic processes of aging, and age-related disease. The Review focuses on the aging process from lower organisms to man, and is organized in ascending order of biological complexity starting with stem cells and progressing through worms, flies, mice, and humans. Where relevant, the Review also includes information about yeasts and non-human primates. The research presented in the Review uses a species-comparative approach that makes finding cross species similarities (gene conservation) and differences (gene differentiation) apparent. This approach reflects the way in which the field is organized, making it highly useful for investigators who want quick access and a concise summary of a particular topic. Key Features: Provides state-of-the-art information about promising advances in genetic research on aging Comprises the first comprehensive volume regarding genetic research about aging in decades Authored by leading scholars in the field Disseminates enormous advances in our understanding of the aging process

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