Economist Teresa Ghilarducci delivered the annual Frank Pierson Lecture. Her talk, "Do the Old Eat the Young?: The False Tradeoff Between Funding for the Young and the Old," focuses mostly on Social Security and pension funding and aims to generate critical thinking about who, why, and when "inter-generational equity" is evoked in political economy debate.

Ghilarducci is the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz Professor of Economics and Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research.

This lecture is in honor of Frank C. Pierson '34, who joined the College faculty in 1940 and taught for 39 years, chairing the Department of Economics from 1967 until his retirement in 1979. Professor Pierson was a distinguished scholar of labor economics as well as an arbitrator of industrial disputes and provided an important voice for moderation and tolerance on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s.