“We won’t be rebuilding wealth so quickly,” says Christian Weller of the American Progress and the University of Massachusetts, who specializes in retirement income security.

Weller says the decline in wealth is the greatest on record.

Housing prices are expected to bottom out until mid year at the earliest. Thus far, the median price of a home is down more than 20 percent from $219,000 at the market peak in 2007 to $170,000 in January.

Stock prices, however, have fallen twice as much, some 50 percent, from their October 2007 peak.

And while a greater percentage of Americans are homeowners than investors and thus the average household’s wealth is more defined by real estate than investments, the investment outlook is still a major force.

“There are more people involved in the equity market and have wealth tied up in it than the 1980s and 1990s,” says Christopher Rupley of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

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Just as we hunker down to survive the worldwide economic collapse, we are confronted daily with news of fellow Americans who already have lost their homes, jobs and life savings.

In one important respect, Americans today are at a greater disadvantage than those who faced the Great Depression some 70 years ago. In 1930, the vast majority of the nation’s households consisted of families led by married couples. Today, many more households consist of adult Americans who face life alone.

They include solitary men and women, single parents, the divorced, widowed and unwed partners.

An important reminder, especially for those in parish ministry in the holiday season. Read it all.

Harvard kicked off a small but ambitious experiment this week that it hopes will become a new “third stage” of university education. For the student-fellows in the program, most in their 50s and early 60s, the goal is a second-act career in a new stage of life.

The 14 fellows have résumés brimming with achievement ”” including a former astronaut, a former senior official at the United States Agency for International Development, a physician-entrepreneur from Texas, a former public utility official from California, a former health minister from Venezuela and a former computer executive from Switzerland.

They gathered at Harvard on Thursday to begin the yearlong program intended to help them learn how to be successful social entrepreneurs or leaders of nonprofit organizations focused on social problems like poverty, health, education and the environment. Their interests include sickle cell anemia, women’s education in Africa, health care quality and water conservation.

The opportunity, the fellows say, is to pick up new knowledge, skills and professional relationships in a new realm. To Charles F. Bolden Jr., one of the fellows, it has the potential to be as life-changing as his selection to join America’s space program nearly three decades ago. “The Harvard program feels sort of like that,” said Mr. Bolden, 62, a retired major general in the United States Marine Corps and a veteran of four space shuttle missions.

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Suicide rates in the USA are up after more than a decade of dropping, and middle-aged whites primarily account for the increase, a report says.

The rate for whites 40 to 64 years old jumped 19% for women and 16% for men from 1999 to 2005, say researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Their analysis was published online in the AmericanJournal of Preventive Medicine.

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A heartwarming story–watch it all.

If you are a woman in her 40s or 50s, living in an arid marriage or partnership, and are not having an affair or contemplating one, you are behaving unnaturally.

More and more women are allowing themselves to behave like my friend “A”, who, as soon as her children finished high school last year, walked away from her battle-scarred marriage, moved into her own place, commenced no-fault divorce proceedings, and joined the RSVP online dating service.

I didn’t see her for months, and when I did she looked trim and buoyant. She had a new boyfriend. “I’m behaving like an 18-year-old,” she said. She did look as if she was getting a lot of exercise. She met the new man on RSVP. She also had war stories about RSVP. One of her friends, a 60-year-old architect, received about 100 responses from women on the site.

This, by the way, is not a clarion call to infidelity. The key qualifying word in the opening paragraph is “arid”. Rather, it is a consideration of the way society treats and portrays the sensuality of older women, and why so many allow themselves to disappear into a great compromise built on habit, stability, security and obligation rather than how they really feel.

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Shannon Neal can instantly tell you the best night of her life: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, the Hinsdale Academy debutante ball. Her father, Steven Neal, a 54-year-old political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, was in his tux, white gloves and tie. “My dad walked me down and took a little bow,” she said, and then the two of them goofed it up on the dance floor as they laughed and laughed.

A few weeks later, Mr. Neal parked his car in his garage, turned on the motor and waited until carbon monoxide filled the enclosed space and took his breath, and his life, away.

Later, his wife, Susan, would recall that he had just finished a new book, his seventh, and that “it took a lot out of him.” His medication was also taking a toll, putting him in the hospital overnight with worries about his heart.

Still, those who knew him were blindsided. “If I had just 30 seconds with him now,” Ms. Neal said of her father, “I would want all these answers.”

Mr. Neal is part of an unusually large increase in suicides among middle-aged Americans in recent years. Just why thousands of men and women have crossed the line between enduring life’s burdens and surrendering to them is a painful question for their loved ones. But for officials, it is a surprising and baffling public health mystery.

A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.)

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We hear a lot about men and their midlife crises; the sudden urge to own an Alfa Spider, the unexpected interest in back-hair removal (the same hair he has lived with quite harmoniously for much of the last four decades), the elopement with the young blonde from the gym after 25 years of an apparently happy and stable marriage.

The explanation given for this erratic behaviour centres on one thing: sex. At 40, a man feels he is losing his sexual attraction – hence the need to be confirmed by a younger woman. But what about the middle-aged woman and her midlife crisis? Just because she doesn’t abandon the established family quite so regularly and dramatically doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t occasionally consumed by the same urges.

My observations are that women approaching 50 swoon just as easily at the sight of a fit male chest or a sweaty bicep as a middle-aged man might over a girl in a bikini. It’s just that women are better at concealing their lust.

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