Lags and Leaps: The Dynamics of Demography, Economy and Policy and Their Implications for Life Course Research

Abstract

This essay proposes that research on the life course be placed explicitly within the larger global context to understand the forces of history and social change that bear upon it. Population aging, migration, and global financialization are major accelerating forces for change—leaps—over recent decades. However, persistent cultural and policy legacies across countries and regions lag behind these changes. Three areas of life course are proposed to reflect the complex and sometimes countervailing dynamics of these macro-level forces. The first is a more conceptual proposal to guide life course research in general. It focuses on the life course as a continuous manifold process with diverse temporality in a population. Age-graded, phasic constructions of the life course are treated as too restrictive to account for growing variations in education, family, work and health transitions across the life course and in the pace of aging in advanced countries but also extending to developing countries. The second focuses on the ascendance of market institutions, especially financial institutions, in the maintenance of individual and household financial and health decision-making. Financial and health literacy are new life course risks which pervade the life course. Third, increased migration levels over recent decades, especially to some advanced countries, are changing the demographic compositions of successive cohorts who face changing educational opportunities and workplace protections. The life course implications of migration are now matters of speculation, which life course research should address in the future as data permit.