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Abstract:
The American institution of retirement has sustained numerous attacks over the last twenty years, to the extent that it may cease to exist in its current form by the time most of today's workers reach their mid-sixties. Two of the major components of the U.S. retirement system, private pensions and Social Security, have either declined or are under attack, and thus may not be able to provide support for the elderly in the future, particularly low and middle income retirees. Changes in employment policies, volatility in investments available for retirement savings plans, and proposals to privatize Social Security threaten the financial basis for retirement itself over the next twenty years. Human beings have always structured their societies, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, to some extent around sustaining elderly members of the population, but for almost all elderly people, work into extreme old age and disability was the norm until the twentieth century. The innovation of the last century, and specifically of Social Security, was to make retirement the mechanism for caring for the elderly, and to make retirement the norm for the elderly of all income groups. The current debate over privatizing Social Security, combined with legislative neglect of the weakening employer-provided pension system, threatens to return the United States to the pre-20th century methods of caring for the old - requiring them to work until death or disability makes work impossible, or allowing responsibility for their care and upkeep to fall on individual family members or friends. The alternative is to make moderate revisions in the institution of retirement itself; phased retirement, increased funding for Social Security benefits for lower and moderate wage workers, and exploration of a citizen-based, rather than employment-based, retirement income system, are all possible avenues to maintain retirement as an expectation for workers at all income levels.
retirement, Social Security, pensions, elderly
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