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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