Go ahead and retire
a somewhat disgusting morbidity...
In the New York Times, Eugene Steuerle and Glenn Kramon make the argument that Americans retire too early.
Their argument is based on two, reasonable I think, assumptions. One is that life expectancy, while its growth has somewhat stalled in recent years, is significantly longer than it was when our major government programs for seniors, Social Security and Medicare, were implemented, or last had their age parameters adjusted. This has made these programs expensive to fund. Although politicians often link them, we should take some care to treat them separately, as part of the high cost of Medicare arises from a health care delivery system in the US that is vastly more expensive than in other countries. But still, we do live longer, and these programs thus have to fund a greater number of person-years.
Their second assumption, again quite reasonable, is that we need to pay attention to inter-generational equity - for someone born in any given year, how much over their lifetime will they expect to contribute to these programs, and by how much will they benefit. Steuerle and Kramon claim the current generation of retirees is getting a rather sweet deal compared to younger generations, having been somewhat undertaxed during their working years relative to what they can expect to draw from the system. Inter-generational equity is a tricky problem, and no doubt should be accounted for as we determine the parameters of the tax and transfer system.
But then we come to their proposed solution: that the problem we have in the richest country in the history of the world is that people don’t work enough. That we should adjust Medicare and Social Security to encourage people to delay their retirement age.
The buried assumption here is that growth in aggregate income is a necessity, and the way to achieve it is to increase the workforce participation rate by keeping more seniors on the job.
Maynard Keynes, we cry out to you, for you knew, back in 1930, that with the fantastic increase in wealth we would enjoy over the century to come:
there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of higher virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution or wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
We work more than we need to as it is. I look around the campus where I teach, and ask: should we encourage those still holding a professorship at age 67 to hang on to it until they are 75? 85? They can manage it, those old notes have always served students well in the past!
Retire. And then go for walks, go for coffee with friends, listen to records, putter in the garden. Of course the country can afford it.
I imagine that the people writing these recommendations that people should work longer are also comfortably high up in the income distribution. They don't seem to consider the significant difference in life expectancy at age 65 between those at the top and those at the bottom of the distribution. And perhaps even more relevant are the differences in disability-free life expectancy by socioeconomic status/income/education levels that surely affect people's ability to keep working.
Right. The "sweet deal" problem is not that those people don't work it off somehow, it's that we've short-changed generations since in terms of offering them the same social supports that the current elderly received--the real cost of living has gone up considerably, home ownership and rents are way more expensive in real terms, higher education is ridiculously more expensive now that we've withdrawn so much public funding, health care is both more expensive and much worse than it was for most of the lives of the now-elderly, etc. It's a super-weird bit of advocacy, that somehow to justify being treated fairly and well in a society that used to be closer to social democracy, the elderly now must be sentenced to their time on Devil's Island breaking rocks in the quarry. Austerity ideology leads to some really strange places.