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That's the title of an eye-opening article from the August Harper's. Contact me privately if you'd like a copy. Here's an excerpt:
The very idea of retirement is a relatively new invention. For most of human history, people worked until they died or were too infirm to lift a finger (at which point they died pretty fast anyway). It was the German statesman Otto von Bismarck who first floated the concept, in 1883, when he proposed that his unemployed countrymen over the age of sixty-five be given a pension. This move was designed to fend off Marxist agitation—and to do so on the cheap, since few Germans survived to that ripe old age.
William Osler, a celebrated physician who helped to found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was instrumental in bringing the idea to the English-speaking world. His rationale was physiological and, to a certain extent, economic. Workers peaked at forty, he argued, then went downhill until they hit their sixties—at which point, Osler prankishly suggested, they might as well be chloroformed (an idea Osler borrowed from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period). The pension advocate Lee Welling Squier expressed a similar idea in 1912, in considerably less comic terms:
After the age of sixty has been reached, the transition from nondependence to dependence is an easy stage—property gone, friends passed away or removed, relatives become few, ambition collapsed, only a few short years left to live, with death a final and welcome end to it all—such conclusions inevitably sweep the wage-earner from hopeful independent citizen into that of the helpless poor.
In this country, it was the Great Depression that made retirement into a reality. There were too many workers, too few jobs, and a consequent sense that the elderly needed to be nudged out of the labor pool. Francis Townsend, a California physician who had also farmed hay and managed a failing dry-ice factory, began lobbying for what came to be known as the Townsend Plan: if a worker retired at sixty, the federal government would reward him with a monthly pension of up to $200. It was partly in response to this populist initiative that FDR and a Democratic Congress passed the Social Security Act of 1935—which, unlike the Townsend Plan, required future retirees to chip in to a common fund throughout their working lives.
After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of these legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions with 401(k) plans, which were originally marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices. (The upshot: Employers saved money. Workers got shafted.)
All of which is to say that Social Security is now the largest single source of income for most Americans sixty-five or older. But economists agree that it’s woefully inadequate. Nearly half of middle-class workers may be forced to live on a food budget of as little as five dollars a day when they retire, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist and professor at the New School in New York City. “I call it the end of retirement,” she told me. Many retirees simply can’t survive without some sort of paycheck. Meanwhile, Ghilarducci noted, jobs for older Americans are paying less and becoming ever more physically taxing. She worries we’re returning to the world that Lee Welling Squier described more than a century ago. And any serious discussion of the problem, she added, is complicated by a cultural stigma. “I never talk about this issue in terms of ‘retirement,’” Ghilarducci said. Americans traditionally abhor the idea “that A you are mooching or you’re not productive.”
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