UCLA professor to speak on the well-being of the elderly

An expert on the well-being of the elderly will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19, at the Founders Room (Quadrangle Building room 170), Saint John’s University.

Visiting scholar Kathleen McGarry will present “50 Years of the War on Poverty, What it Meant for the Elderly?” Her speech, presented by the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement and Theta of Minnesota, the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at CSB and SJU, is free and open to the public.

McGarry feels that the War on Poverty was a success in reducing poverty among the elderly.

“When (President) Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in 1964, the poverty rate was 19 percent, a rate deemed far too high for a nation with the wealth and resources of the United States,” McGarry wrote in a paper. “Yet far worse was the poverty rate for those age 65 or older, which stood at 35 percent in 1959 … more than twice the 17 percent rate among non-elderly adults.

“Despite this inauspicious start, the War on Poverty has been a success for the elderly by almost any measure. In the most recent data available, the poverty rate for the elderly in 2010 was 9 percent, approximately one-quarter of what it once was and far lower than the poverty rate for children, 22 percent, or non-elderly adults, 13.7 percent.”

McGarry joined the faculty at UCLA in 1992, becoming a professor in 2004. She has won numerous teaching awards while there.

In 2000-01, she served as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, working for both the Clinton and Bush administrations in the areas of health, education and welfare.

McGarry has also served as a research fellow (1993-99) and research assistant (1999-present) at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Aging Program.

She received both her bachelor’s of science (mathematics) and Ph.D. (economics) degrees at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Her research focuses on the well-being of the elderly with particular attention paid to public and private transfers, including the Medicare and SSI programs, and the transfer of resources within families. Her research combines work on the financial aspects of aging with issues related to health economics to examine insurance coverage for the elderly.

The Visiting Scholar program is set up through the national Phi Beta Kappa office. Scholars visit selected schools for two days, interacting with students in classrooms.