AGING AND OLD AGE
By Richard A. Posner. Univ. of Chicago Press. 363 $29.95
AGING AND OLD AGE. By Richard A. Posner. Univ. of Chicago Press. 363 pp. $29.95 Francis Bacon once wrote: "Age is best in four things--old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read." What about our understanding of age itself? Should we rely on old ideas--or new? Posner, a federal judge, legal scholar, and economist, evaluates the contentious issues surrounding age through the (relatively) new discipline of rational-choice theory. Though his wide-ranging study draws upon such diverse fields as medicine, psychology, and philosophy, Posner admits that "economics wields the baton of my multidisciplinary orchestra." As an overture, Posner asserts that aging is real--not, as some activists propose, a social construct that gathers otherwise unrelated mental and physical illnesses under an unnecessarily demeaning rubric. He also speculates, in an armchair evolutionary argument, on why human beings are built to break down: eventually our resource consumption becomes a drag on the reproductive capacities of the young. Yet while aging is real, people often behave as though it were not. Among the many topics addressed by this book is social security. Posner admits that most mandatory retirement savings systems are justified by the fact that young people tend not to save for retirement, even though they have every reasonable expectation of living long past their working years. One might think that people don't plan for old age simply because they don't like to think about it. Yet Posner finds this explanation unacceptable. Invoking rational-choice theory, he probes for the logic behind the fact that young people act like grasshoppers when they should be acting like ants. What he comes up with is an ingenious theory of "multiple selves," in which the economist's rational self-interested individual is replaced by a series of rational self-interested individuals--overlapping with each other and capable, to some degree, of assuming responsibility for each other. In Posner's view, this theory explains why social security is not a form of "paternalism," based on the notion that "government knows best." Instead, it construes the young working "self" as a trustee, occupying a body that will later be occupied by the older retired "self." Since the interests of both "selves" must be respected, the law imposes a limited fiduciary obligation on the younger. However ingenious, such a theory has too little explanatory power to justify its bizarre disassembling of the person. This is model building for its own sake, and it becomes even less satisfying as Posner tackles such vexing issues as age discrimination and euthanasia. Despite the occasional quota-tion from Aristotle or Mill, Posner's approach does little to illuminate the moral dilemmas involved. Indeed, superficial borrowings from philosophy only serve as reminders that, for examining some areas of life, the older disciplines are best. --Joseph Brinley