GBO NEWS: Debunking Age “Fear Factor”; Alive Inside Film a Must; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
July 30, 2014 — Volume 14, Number 10
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. If you receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
IN THIS ISSUE: Who let the dog days out?
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS: The Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Greene Moves On to the Market Side; *** Oy, Vey, Don’t Tell Me! BBC Reports U.S. Military Recruits Soldiers Up 117
2. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL: American Scholar’s “The Fear Factor” Debunks Worker:Retiree Ratio
3. THE MEDIA BEAT: Alive Inside Documentary Released Nationwide on Music’s Power on Dementia; *** Sara Davidson’s book The December Project, Celebrates Wisdom of the Late Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi; *** Changing the Way We Die Gets Coveted Starred Review From Library Journal.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE: AHCJ Health Reporting Fellowships; *** National Health Policy Journalist Training for Communities of Color in New Orleans
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** The Wall Street Journal’s stalwart reporter on retirement, Kelly Greene, left the paper in February after 17 years. Greene said in an e-mail, “I was lured away to head up BlackRock’s retirement content strategy. It’s a great, fascinating challenge.” The asset management firm created the new role as part of the marketing unit for its U.S. Retirement Group. Greene recently rolled out her first project: A quarterly analysis of U.S. retirement readiness using BlackRock’s CoRI Retirement Indexes and the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s retirement savings data.
And she’s hiring. Greene e-mailed that she’s in search of a “full-time marketing writer/project manager familiar with the defined-contribution industry and personal-finance retirement issues.” Good gig for somebody who can tune up those charts and spread sheets. For more information, reach her at Kelly.greene@blackrock.com.
Meanwhile, Greene’s longtime editor, Glenn Ruffenach, continues putting out the paper’s “Encore” retirement sections (five scheduled for this year), which preceded the one issued periodically by the New York Times (and got the better name). Greene and Ruffenach coauthored the 2007 bestseller, The Wall Street Journal. Complete Retirement Guidebook: [http://tinyurl.com/mky6g27] How to Plan It, Live It and Enjoy It,
He also contributes to the MarketWatch retirement blog (also called “Encore”). Yeoman that he is, Ruffenach added, “And I edit articles for the daily paper and Sunday Journal.” Presumably, that’s accomplished in quality air conditioning at the WSJ’s Atlanta office, where “Encore” and other specialty WSJ sections are headquartered. Ruffenach, who has aged into encore-hood with two granddaughters, is not completely bereft at the loss of Greene. Staff writer Anne Tergesen, also in Manhattan, has been ably filling in “Encore” bylines for some time.
***Oy, Vey, Don’t Tell Me: It’s been widely reported in recent years that the U.S. military has recruited somewhat older soldiers than it used to, but how about age 117?
According to a recent BBC News report, that would be the age of the youngest potential inductees among 14,250 men to whom the Selective Service System (SSS) sent conscription registration notices. Although the U.S. draft was ended in the wake of Vietnam War protests, American males still have to register soon after turning 18 (and male immigrants ages 18-25), presumably for a possible call-up. The federal agency, though, erroneously notified men in Pennsylvania born from 1893 to 1897 of their obligation to do their duty. Most intended recipients are dead. BBC reported, “A clerk neglected to select the century in a search for newly eligible young men.”
BBC reported, “Chuck Huey, 73, of Kingston, Pennsylvania, said he got a notice addressed to his late grandfather Bert Huey, a World War One veteran who was born in 1894 and died in 1995 age 100.” That, to be sure, would have been too young for the modern army. Even though GBO’s editor protested the draft back in the 1960s, it’s hard not to notice that BBC didn’t asked the other obvious question other question. In the era of combat-ready women, why must only males register? It puts a different twist on don’t ask, don’t tell.
The Pennsylvania SSS office software only allows two digits for filling in the date, requiring a data-entry clerk to also enter the century. So the intended 1993 defaulted to 1893. That is, the software was about as old as those sent the notices, at least in technology years. Gives new meaning to the “100 Years War.”
2. FISCAL REFORM SCHOOL
In “The Fear Factor”, the cover story in the summer “Boomer Myth” issue of The American Scholar, distinguished journalist Lincoln Caplan says, “Long-held predictions of economic chaos as baby boomers grow old are based on formulas that are just plain wrong.” Caplan, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, has long been a contributor to such major media as The New Yorker, The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report, and is the author of several books on subjects from adoption to affirmative action. So GBONews was intrigued to learn that he’d taken on the American debate over social insurance entitlements. (He’s also on the editorial board of the Scholar and a senior advisor to Encore.org.)
Caplan’s analysis should be required reading for anyone writing today on aging and the American future. It’s especially important, since at least two recent articles we’ve seen succumbed to the common fallacy Caplan dismantles, the presumed threat of a shrinking old-age dependency ratio that will burden younger families and the national budget with the cost burden of an aging population.
He begins, “For the past half century, the biggest demographic changes in the United States have often reflected the stages of life for the 76 million baby boomers. The demographer Dowell Myers has described their passage as ‘a rolling tsunami that first rocked the schools, then flooded the labor market, and next drove up house prices and triggered waves of gentrification.’ When the first wave of boomers turned 65 in 2011, the rest of the country started paying attention to what demographers had been warning about for a generation: The tsunami was turning gray and driving the United States toward fundamental shifts in social policy.”
Caplan, however, challenges the bases for such dire predictions, especially the often misused dependency ratio, employed to measure those in the workforce against those who are not. He explains, “An increase in the ratio is understood to mean a growing burden on each person in the workforce to support the economically dependent.” Its modified calculation, called the “old-age dependency ratio,” is frequently cited to show a dwindling number of those of working age (18-64) and people 65-plus.
Old-Age Dependency Alarmists
He writes, “The old-age dependency ratio appears to justify the view of alarmists like former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate that this outsized group of aging Americans ‘makes our Social Security and Medicare programs unsustainable in the long run.’” He might have added that this is the same Alan Greenspan who later expressed disappointment that financial institutions he’d allowed to get away with enormous transgressions failed to act rationally as they drove the economy over a cliff six years ago.
Caplan proceeds in sharp, well measured prose, to shed the Greenspan viewpoint— a perspective often echoed in major economic and political reporting, as GBONews.org [http://www.gbonews.org/?p=425] noted in our May issue.
He cites well-established sociological analysis on the social construction of elders’ obsolescence. Noting “that our society has chosen to regard older people as a burden,” Caplan explains, “A person’s race, ethnicity, wealth, and level of education are often better predictors of that decline than age.” GBONews recalls the admonition of the venerated late Oakland Tribune Editor and Publisher Robert Maynard, the first African American owner of a metropolitan daily, who urged reporters to filter every story through the prism of race, class, gender, geography and generation.
For example, Caplan cites Stanford research revealing “that 82 percent of white women could expect to live until 70, but only 54 percent of black men. They found that the probability of a white male living until 70 in Massachusetts is close to 80 percent, but for a white male in the southeastern ridge of Appalachia, only 55 percent.” Another sterling and source of disturbing findings on longevity is the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society.
As for those persisting dire predictions of burdensome decrepitude of old age, Caplan takes the debate in an economic time machine back to projections in the early 1980s. Only 30 years ago, articles appeared warning of an aging crisis to come. It rested “on the assumption that, in the subsequent half century, the American economy would perform poorly and produce little improvement in real income. In fact, between then and now, real income has grown somewhat more than was predicted.”
Old-Age vs. 1% Inequity
The problem, Caplan observes —one that should be unsurprising to anyone who’s occupied the inequity debate for even five minutes—is that those productivity gains have come “with dramatically unequal distribution.” He reminds us that while the rise in real income for nine out of 10 Americans has been slight. The rise for the top 10 percent has been much higher—and higher still for the top one percent. Caplan stresses that the failure to explain this results amounts to presenting an economic problem as a demographic issue.
While “silver tsunami” scenarios too often end up being reported along with suggestions for reducing Social Security or Medicare costs to save them for the future, Caplan instead emphasizes, “Many experts believe it is essential to increase the amount of Social Security payments for people whose lifetime earnings have been moderate, low or less.”
In explaining that Social Security provides 30 to 40 percent less than the average retirement pension of other developed economies, Caplan asserts that it would be essential for the United States to expand the ability of older people here to “turn their energy and capability into a well-directed force for good, such as by volunteering for nonprofits like Experience Corps and Senior Corps, or starting new careers.”
Caplan concludes, “Social change takes time, even when it is visibly underway. But change accelerates when outdated ways of thinking are put aside in favor of useful new ones. It is time to replace the dependency ratio, especially the old-age one, with a more accurate measure that takes account of how many of today’s older Americans remain productive—how many continue to ‘promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.’ Baby boomers are imposing significant costs on this society, yes: but more than ever before by people in their age group, they are conferring important benefits for ‘our Posterity,’ with a great prospect of changing what the future means for every generation that follows.”
3. THE MEDIA BEAT
*** Alive Inside, the compelling new feature documentary of the healing power of music, including for those with dementia by Michael Rossato-Bennett, opened in New York last week and is now illuminating movie screens around the country. You cannot miss this film: It will drop your jaw and swell your heart. You may already have seen the viral 6:30 minute clip that’s been on YouTube for over a year. (If not, stop right now and watch it. It will make your day.) The full 73-minute film, winner of a Sundance Film Festival audience award, remains captivating—at times astonishing—throughout.
The film follows Dan Cohen, a social worker, founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory, as he works with Alzheimer’s patients and their family members first to learn what kinds of music they enjoyed in their lives. He or nursing home staff then program the music – ranging from the wild antics of big-band pioneer Cab Calloway (“Minnie the Moocher”) to the strains of Schubert or Mozart – in iPods. Almost instantly, someone you’ve seen moments before in a nearly catatonic state comes to life, not merely gesticulating to the music, but also recounting memories and responding to questions.
The power of music and arts therapy have been well established, but never has the evidence been made so dramatically manifest, including the contradictions imbedded in the United States’ highly medicalized system. In the film, geriatric physician Bill Thomas, MD, founder of the Eden Alternative and Green Houses for better nursing care, notes that he can write a $1,000 prescription to be covered by Medicare, but can’t get reimbursed for a $43 iPod that may instantaneously and non-invasively revive the humanity of a patient.
Although Cohen’s iPod campaign is at the humane (and cost-effective) core of the film, other fascinating or moving segments, such as with neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, singer Bobby McFerrin and others, demonstrate the therapeutic impact of music for those suffering different kinds of pain and loss. Ugandan musician, Samite Mulondo, founder of Musicians for World Harmony, is seen in a village in the Congo bringing women to tears and then laughter as he musically touches nerves of rape and trauma. Later, on one of his many journeys to American nursing homes, Samite forms a deep bond with a white American woman incapacitated by pain, as he simply crouches patiently near her chair and sings soothingly while and playing his African lyre. “I love you,” she tells him quietly and at peace as they say goodbye.
The sentimentality of Alive Inside is rich and honest, edged with just enough science and public policy outrage to carry you to the joyously lilting final segments. Visit the film’s website, for opening dates and movie-theater names. Press materials are also posted. Reporters can obtain a DVD screener or Vimeo link for the full documentary by contacting Gabrielle Flamand, 202.339.9598; or e-mail gabrielle@prcollaborative.com.
*** Sara Davidson’s book The December Project, published by Harper One this spring, took on special poignancy with the recent death of the volume’s central figure, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, 89.
The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery, is sort of a reverse Tuesdays With Morrie. Rather than offering inspiring words for the young, the book records the thoughts and lessons on life and his philosophy on death and dying of “Reb Zalman,” as he was lovingly known. Davidson explains that she was surprised in 2009 by a phone call from him proposing a series of meetings where he could elaborate on what he called his December Project.
Davidson said on news of his passing on July 3, “He wanted to teach people how to navigate the December years and to help them ‘not freak out about dying.’”
The pair met nearly every Friday at his residence in Boulder, Colo. A release on the book explains, “They created strategies for dealing with pain and memory loss, and for cultivating fearlessness and joy—at any age. Interspersed with their talks are sketches from Reb Zalman’s extraordinary life, from escaping the Nazis in Vienna to landing in San Francisco during the sexual revolution to founding the Jewish Renewal movement.”
Predictably, the New York Times obituary recounted the rabbi’s earlier experiences, such as participating in LSD experiments with Timothy Leary and meeting the Dalai Lama, but failed to mention his creating of the Spiritual Eldering project over the past 25 years. Its worth clicking on the obit, though, to see the loving Joan Halifax photograph of Reb Zalman with healer and one time Harvard compatriot of Leary’s, Ram Dass, who wrote the 2000 post-stroke memoir, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Change and Dying.
Davidson, bestselling author of seven other books, noted in a blog headed “Reb Zalman’s Last Breath,” that “he quoted Woody Allen, who said, ‘I don’t mind dying, and I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ But Reb Zalman said, ‘I do want to be there. It’s such a holy moment. I want to watch the last breath going out and whisper the Shema [the essential Jewish prayer]. I want to merge back with the infinite… like a drop in the greater ocean.”
Journalists can request a press kit and review copy of The December Project from Suzanne Wickham.
*** Changing the Way We Die authors Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel received cheerful news on their otherwise sobering title. Library Journal gave the book a starred review, kind of like like hitting the Billboard charts with a bullet. The LJ review declared, “Verdict: This book belongs in every public and health-care library in America.” The book, Changing the Way We Die: Compassionate End-of-Life Care and the Hospice Movement, comes from Viva Editions, which can provide writers with press matter.
The book’s website includes a number of upcoming speaking gigs. Most at this point in Northern California, where the authors reside, but they will appear at the New York Public Library, Aug, 26, 6:30p.m., and the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, October 27, 4:30 p.m. Also Smith will deliver the plenary address at the annual New Hampshire Hospice & Palliative Care Organization meeting, Nov. 6. For interviews or inquiries e-mail Fran Smith.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE
***Application Deadline Oct. 1 for AHCJ Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance. The Association of Health Carte Journalists (AHCJ) is offering a yearlong program allowing journalists to pursue significant reporting on the health care system. “It can be local or national in scope, or a little of both — say an aspect of the Affordable Care Act playing out in your community or subject specialty, or the impact of particular evidence-based treatments on health outcomes, or an analysis of a health care organization’s performance, using public data sets. Fellows pursue the projects with the support of their newsrooms or freelance outlets, which commit to publish or air the work.”
AHCJ fellowship leaders will provide support through customized seminars on health care systems, conference calls and e-mail consultations. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the seminars and AHCJ conferences, plus a $4,000 project allowance to defray the cost of field reporting, health-data analysis and other project-related research. In addition, each fellow will receive a $2,500 fellowship award upon the successful completion of the project. Visit their website to review this and other AHCJ fellowship opportunities. Contact AHCJ’s Ev Ruch-Graham for answer questions: ev@healthjournalism.org or 573-884-8103.
*** Families USA’s Sixth Annual National Health Policy Journalist Training for Communities of Color in New Orleans, Sept. 25-26. The intensive, two-day session draws journalists from across the country, especially those serving communities of color. Registration is $75 cost of registration to the training. A limited number of fellowships are available to offset the cost of travel and accommodations. (Indicate your need for a fellowship on your online application.
This year’s session will focus on lessons learned in the first enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Conference sessions will “preview the outreach strategies and tactics expected in the second, which will begin just two months after the training. Overall, the training will offer a timely roadmap of the coming year’s major health policy issues,” says their website.
Workshops will also address topics relating to the cost and quality of care and reducing health disparities. The nonprofit Families USA is a respected national advocacy organization for health care consumers.
All questions should be directed to Airrion Andrews at aandrews@familiesusa.org or Bryan Fisher at bfisher@familiesusa.org. Phone: (202) 628-3030
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