ABSTRACT
Social gerontology draws on a broad range of social science disciplines for its theories and methodologies, but to date its debt to economics and economists has been slight. Aside from a passing interest in the impact of the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme on future tax burdens, economists seem generally to have ignored the issues of elderly people and of ageing. Economic questions have been left largely to social policy analysts to look at, and much of their writing has been placed squarely within a radical framework often described by the term ‘the political economy of ageing’. Economic questions about ageing are seen by them to have an explicitly political dimension because the state, being the major determinant of the economic status of the elderly population, is regarded as capable (and culpable) of creating a new sort of deliberately structured dependency among old people.
