Ask people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect””better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure””vitality, mental sharpness and looks””they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being.

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When Jermaine Robinson got out of Rikers Island jail last March, he had nowhere to live and few real prospects for finding a job. But he did have something that would prove almost as valuable: The address of the storefront Harlem office where Getting Out and Staying Out operates.

“Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten where I am right now,” 23-year-old Robinson says.

The nonprofit, founded by retired cosmetics executive Mark Goldsmith six years ago, has helped some 1,500 young men incarcerated at Rikers chart new lives.

Only about 20 percent of those who go through the program return to prison, compared with nearly 60 percent for Rikers as a whole.

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Religious denominations have long provided retired clergy and staff with secure pension payments””more secure, in some cases, than corporate retirement plans.
But some recent bumps have drawn attention to the vulnerabilities of so-called “church plans,” which are exempt from federal regulations aimed at safeguarding retirement funds for private-sector retirees.

As cash-strapped states and private companies revamp, freeze or end their pension programs altogether, participants in church plans are now realizing how church plans can be riskier than they appear, observers say.

“As a group, employees in so-called church plans are far more at risk than other private sector employees,” said Karen Ferguson, director of the Pension Rights Center, a Washington-based watchdog group.

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The financial crisis has been hard on just about everyone. But for older folks, the pain is proving particularly deep and lasting ”” a problem that could put a drag on the economy for many years to come.

People approaching retirement age are suffering on all fronts. Even with the Dow above 11,000, their stock holdings are worth less than they were back in 2006. Fixed-income investments hardly provide any income. Home prices remain depressed.

As a result, more older people are trying to make up lost ground by staying at work longer or rejoining the labor force ”“ precisely at a time when finding a job is exceedingly difficult.

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The trustees of the Church Pension Fund have decided not to grant a cost-of-living-related increase for retirees and surviving spouses in 2011, according to fund president Dennis T. Sullivan.

In a letter posted here on the Fund’s website, Sullivan added that the trustees will not make a “one-time special supplement” benefit payment as they did in 2010.

“I know this decision will be a disappointment to many of you,” Sullivan wrote.

This will be the second year in a row that the Fund has not made a cost-of-living-related increase.

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A draft proposal released Wednesday by the chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the federal debt calls for deep cuts in domestic and military spending starting in 2012, and an overhaul of the tax code to raise revenue. Those changes and others would erase nearly $4 trillion from projected deficits through 2020, the proposal says.

The plan would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades ”” low-income people would get higher benefits ”” and slowly raise the retirement age for full benefits to 69 from 67, with a “hardship exemption” for people who physically cannot work past 62. And it would subject higher levels of income to payroll taxes, to ensure Social Security’s solvency for the next 75 years.

But the plan would not count any savings from Social Security toward meeting the overall deficit-reduction goal set by Mr. Obama, reflecting the chairmen’s sensitivity to liberal critics who have complained that Social Security should be fixed only for its own sake, not to balance the nation’s books.

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It…[was] be a quiet celebration [this past weekend] in Montreat as Billy Graham gather[ed] with family to mark his 92nd birthday.

His health fragile, but his mind alert, the Charlotte-born evangelist still has a to-do list: He’s working on another book, “Nearing Home,” about aging, and he hopes to preach one last time.

“He still has the sermon on his heart,” said spokeswoman Melany Ethridge.

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The Archbishop of Adelaide has called for the government to put the question of decriminalizing euthanasia to a national vote.

“If politicians believe voluntary euthanasia is a public policy priority of first importance, then let them seek an electoral mandate upon it,” Archbishop Jeffrey Driver told his diocesan synod last week.

“It is too significant an issue to be introduced any other way,” he said on Oct 21.

Dr. Driver’s comments follow upon church-wide denunciations of euthanasia in the wake of the new Labor government’s decision to debate the issue. State legislatures in Australia have also taken up the issue, with the upper house of the South Australia parliament scheduled to vote on Nov 24 on a bill sponsored by the Green Party to legalise voluntary euthanasia. A similar bill was defeated by a single vote last year.

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More than a thousand Britons will die by doctor-assisted suicide each year if a U.S. law is imported, a think-tank will tell MPs and peers today.

Safeguards to limit the law to those patients who are terminally ill will also become meaningless as some doctors began to interpret the rules liberally in practice, the Living and Dying Well report says.

In Oregon, the first U.S. state to legalise assisted suicide, this has apparently led to ”˜doctor-shopping’ for physicians who will overlook criteria such as being terminally ill, mentally competent and making a choice to die free from coercion.

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A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday. Instead of the traditional audience reaction ”” euphoria from the winner’s entourage, anemic clapping underpinned by envy and bitterness from everyone else ”” the announcement, over dinner at the Guildhall here, was greeted by loud, sustained applause. A smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered.

“I think it’s that I’m someone who’s been around for a long time,” Mr. Jacobson, exhausted but excited, said in an interview two days after. “There was also the feeling that, ”˜Thank God an old man’s won it.’ ” (He is 68).

The winning book, “The Finkler Question,” is Mr. Jacobson’s 11th novel; it was published in the United States as a paperback original by Bloomsbury on the same day that the prize was announced. It is an unusual Booker choice, both because it delves into the heart of the British Jewish experience, something that few contemporary British novels try to do, and because it is, on its surface at least, so ebulliently comic. It tells the story of three friends, two Jewish and one, Julian Treslove, who longs to be.

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While I admire Harriet Harman’s attitude, we do have to be careful not to think that the only meaningful life is a busy one. Religions across the world have never thought that – with the exception of Protestant Christianity. But Protestant Britain forgot that the God in whose image we are made was not only an industrious creator, he also took time out to enjoy what he had made.

Too often we lose the capacity for enjoyment other than through work. In the gospels Jesus hints at how we may recover it when he says that if we are to enter the Kingdom of God we must become as little children. Perhaps what he has in mind is the capacity of children for self-forgetfulness in play. They do something because it is fun, worthwhile in itself, and not because it has some further justification beyond itself. This is what we lose in busy lives where everything must be useful or done for a purpose. If we are to enjoy older age we need to regain that spirit of play, and rediscover that light-hearted self-forgetfulness we knew as children. Sixty may be a good age to find it again.

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Judge Wesley E. Brown’s mere presence in his courtroom is seen as something of a daily miracle. His diminished frame is nearly lost behind the bench. A tube under his nose feeds him oxygen during hearings. And he warns lawyers preparing for lengthy court battles that he may not live to see the cases to completion, adding the old saying, “At this age, I’m not even buying green bananas.”

At 103, Judge Brown, of the United States District Court here, is old enough to have been unusually old when he enlisted during World War II. He is old enough to have witnessed a former law clerk’s appointment to serve beside him as a district judge ”” and, almost two decades later, the former clerk’s move to senior status. Judge Brown is so old, in fact, that in less than a year, should he survive, he will become the oldest practicing federal judge in the history of the United States.

Upon learning of the remarkable longevity of the man who was likely to sentence him to prison, Randy Hicks, like many defendants, became nervous. He worried whether Judge Brown was of sound enough mind to understand the legal issues of a complex wire fraud case and healthy enough to make it through what turned out to be two years of hearings. “And then,” he said, “I realized that people were probably thinking the same thing 20 years ago.”

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“I love his compassionate heart, his generosity, his showing of himself as a person of dignity and grace,” [Ruth] Franz said, her fingers intertwined with Jones and her head resting on his shoulder.

Swooning when Jones explained again how the moon’s orbit affects the tides, Franz gushed: “And he has such an amazing ability to remember stuff.”

[Henry] Jones, who lost his wife a year ago after some 60 years of marriage, appears just as agog and in love as his bride.

“I love her dearly because of the way she thinks and the way she loves the Lord. We’re singing off the same sheet and that’s all you could want in life,” Jones said. “She’s the most wonderful woman in the world … and she’s beautiful ”” I’ve always thought she was beautiful.”

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At the very start of my pontificate I said, “Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary” (Homily at the Mass for the Beginning of the Petrine Ministry of the Bishop of Rome, 24 April 2005). Life is a unique gift, at every stage from conception until natural death, and it is God’s alone to give and to take. One may enjoy good health in old age; but equally Christians should not be afraid to share in the suffering of Christ, if God wills that we struggle with infirmity. My predecessor, the late Pope John Paul, suffered very publicly during the last years of his life. It was clear to all of us that he did so in union with the sufferings of our Saviour. His cheerfulness and forbearance as he faced his final days were a remarkable and moving example to all of us who have to carry the burden of advancing years.

–Pope Benedict XVI earlier today in his visit to St Peter’s Residence home for older people

At the Cooper Tire plant in Findlay, Ohio, Jack Hartley, who is 58, works a 12-hour shift assembling tires: pulling piles of rubber and lining over a drum, cutting the material with a hot knife, lifting the half-finished tire, which weighs 10 to 20 pounds, and throwing it onto a rack.

Mr. Hartley performs these steps nearly 30 times an hour, or 300 times in a shift. “The pain started about the time I was 50,” he said. “Dessert with lunch is ibuprofen. Your knees start going bad, your lower back, your elbows, your shoulders.”

He said he does not think he can last until age 66, when he will be eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits. At 62 or 65, he said, “that’s it.”

After years of debate about how to keep Social Security solvent, the White House has created an 18-member panel to consider changes, including raising the retirement age….

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While reporting my recent series on Aging At Home, I came across a special suit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab. It’s meant to help 20-something engineers feel the aches and limitations of an average 75-year-old so they can design better products for them. Think of it as working like those outfits Superheroes put on, only backward. Of course, I couldn’t resist.

Now, I’m 40-something ”” no spring chicken. But if the crosswalk light is blinking, I can still dash across the street, no problem. Until, that is, MIT researcher Rozanne Puleo starts strapping me into what she calls her Age Gain Now Empathy System.

I pull a harness around my waist and Puleo starts attaching things to it. First, stretchy rubber bands connect from my waist to the bottom of my feet.

“It will limit your hip flexion,” Puleo explains.

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Grandma is posting a photo on Facebook.

Grandpa is looking for former colleagues on LinkedIn.

And more and more people ages 50 and older are joining social networks, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The study found that social networking has almost doubled among this population ”” growing from 22 percent to 42 percent over the past year.

According to comScore, a digital measurement company, 27.4 million people age 55 and over engaged in social networking in July, up from 16 million one year ago.

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Of all the elderly people he’s visited, the Rev. Kenneth Dupin remembers a woman named Katie in particular.

Katie had a houseful of treasured memorabilia, and she loved to regale him with stories of Washington high society in the 1950s. But after she was moved to a nursing home, “she started crying,” Dupin says. “I went over to her, and she pulled me down to where I could hear her, and she said, ‘Please take me home.'”

She never did go back home, but after she died, her memory stayed with Dupin. He tells NPR’s Audie Cornish that it got him wondering if there was a way to keep people like Katie out of nursing homes and closer to their families. His idea might seem strange, but “granny pods” are catching on.

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America’s baby boomers””those born between 1946 and 1964””face a problem that could weigh on the economy for years to come: The longer it takes for the economy to recover, the less money they’ll have to spend in retirement.

Policy makers have long worried that Americans aren’t saving enough for old age. And lately, current and prospective retirees have been hit on many fronts at once: They have less money, they earn less on what they have, their houses aren’t rising in value and the prospect of working longer to make up the shortfall has dimmed significantly in a lousy job market.

“We will have to learn to make do with a lot less in material things,” says Gary Snodgrass, a 63-year-old health-care consultant in Placerville, Calif. The financial crisis, he says, slashed his retirement savings 40% and the value of his house by about half.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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A new Bank for International Settlements working paper by economist Elod Takats looks at the interaction of demographics and asset prices and finds not a meltdown but a long hard slog for house prices and, by extension, for other assets like stocks.

“If you look at the U.S., or most English-speaking countries, the next 40 years is substantially different from the last 40,” Takats said.

“We had demographic tailwinds over the past forty years and will have headwinds over the next forty.”

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Paul Skidmore’s office is shuttered, his job gone, his 18-month job search fruitless and his unemployment benefits exhausted. So at 63, he plans to file this week for Social Security benefits, three years earlier than planned.

“All I want to do is work,” said Skidmore, of Finksburg, Md., who was an insurance claims adjuster for 37 years before his company downsized and closed his office last year. “And nobody will hire me.”

It is one of the most striking fallouts from the bad economy: Social Security is facing a rare shortfall this year as a wave of people like Skidmore opt to collect payments before their full retirement age. Adding to the strain on the trust are reduced tax collections sapped by the country’s historic unemployment ”” still at 9.5 percent.

More people filed for Social Security in 2009 ”” 2.74 million ”” than any year in history

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There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

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Henry Kerr and Valerie Berkowitz Kerr speak of their courtship

At the age of 97, Henry Kerr has married 87-year-old Valerie Berkowitz after wooing her for four years.

The pair, who met at a residential home in Golders Green, north London, tied the knot in a ceremony at the home on Sunday followed by high tea for 80 guests.

Mr Kerr said when he asked the now Mrs Berkowitz Kerr to marry him she “burst into a hysterical laugh”.

She agreed after Mr Kerr said he would not ask her again.

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Working Americans aged 60-69 have slightly better emotional health than those who do not work, according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. This relationship is primarily evident among the relatively small numbers of Americans aged 60-69 who have fair or poor health. Among the 75% of the 60- to 69-year-old population who have excellent, very good, or good health, however, there is virtually no difference in emotional health by work status.

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Humans are body, mind and spirit. A body is something we can see, weigh, touch, and even decorate. A mind we can see in operation. We can measure intelligence and observe the inner workings of the brain through modern imaging.

There is, however, no CT scan of the spirit. Like the wind, it cannot be seen, but it is a strong force in our lives. We see evidence of the spirit in a parent’s love for a child. It motivates heroes, fuels curiosity of a scientist and sustains a Holocaust survivor. We see signs of the spirit in the mother who cannot recall her child’s name but can recite the 23rd Psalm and in the musician who cannot sing along with other residents in the nursing home but can whistle previously learned complex tunes.

There is still a person beneath the cloak of dementia. As an Episcopal priest who frequently interacts with people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, I ask myself, “How can we nourish the soul of someone whose memories are no longer accessible?” After 32 years of ordained ministry, I have found the answer lies in attentive and discerning listening. People with dementia will tell us how to nourish their souls, but we need to listen carefully.

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(The original article to which they are responding is here).

Here is one:

Without commenting on the separation of Al and Tipper Gore, I think there are at least four reasons to be appalled at the attitude and assumptions reflected by Deirdre Bair in her article.

First, there is no consideration of the religious or at least personal commitment undertaken by couples. The unilateral abrogation of that commitment may result in few regrets by those who do so, according to Ms. Bair, but presumably that is not the view of their abandoned partners.

Second, there is no mention of the effect on the children, albeit adult. One wonders if the children are in fact happy to see their parents pursuing their “third age.”

And oddly for a woman, Ms. Bair breezily assumes that women involved in such situations will do just fine financially. The general understanding is that women most usually suffer financially from divorce.

Finally, there is the clear implication that those who remain married for life are benighted, craven losers without the guts to pursue their zen, rather than those whose love and devotion deserve our respect.

John W. Curtis
Greenwich, Conn.

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It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.

It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.

“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological ”” for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”

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Yesterday was my 58th birthday. If I were a Greek worker I could retire. Although pension payments in Greece normally start around 61, special provisions allow anyone to retire at 58 if they have been in employment for 35 years. That, as it happens, is how long I have been at work. My index-linked pensions from the Greek Government would be worth 75 to 90 per cent of the average salary in the country, guaranteed for the rest of my life by the State.

If you want to know why Greece is going bankrupt and why the euro seems to be on the verge of disintegration, look no farther. The best argument I have ever heard for a break-up of the euro was this observation in a German newspaper: “The Greeks go on to the streets to protest against an increase of the pension age from 61 to 63. Does this mean that Germans should extend the working age from 67 to 69, so Greeks can enjoy their retirement?”

This, however, is not another article about self-indulgent Greeks and self-righteous Germans. The battle over bailouts in Europe is only a sideshow compared with the great social conflict that lies ahead all over the world in the next 20 years. This will not be a struggle between nations or social classes, but between generations ”” and it is a conflict that, in Britain, begins in earnest this year. The end of the Second World War in May 1945 marked the start of the baby boom, which lasted until the mid-1960s. Now, 65 years later, the corresponding retirement revolution is about to shake up our society, economy and political institutions.

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Expectations are growing that France is set to remove the right to retire at 60, as it embarks on a contentious reform of its debt-laden pension system and brings public finances back into line.

Christian Estrosi, industry minister, said on Sunday the government was “leaning towards an increase in the [retirement] age” in its talks with unions and employers’ federations, despite denials from cabinet ministers over the weekend of a decision being taken.

Although there has been much speculation that France’s legal retirement age of 60 ”“ one of the lowest in Europe ”“ would be abandoned, Mr Estrosi’s comments on national radio are the clearest statement yet of government intentions.

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