Retirement was a nice idea while it lasted.

January 13, 2014 9:22 PM

Nobody was ever actually supposed to live long enough to retire.
posted by paleyellowwithorange (6 comments total)

I have been at my job a paltry 10 years and if some Shadowy Entity told me today that in order to retire by 50 I would have to drink a glass of fresh kitten blood each morning for the next 15 years I would do so with neither hesitation nor remorse.
posted by elizardbits at 9:25 PM on January 13, 2014 [4 favorites]

While the Social Security Administration will tell you that the 1935 decision to set the retirement age at 65 was based on the pension systems already in place at that time — half of which had 65 as their retirement age, and half of which used 70 — it fails to mention that Americans’ life expectancy was a paltry 61.7 years at that time.

That's life expectancy at birth. That's the wrong metric to use because odds of surviving childhood were often not good.

In 1935 the life expectancy of a 20 year old was ~69 years, and if you made it to 60, life expectancy was 75.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:30 PM on January 13, 2014 [11 favorites]

Nobody was ever actually supposed to retire. Let’s take the United States as an example. While the Social Security Administration will tell you that the 1935 decision to set the retirement age at 65 was based on the pension systems already in place at that time — half of which had 65 as their retirement age, and half of which used 70 — it fails to mention that Americans’ life expectancy was a paltry 61.7 years at that time. It’s almost as if the pension industry asked cold-blooded actuaries to design highly promising, Ponzi-scheme-like retirement programs that would only benefit a fraction of the people paying into them. Almost

It's almost as if whoever wrote this piece is so completely incapable of understanding basic mathematical concepts (such as "averages") that they should be prevented by law from writing about actuarial subjects. Almost.
posted by yoink at 9:32 PM on January 13, 2014

Popover engagement tab with this question: "DO YOU AGREE THAT OUR GENERATION NEEDS A VOICE?"

Without reading this article, I predict it to be the annual GOP stalking horse to recruit youngsters in the War on the Olds. May they wither and blow away on a dessicating wind.

The parties complicit in the drumbeat for the War on the Olds, that is.
posted by mwhybark at 9:32 PM on January 13, 2014

Let's see this kind of article for what it really is: desensitizing today's young people from the prospect of having benefits taken away from them. That way, when the time comes for retirement, decades from now, this will have laid the groundwork for a deft, devastating political maneuver: "Oh, surely you didn't expect Social Security/pensions/etc. to actually be there for you! Ha ha ha ha! You must be joking!" (Whether or not that's what the author of this particular article intends is beside the point.)
posted by John Cohen at 9:34 PM on January 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Furthermore, the designers of Social Security planned for increasing life expectancy.

The writer appears to have swallowed whole a right-wing "everybody knows Social Security is bankrupt" talking point.
posted by thelonius at 9:36 PM on January 13, 2014