1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480896503321

Autore

Milne Ida

Titolo

Stacking the coffins : Influenza, war and revolution in Ireland, 1918–19 / / Ida Milne

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Manchester, U.K. : , : Manchester University Press, 2020

©2020

ISBN

1-5261-5435-8

1-5261-2270-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 263 pages) : illustrations, maps

Disciplina

616.203

Soggetti

Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1919 - Ireland

Electronic books.

Ireland

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

A 'mysterious malady' - or a 'perfect storm'? -- The flu: a news perspective -- Counting the ill and the dead -- 'Managing' the crisis -- The doctors' view: medical puzzle, politics and the search for cures -- Hospitals and other institutions: coping with crises -- Dying and surviving: eye witnesses -- Influenza as a political tool -- Epilogue: the long aftermath.

Sommario/riassunto

The 1918-19 influenza epidemic killed more than 50 million people, and infected between one fifth and half of the world's population. It is the world's greatest killing influenza pandemic, and is used as a worst case scenario for emerging infectious disease epidemics like the corona virus COVID-19. It decimated families, silenced cities and towns as it passed through, stilled commerce, closed schools and public buildings and put normal life on hold. Sometimes it killed several members of the same family. Like COVID-19 there was no preventative vaccine for the virus, and many died from secondary bacterial pneumonia in this pre-antibiotic era. In this work, Ida Milne tells how it impacted on Ireland, during a time of war and revolution. But the stories she tells of the harrowing impact on families, and of medicine's desperate search to heal the ill, could apply to any other place in the world at the time. --



2.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910778635903321

Autore

Disney Richard

Titolo

Can We Afford to Grow Older?

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, : MIT Press, 2015

ISBN

0-262-27177-X

0-585-03096-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (356 p.)

Disciplina

305.26

Soggetti

Aging - Economic aspects

Older people - Economic conditions

Age distribution (Demography)

Old age pensions

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-338) and index.

Sommario/riassunto

The United States Social Security fund is huge and in trouble. The United Kingdom has experimented with the voluntary contracting out of pensions to the private sector. Chile has privatized its public pension system. Australia has adopted a means-tested public pension system. Japan has the earliest retirement age of any advanced economy; it also has the highest rate of labor force participation by elderly men. Can We Afford to Grow Older? provides a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of the implications of population aging in these and other OECD countries relative to a range of specific interrelated issues--Social Security schemes, employer pensions, educational attainment, wage growth and distribution, economic productivity, consumption, savings, retirement, and health care--all within a realistic framework for modeling and discussing policy. International in scope, filled with rich institutional detail, and built on a solid technical foundation, this will be a standard reference on the economic consequences of aging. Richard Disney adopts a "life-cycle" view of the world which recognizes that individuals often make plans with a forward-looking perspective across the stages of childhood, the peak of economic productivity, and retirement. He stresses the existence of overlapping generations and the reality of



generational transactions (which include tax and transfer systems, bequests, and charity to the elderly). And he assumes intertemporal optimization as a useful unifying basis for analyzing social security, private pension schemes, lifetime labor-supply decisions, consumption, and saving. Among the surprising conclusions that emerge is that there is no "crisis of aging"--no adverse effect of aging on productivity. And although there are serious crises in pay-as-you-go social insurance programs and in health care, these have little to do with aging. Moreover, the shift in private provision plans away from traditional defined- benefit plans will continue, along with an interest in privatized pensions instead of social security.