Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Baby boomers and retirement
I confess I don't normally read The Nation, but someone recently recommended William Greider's latest article, "Riding Into the Sunset." It touches on some of the same issues we talked about in a 2004 Perspectives piece, but deals more with the financial issues created by the growth of the retirement-age population-- not a surprising choice, given the current discussion of Social Security, and the fragile state of some corporate pensions.
Greider's piece seeks to resolve two conflicting issues. First, Boomers are changing retirement:
The elderly are redefining leisure, finding "fun" in myriad activities that lend deeper meaning to their lives. An informal shadow university has grown up around the nation in which older people are both the students and the teachers. They do "volunteer vacationing" and "foster grandparenting." They rehab old houses for the needy, serve as self-appointed environmental watchdogs or act as ombudsmen for neglected groups like indigent children or nursing-home patients. They dig into political issues with an informed tenacity that often withers politicians. In civic engagement, they are becoming counselors, critics, caregivers and mentors equipped with special advantages--the time and freedom to act, the knowledge and understanding gained only from the experience of living.
However, he argues, proposed Social Security reforms, pension underfuding, and low 401(k) and personal savings participation rates threaten to close the window on retirements of this sort-- ones that, as Theodore Roszak put it, will endow elders with "the wits, the political savvy and the sheer weight of numbers to become a major force for change."
Greider comes down in favor of something close to a proposal Robert Fogel has made for a mandatory TIAA-CREF-like retirement system. (Most academics are required to put a certain percentage of their salary into retirement. Not only has the system been pretty well-managed, by all returns, it's made it easier for a number of states to experiment with early retirement incentives for senior faculty-- essentially using the professoriate's own savings to subsidize changes in policy.) Whether one agrees with Greider's conclusions, the basic argument-- that retirement as we know it can change for the better only under the right financial conditions, and no one can assume that those conditions will exist in the future-- is unassailable.