Too many open browser windows, so it’s time so share some of the links that I’ve been accumulating.
From the Center for Retirement Research, a briefing on the retirement age. Despite Americans’ general lack of preparedness for retirement, the retirement age, after a significant trend of increasing, has leveled off over the last decade, at about 62 for women and 64 for men.
From Slate, an article pushing back on the notion that the solution to one’s lack of preparedness for retirement is to just keep working, indefinitely. Whether for health reasons or job loss and inability to find a new job, large numbers of people end up retiring involuntarily, even if they had planned on working later. (I need to dig these statistics out.) Of course, Slate continues by promoting plans to increase Social Security benefits, but that’s a topic for another post.
And AEI has a piece on “The global flight from the family,” that is, the trend among rich nations globally that increasing numbers of adults are voluntarily childless — which, of course, plays into the issues of “who’ll take care of the elderly?”
Unrelated to retirement but still worth a read is this piece by Megan McArdle, “It’s Complicated. But Hopeful.” Actually, I take that back — it is related to retirement, in that a lot of the discussion around retirement is around standards of living: should our retirement policy be targeted at helping the elderly maintain their standard of living (whether working-class, middle-class, upper-middle-class), or preserve them from poverty, that is, ensure they have a roof over their heads, nutritous food, medical care, and are, in general, protected from material deprivation.
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