Dinner with friends last week drifted from the food to weight loss, to a research paper. A Harvard economist compared women who were on a weight loss drug with women who wanted to but hadn't yet. Among those who weren't employed to begin with, the ones on the drug were about 27% more likely to be working around 18 months later. (the article here)

The effect sat entirely on first impressions. For women already in a job, pay and hours held steady, and self-reported life satisfaction didn't move. So the number probably measures how much a first meeting turns on visible weight. I think it is relevant because the same mechanism runs under one of this week's articles (see Ageism cuts both ways at work further below): the assumptions that are at play in work environments — about weight, about age — that ultimately dictate who gets hired.

The word "economy" started life meaning the running of a household. It comes from the Greek oikos, the home, and oikonomia, the skill of managing one. For centuries that skill — provisioning, ordering the day, holding a group of people and their needs together under one roof — was treated as a subject worth thinking about. An essay by philosopher Sandrine Bergès traces how the household then dropped out of philosophy, partly because the people doing the thinking were men and the people running the homes were women. (read it here)

One of the ancient texts Bergès recovers, long attributed to Aristotle himself, claims that a city is only a collection of households, so the household comes first, and running one well is the ground everything else stands on. Running a home well was the ground everything else stood on. The Stoics went further; they wrote about a home as a partnership that works only when the people in it can cover for each other, take over a task when someone is sick or away, and keep the whole thing running.

Here the read-across is mine. A residential aged care home is a household in exactly this sense. Someone plans the meals, sets the rhythm of the day, notices when a person needs more and when they need to be left alone, and holds a hundred small arrangements together so the place runs. That is oikonomia — the same craft the ancients thought was serious enough to write about, carried out now by the people who run our homes.

I like the word because it names something the modern sense of "economy" left behind. The daily ordering of a shared home takes real skill and real judgement and sits alongside the clinical and the regulatory work. Running a home well is demanding, careful work, and it has been for a very long time.

Tuesday 28 July | 2–4.30pm AEST | Online | Ticketed

I'm running this workshop with Ageing Australia, building on the June webinar on AI in aged care. The session covers Tier 2 and Tier 3 of AI adoption — the structured phase that comes after Tier 1, where generic tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot are already in everyday use across the sector.

Hands-on walkthroughs of five practical tools — AI Use Case Discovery, Value Assessment, Ethics Assessment, Risk Assessment, and a Prioritisation Roadmap. Governance and oversight considerations through the back half. For executives, operational managers and anyone moving their organisation past individual experimentation.

Wednesday 5 August | 9am–5pm AEST | Establishment Ballroom, Sydney | Ticketed

A one-day forum for NDIS and aged care providers on where AI and automation are landing in day-to-day operations — rostering, compliance, intake, payroll — and where they're still rough. Hosted by Tania Gomez Consulting, the program runs across VR for dementia, AI governance, short tech showcases from a range of vendors, and a CEO roundtable to close. I'm speaking on the future of care.

You can read more here. Registering through the link below takes 20% off. 👇

A commentary in the Journal of Elder Abuse & Neglect argues that coercive control against older people is hard to see partly because the language for it isn't settled. The patterns — isolation, control of money, decisions made for someone without real consent — often get described in vague terms rather than named, and what isn't named is hard to report, prosecute or research. The authors put forward an evidence-based definition to close that gap. (read it here)

There's a harder finding too. Some of the safeguards built to protect older people can be turned to control them, and people who raise concerns are sometimes treated as the problem.

An animated short from the Brazil. As his illness worsens, an old man moves into his daughter's house, and his young grandson starts redrawing the family's old photographs — and the drawings begin to reach memories that had slipped away. There's no dialogue; across 16 minutes the pictures carry it. (watch it here)

A newly published report looks at how age plays out for people already in a job, rather than at the point of hiring. Younger workers report the most discrimination and harassment day to day. Older workers report the most room to be themselves, and the least access to development, mentoring and career support. (read the summary)

Gender sharpens it. Older women were recognised for their work far less often than older men (69% against 81%), and offered career development far less often (41% against 57%). The Age Discrimination Commissioner framed ageism as one problem shared across the generations, showing up differently at each end.

Describe the deck you want in a sentence or two — the topic, who it's for, roughly how many slides — and Claude produces a first draft you can see and click through. From there you edit slide by slide: rewrite a heading, change the order, ask it to turn a list into a chart, adjust the look. When it's right, you export to PowerPoint, PDF or Canva and finish it wherever you normally work. (here's the walkthrough)

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis