Age is the only category of discrimination that includes all human beings—if they live long enough. The bodies of aging people remind younger people of their own frailty and mortality, and popular discourse portrays those bodies as incompetent, unattractive, even revolting. Aging people themselves often come to feel disgust with their own bodies, as new research proposes. As philosopher and law professor Martha Nussbaum will argue, this stigma is itself a social problem leading to various forms of injustice, such as discrimination in employment and in informal social interactions, not to mention the social evil of compulsory retirement. Age discrimination may well be the new issue for our time, since it deprives all societies of valuable human capital.

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