As French workers organize to protest raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 and fight against moves to lower pension payments from 60 percent of earnings at retirement, the prospect looms that the Social Security retirement age in this country will rise to 70 and then be indexed to longevity numbers.
Let’s don’t do the math. How the question of retirement age will be re-solved in the good, old United States of America will be by the way Americans look at their lives, not by what can be afforded.
For the economics are implacable. Today there are about 3.3 workers and their employers paying into Social Security for every retired worker. The ratio was more than 16 to 1 in 1950. In a few years that number drops to even lower. Doesn’t compute. The whole pension system, private and public, must be restructured to meet today’s realities.
What must happen, and will happen therefore, is that the attitude toward retirement will adapt to changed circumstances. Americans — and maybe even the French — will decide that retirement is a bore. Here they are, vigorous at 70 being told they must stop being productive, put their feet up and do nothing useful. They’ll make other choices and make them earlier.
Americans live a month longer for every year that goes by. Not only is the percentage of the population older than 65 growing steadily, so is the percentage of healthy people within that segment of the population.
When the Social Secur-ity system was created in the 1930s, the average lifespan was 65. Few were expected to draw pensions; fewer still would be on the pension list very long. Not only did workers die earlier, a far greater percentage of the elderly population was disabled. After 40 years of hard physical labor, they were unable to work longer even if they had wanted to.
These new realities became apparent in the 1960s and 1970s, about the same time that personal wealth grew larger. The psychological re-sponse to this new world was to make early retirement a goal. Being able to retire early became a mark of success. Retired at 40? Wow, what a winner!
That era passed, too. The goal changed to embarking on a second career to put a new spark in living. Today, more and more Americans re-invent themselves from stage to stage and expect to be productive as long as getting up in the morning is fun.
The change in attitude starts early. Today’s young men and women may graduate from the university, then take a year or two off to serve in the Peace Corps, become a community organizer, be a ski bum or find some other non-career way to put their life in neutral while they weigh alternatives. Graduates no longer are faunching at the bit to make a million in plastics, then quit and play.
If the national and world economy allows, the work pattern in the knowledge-based society will become less ordered by age-stages — young, middle and old — and more tailored by individual decisions. To accommodate, individuals will plan more and save more to be able to direct their own lives.
AN ALTERNATIVE vision of the future for the United States and for the social democracies of Europe is the diversion through taxation of an ever-greater percentage of national wealth to perpetuate and enhance the belief that the elder 40 percent of the population should be supported in comfort and leisure by the other 60 percent into the indefinite future.
Call it the Greek Way.
Call it highly unlikely so long as those who do the earning also have the vote.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
