This book presents a careful analysis of pension data collected by the Health and Retirement Study, a unique survey of people over the age of fifty conducted by the University of Michigan for the National Institute on Aging. The authors studied pensions as they evolve over individuals’ work lives and into retirement: how pension coverage and plans change over a lifetime, how many pensions workers have by the time they retire and what these pensions are worth, what pensions contribute to individual retirement incomes, and how trends and policy changes affect retirement plans.
The book focuses on the major features of pensions, including plan type and participation, ages of eligibility for retirement, values of different pension types, how pension values are influenced by retirement age, how plans are settled when a worker leaves a firm, how well people understand their pensions, the importance of pensions in retirement saving and as a share of household wealth, and the vulnerability of the retirement age population to the current financial crisis.
This book provides readers with an invaluable look at the crucial but ever-changing role of pensions in supporting retirees.
The private pension is a curiosity in the modern economic environment. Why do profit-seeking companies pay retirement benefits to those no longer on the job? In this new institutional history, Steven Sass explores the rise and growth of the financial support system that today commands trillions of dollars of investment capital and supports hundreds of thousands of older Americans.
Before 1900 America's elderly derived their livelihood from simple sources. They worked if they could, relied on their children, and took charity if necessary. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the country was constructing a new industrial economy. Both laborers and capital were moving away from farms toward large corporate establishments. These market changes weakened family links and traditional skills, rendering workers more vulnerable to economic shocks. The elderly, in particular, fell out of step with the new mechanized and bureaucratic regime. It was in response to these dramatic economic shifts that the institution of private pensions emerged. In return for workers' long-term loyalty, employers promised to help sustain them through old age.
As Sass shows, creating the pension system proved far more complicated than anyone had anticipated. Over the last hundred years it has evolved into a complex institution driven by congressional mandates, judicial/administrative decisions, union campaigns, political debates, and the ministrations of lawyers, economists, human resource specialists, actuaries, and insurance experts. Sass traces the U.S. pension system through to the present day, exploring how our modern corporate economy is confronting the challenges of an aging population.
A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.
While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.
Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.
But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.
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