Challenges of Aging

Cornelius Torp is Professor of Modern History at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Previously, he has been Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany.

• Introduction: Demographic Aging as a Challenge to Modern Societies; Cornelius Torp PART I: THE MULTIPLE FACETS OF POPULATION AGING 1. The Challenges of 21st Century Demography; Sarah Harper 2. Population Aging and the Changing Economic Life Cycle: A Global Perspective; Ronald Lee PART II: PENSION SYSTEMS UNDER PRESSURE 3. Age Politics and Pension Systems Development and Reform; Julia Lynch 4. Policy Feedbacks and Pension Policy Change; R. Kent Weaver 5. Sovereign Debt Crises and Pension Reforms in Europe; Karl Hinrichs 6. The UK Pensions Crisis and Institutional Innovation: Beyond Corporatism and Neo-liberalism; Gordon L. Clark PART III: RETIREMENT AND THE CHANGING IMAGES OF OLD AGE 7. Work versus Leisure: Historical Roots of the Dissociation of Work and Later Life in Twentieth Century Europe; Josef Ehmer 8. From Retirement to Active Aging: Changing Images of 'Old Age' in the Late Twentieth and the Early Twenty-first Centuries; Stephan Lessenich 9. Delaying Retirement in Germany and Europe; Jürgen Bauknecht and Gerhard Naegele 10. Changing Retirement Transitions in Times of Paradigmatic Political Change: Towards Growing Inequalities?; Dirk Hofäcker, Moritz Hess and Elias Naumann PART IV: THE PROBLEM OF GENERATIONAL JUSTICE 11. Intergenerational Equity: Historical Reconstructions; John Macnicol 12. Generational Justice, Generational Habitus and the 'Problem' of the Baby Boomers; Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard 13. Generations in Aging Societies: Inequalities, Cleavages, Conflicts; Martin Kohli

"'Challenges of Aging', when taken as a whole, offers some rather consistent messages across the three broad topics: pensions, retirement and generational justice. ... There is just enough analysis ... to satisfy the tastes of the quantatively-inclined reader. Yet, the book also provides relevant commentary on social policy history and political institutions and processes (e.g.,Weaver's chapter on policy feedbacks). This makes the book easily accessible to a diverse but relatively general audience." (Laurel Hixon, Journal of Population Ageing, Vol. 9, 2016)