Dondena Lecture: Aging for Young People

Aging is the subject of the 2011 Alberto Dondena Lecture (May 12, 2:30 p.m, classroom N35, Velodrome, p.zza Sraffa 13), the fourth edition of the lecture in memory of the man who, in 2006, funded the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research in Social Dynamics naming it after his son.

Pearl Dykstra, professor of empirical sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam will be welcomed by Bocconi rector, Guido Tabellini, and Dondena Centre director, Vincenzo Galasso, to give a speech about Aging Is Not Only about Old People. She'll present findings from the Multilinks project, the EU Seventh Framework program she coordinated, which ended last February. The Dondena Centre was one of the nine consortium members from six countries.

"Debates on aging societies predominantly focus on the circumstances of the elderly. A change of focus is needed, however", Dykstra wrote. "First, population aging is about more than the elderly. The young and middle-aged should also be considered. Second, the new demographic circumstances in which multiple generations of family members share several decades together compel us to consider crucial interdependencies between family generations, which are built and reinforced by social policies. The typical portrayal of the elderly is that they are a drain on financial and care resources, and that they are an overwhelmingly lonely group. These often-held assumptions about the elderly should be challenged. In addition, cross-national variations in the ways in which caring responsibilities for the young and the old have been allocated between the family and the collective should be critically examined".