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415 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1974)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0415 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE America is aging. The proportion of its population now over 65 years of age-li percent-has almost tripled since 1900 and could grow to almost 20 percent in the next century. The emergence of this stratum of elderly is historically unprecedented. Demographically, falling birth rates and rising life expectancy rates have produced societal aging only in a handful of countries in the most advanced stages of industrialization. Simultaneously, the social meanings of growing old-once an ambivalent mix of neglect and resignation-are changing; retiree and senior citizen are becoming new stages in the life cycle. The political consequences of these dramatic shifts have been neither widely noticed nor clearly analyzed. Societal aging has been, in fact, an iceberg issue in the history of social policy. The tip has been known for decades, but its deeper outlines and implications are only beginning to be fathomed. Private citizens tend to think of aging as a personal fate rather than as a public issue. Scholars originally concerned with aging-mostly biologists and psychologists-have focused chiefly on microanalytic factors. Politicians and others seeking legislation favorable to the elderly present their case as nonpartisan and, therefore, nonpolitical. All who are involved labor under a double burden of public disinterest: (1) the generally negative value placed on any kind of obsolescence in a culture obsessed with newness; (2) the often dry and technical nature of the critical issues, such as income maintenance and health care organization. As a result, analyses of macrolevel consequences of aging have been sparse, scattered and usually written for specialists. This has been true particularly in the area of public policy-where available information becomes quickly outdated-and in political behavior-where unin- formed generalization has flourished without empirical evidence. Edu- cated lay people interested in the latter, for example, have had to rely on often highly speculative popular predictions of the coming political power of a senior citizenry. The present volume of THE ANNALS is designed to make available to the generalist the best and most current thinking on the topic. The contributors-academicians with long experience in fields related to aging and public policy, and practitioners conversant with the tech- nicalities of law and administration-represent a cross-section of ideologies and viewpoints. For the most part, their perspectives are long range, attempting to situate and to analyze the issues in their broader, historical context. Hopefully, the volume will stimulate wider public awareness of, and informed debate over, the political consequences of aging. FREDERICK R. EISELE ix

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