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This chapter begins with two foundational questions about gerontology. How did discipline discourse about aging and the aged become possible and compelling sometime around the 1950s and 1960s? What discursive resources does gerontology depend on to fund its intellectual operations? Population statistics connect also to the strands of the groundwork of gerontology: economic planning, public care, fiscal management of private and state budgets, and legislative action. The growth of semantic density around aging, old age, and the aged was a necessary but not sufficient linguistic condition for gerontology to emerge. Every science of social reality is a secondary and higher order, reworking of a reality linguistically composed. Its possibility depends, therefore, on prior language practices grown dense, complex, and folded back on them. A standard gerontological observation is that age structure—top heavy bulging in the population age pyramid—has implications for “the economic burden that a society must bear in supporting its dependent members”.
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