Early life predictors of old-age life expectancy

The laboratory of Richard Miller and numerous heroic collaborators are in the process of testing a variety of life span predictors on more than 1000 mice. In their most recent publication, Harper et al. show that early-adulthood measures of T cell subsets, body weight, and thyroxine can be effectively combined to provide a highly significant predictor of life expectancy. Each measure appears to be an index of largely separate parameters that affect the course of aging. This article summarizes the results, discusses implications, mentions caveats, and suggests future studies.     

A different life?: Barthes,Foucault and everyday life

How might the injunction to ‘think differently’ in the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have informed a re-thinking of everyday life? In Barthes’ work, a critical analysis of myth and ideology in the contemporary everyday life of the late 1950s gives way to counter-ideological strategies that might seem to move away from the everyday and towards the utopian. However, the utopian imagination at work in Barthes’ thought is effective precisely in its insistence on the everyday detail. This is reflected in the later work in the attention given to the incident and the haiku. In his later work, Foucault turns towards antiquity in response to his own assessment of the ubiquitous diffusion of relations of power and the need to ‘think differently’. It is, however, in the interviews and specifically in a series of comments on homosexuality that Foucault is most attentive to the ‘possibilities for new life’ in his own time. It is through the undoing of already established relations and the experimentation with different modes of relation that a locus of difference can be found in everyday life. This is characterized by Foucault as a heterotopia. Foucault’s tentative suggestions of different possibilities are oriented towards an intensification of pleasures, counter to the psychoanalytic attention to desire. However, Foucault’s account of pleasure is associated with mortality, suggesting the question: is this different life one destined only to posterity and its own transcendence? Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian subjectivation suggests a different strategy of resistance, more attuned to the immanence of a life.     

Testosterone and men's quality of life

As the worldwide population ages, the emphasis on having a reasonable quality of life in old-age is increasing. In men, age-associated testosterone decline is one of the major factors that reduce quality of life. In patients and the physicians treating them, decreased energy levels and impairments to sex-life are perceived as the most important effects of hypogonadism. Two quality of life scales, the Aging Males' Symptoms (AMS) and the Age-Related Hormone Deficiency-Dependent Quality of Life (A-RHDQoL) scales, have recently been developed to specifically assess this patient population, and the A-RHDQoL found that memory, energy and physical capabilities, and sex-life were the factors most adversely affected by low testosterone levels. Unfortunately, there are limited data on the effects of testosterone on the quality of life of men with hypogonadism, but the information that exists suggests that testosterone can improve the quality of life significantly (to the same level as men with normal testosterone levels) and the more severe the symptoms before treatment, the greater the benefits of testosterone replacement. These promising early results need to be confirmed in more detailed quality of life studies.     

Marketing and the quality of life

This article explores the relationship between marketing and quality of life.The first part develops a conceptualization of quality of life based on the idea that citizens arc involved in exchanging resources to new resources or to ultimate satisfaction in a set of arenas of action. The so-called objective and subjective approaches to measuring quality of life address different aspects of the exchange relationships and their context.The article claims that marketing at least indirectly has contributed to a higher quality of life by rendering work life possible and by providing the goods and services entering the consuming life arena. At the same time, marketing has had a negative influence by giving priority to short-term, materialistic needs. Necessary institutional changes in marketing are indicated.     

Positive events and quality of life

Research evidence that might either support or deny the substantive contribution of positive life experiences on health and well-being would be of great value. Regrettably clinical research has been concerned primarily with the disruption in well-being and adjustment associated with stressful or otherwise aversive events. While positive events and their effects have not been ignored altogether, investigators traditionally have given them short shrift in developing and testing models of mental health and psychopathology. This paper evaluates some of these beginning efforts at testing the positive events on psychological functioning, and suggests some new directions for future work in this area.     

Relational wealth and the quality of life

This article introduces a new concept, relational wealth, which is derived from and deeply rooted in family and community values. The concept offers: (a) a mechanism for consciousness raising, (b) a basis for dialogue, and (c) a foundation for policy making. The basic thesis of this article is based on three propositions: 1) our human and national welfare depends on both material and relational wealth. Material wealth, made up of commodities, provides us physical comforts and defines our standard of living. Relational wealth emanates from our interconnections with other human beings. It gives us inner strength and emotional security and defines our quality of life. 2) There is a tension between material and relational wealth. As material wealth increases beyond a certain level, it impinges on relational wealth. 3) Our current economic practices and policies concentrate on the maximization of material wealth only with minimal concern for its negative effects. Yet the objective of a meaningful economic practice and policy is to maximize material and relational wealth jointly. The article provides suggestive economic policies and ideas regarding family, community and overconsumption.     

Petrified life

How might we read temporality, that is, the psychical and social experience of time, as an index of the prevailing political and intersubjective impasses of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras? This paper explores three perspectives on this broad problematic. Achille Mbembe’s thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide, firstly, a means of understanding one characteristically post-apartheid mode of temporality: that of suspended history. Crapanzano’s notion of waiting, elaborated as a means of grasping the white anxiety of the late apartheid period, allows us, secondly, to conceptualise the de-realised experience of a muted or deadened time. A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid Archive concerning a fantasised scene of violence, enables us to sketch a third form of temporal experience common to apartheid and post-apartheid experiences alike, namely that of imagined retribution. These ostensibly separate and distinct modes of temporality can be read as interlocking forms of “petrified life,” a term I use to link temporalities of immobilisation characterised by suspension, stasis and fear.     

Evolutions of personal networks and life events

Networks of personal relations evolve over time. They reflect and go with processes of socialization. Their history and dynamics contribute to their present structure. The number of people involved in them and their composition change, as does the quality of the links that constitute them. What life events might influence these changes, or possibly even explain them?Drawing on a qualitative survey of a panel of 66 young people living originally in Normandy (France), who were questioned every three years, we attempt here to find a relation between the evolution of their personal networks and the events marking their entry into adult life.Do their networks expand or contract, do they move regularly or in stages? What are the links that appear, disappear or change? What events are likely to influence changes in these links and in the networks as a whole?We begin by examining the changes in the young people's networks during the survey's three waves. We then identify the life events that took place in the intervals, focusing in particular on entry into the labour market, geographical mobility, setting up house with a partner and the birth of children in the household. This enables us to advance some hypotheses about the impact of these events on the evolution of networks and to illustrate our argument with a few significant examples.     

The time and space of everyday life

This article argues that everyday life is related to all social relations and activities, including both the ‘official’ practices that are codified and normalized and the ‘unofficial’ practices and articulations of experience. Indeed, everyday day life is seen as the single plane of immanence in which these two forms of practice and articulation interrelate and affect one another. The lived experience of everyday life is multidimensional, composed of various social fields of practice that are articulated, codified and normalized to different degrees and in different ways (either officially or unofficially). Moving through these fields in daily life, we are aware of passing through different zones of time and space. There are aspects of everyday relations and practices more open to government, institutionalization, and official codification, while others are more resistant and provide the basis for opposition and social movements. Everyday life is a mixture of diverse and differentially produced and articulated forms, each combining time and space in a unique way. What we refer to as ‘institutions’ associated with the state or the economy are attempts to fix social practice in time and space – to contain it in specific geographical sites and codify it in official discourses. The relations and practices more often associated with everyday life – such as friendship, love, comradeship and relations of communication – are more fluid, open and dispersed across time and space. However, the two should not be uncoupled in social analysis, as they are necessarily interrelated in processes of social and political change. This is especially so in contemporary capitalism or, as Lefebvre called it, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.     

Quality of life indicators and program evaluation

Social indicators and program evaluation research have much in common. Quality of life work specifically raises the question of objective versus subjective variables, aggregate data versus distributional and individual issues, and the reference standards used in judgment and evaluation decisions. This article presents perspectives on these issues from the orientation of quality of life research and proposes that these approaches have relevance for program evaluation work.     

The premium of inflation-indexed life insurances for the Romanian life table

This paper deals with the pricing process of life insurances that provide an insured sum indexed annually according to the current inflation rate. In these terms we propose an appropriate formula for the discount factor. In order to describe the inflation, we consider a stochastic autoregressive model. We deduce analytical expressions for the mean value and the variance of random variable defined as the present value of 1 unit indexed annually according to the inflation rate, payable over t years, when inflation is generated by an autoregressive process of order one. At the same time, we obtain numerical results for the Romanian life table, regarding the mean and the standard deviation for the actuarial present value of a pure endowment life insurance with the sum insured indexed annually with the inflation rate.     

Parents' divorce and children's life chances

This paper reports available British data from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies examining the long term impact of parental divorce on children's life chances. The authors suggest that an effect can be traced, lowering the educational attainment of both sexes and the socio-economic status of males in their mid-twenties following parental divorce or separation before the age of fourteen years. This effect is reduced but not removed by remarriage of the custodial parent.