Good insights for right now, “the first time in…history…in which older populations will outnumber younger ones.”
An intelligent warning to pay more attention to your elders.
“Over the course of this decade,” writes demographic futurist Schurman, “some of the world’s largest and most developed economies, as well as some of its smallest and least advanced, will become incredibly old….In the next two years, those aged 65 and over will be equal to those under 18 in the United States. And by 2050, one in six people worldwide will be over 65, one in four in Europe and North America.” In the coming “Super Age,” people throughout the world will live longer and have fewer children, and seniors will become perhaps a third of the population, “as they nearly are in Japan today.” The author adds that we are headed for disaster if we continue to view the elderly as “a social and economic burden,” obsessively celebrate youth and “anti-aging” advice, and do nothing to ease the way for a long, productive life. Schurman combines ideas for an elderly-friendly future with a denunciation of present conditions. Although a former AARP employee, he deplores its portrait of a typical comfortable retiree. In reality, this is “reserved only for a shrinking proportion of the population…due largely to vanishing corporate pensions, shrinking state pensions, and declining private savings.” Only 16% of Americans have saved more than $200,000 for retirement, which is far too little. Ageism, widely denounced and legislated against, remains widespread, although its core tenets were never true. Older workers have always been more dependable. Even today’s epitome of entrepreneurial brilliance is not the college dropout; the average age of founders of the fastest-growing high-tech startups is 45. The fairly good news is that many nations, including the U.S., are making genuine efforts to adapt their infrastructure and government policies to an aging population—but there is still much to be done.
Good insights for right now, “the first time in…history…in which older populations will outnumber younger ones.”Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-304875-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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