Financial gerontology

Financial Gerontology is a multidisciplinary field of study encompassing both academic and professional education, that integrates research on aging and human development with the concerns of finance and business. Following from its roots in social gerontology, financial gerontology is not simply the study of old people but emphasizes the multiple processes of aging. In particular, research and teaching in financial gerontology draws upon the four kinds or four lenses through which aging and finance can be viewed: population aging, individual aging, family aging, and generational aging. The field. While it is not always true that "demography is destiny," demographic concepts, issues, and data play a substantial role in understanding the dynamics of financial gerontology. For example, through the lens of population aging, demography identifies the number of persons of different ages in cities and countries—and at multiple points in time. Through the lens of individual aging, demography notes changes, typically improvements in human longevity. Beginning in its founding years in the beginning of the 21st century, one primary interest of the field has been on the baby boomers and their relationships with their parents. The impact of these two kinds of aging on finance are reasonably apparent. The large and increasing number of older persons population aging in a society, however "old age" is defined, and the longer each of those persons lives [individual aging], the greater the impact on a society's pattern of retirement, public and private pension systems, health, health care, and the personal and societal financing of health care. The focus on boomers illustrates the other two lenses or "kinds" of aging. How boomers deal with the social, emotional, and financial aspects of their parents' aging is a central aspect of family aging. And how boomers may differ from their parents born and raised twenty to forty years earlier, and differ from their Generation X and Millennial children and grandchildren, are substantial aspects of generational aging.

The origins of financial gerontology reflect the vision of two business professionals, Joseph Boettner, a successful insurance salesman and entrepreneur, and Davis Gregg, a successful business educator and administrator. Boettner was born in 1903 and left West Philadelphia High School to work in the city's booming insurance industry. Building from a successful career in sales he purchased the failing Philadelphia Life Insurance Company (for $1 per share), and established it as a successful company. Boettner's post-high school education was with the American College of Life Underwriters, then an insurance education program of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business & Finance; he earned his Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) designation in 1934. Born in 1918, Gregg graduated from the University of Texas and earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, where he studied under the legendary professor of insurance Solomon Huebner, the founder of the American College of Life Underwriters and considered by many to be the "father of insurance education" Gregg was on the faculty of Stanford University when Huebner asked him to come to the insurance college in Philadelphia for a short time. The "short time" became four decades including thirty years (1954 to 1983) as the college's president.

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