I wasn't expecting this to be my first diary, but I got a wild hair and figured maybe I had something to say here that would justify one. This has been inspired partly by various recent threads on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the "left" blogosphere. Still, it's been something that (like many of you) I've been thinking about for a while now.
Some background: I live in Atlanta, my hometown, and work a good, pretty-well-paying "entry-level" tech job at a Fortune 500 company that has given this country a United States Senator (a Democrat, mind you). That should be enough information for some of you out there to deduce exactly which company I'm talking about.
I have a 401 (k) plan from both my current job and my previous job, from which I was laid off three years and small change ago (though I really need to track down exactly where that account is now!). I haven't exactly looked at it for a while, though.
I live alone in a one-bedroom condo; I could probably afford a townhome, but I fear what might happen and I don't need the extra space (unless I have a band, in which case I need a house or a rehearsal studio). Better safe than sorry.
OK--more below the fold.
One more thing: I have practically no legal or political or sociological background. At least in an economic sense, I'm Just Some Guy, though not in that self-conscious "Joe The Plumber" way, which is worth a diary in itself.
All right, here goes:
In an ageist work culture, is it tenable to raise the retirement age?
I've read comments worrying about this recently, and it got me to thinking: Wouldn't it put older workers even more over a barrel if we were to raise the retirement age? As I understand it, Social Security was instituted partly to tighten up the labor market, thereby allowing younger workers a better chance to land a job. As it is, today's work culture already favors younger workers, so to that extent Social Security isn't working as intended; in fact it might be necessary to reduce the retirement age so that employers can have more space to pay entry-level wages to entry-level employees. But what kind of load would that put on Social Security?
Why do so many people expect not to retire?
Do they just want to make sure they aren't caught out? Do they want other people to know how Hard-Headed And Realistic they are? (This has seemed for a very long time to be the motivator for many people's actions and statements.) Have they run the numbers? Did they just listen to Joe (ahem) Republican run a few Social Security numbers, whereupon he left them to fill in the blanks themselves, relying on the now-fevered imaginations of his listeners to imagine THE WHOLE SYSTEM FALLING APART IMMEDIATELY at some future time? Is there "no crisis" or is there one? How can we convince people that if we make some adjustments now, there's no reason to believe that Social Security won't be there?
The effort to privatize Social Security was successfully repelled in 2005. So why do so many people, even left of center, continue to think this way?
What does the puncturing of the housing bubble have to do with this?
IIRC, part of the reason McMansions became popular (apparently lost in the orgy of retro-chic and need to keep up with the Joneses) was that many people in the '80s and '90s were convinced that buying a big house would be a good investment for retirement; when retirement came, homeowners could sell their houses, trade down for a nice condo flat or townhome at a retirement community (maybe in Florida), and put the remainder into CDs (not Compact Disks, mind you). ;-) Obviously this doesn't work so well if the McMansion doesn't gain in value. But beyond that, what does it say about a generation that it regards HOME as an "investment"? When retirement age comes, what if we suddenly realize that we don't want to part with HOME? What does that do to our financial plans?
Besides the obvious benefit of more money going into Social Security, if the retirement age is raised, can an "upside" be provided to workers?
Remember, Social Security was partly instituted to tighten the labor market; the other proposed solution at the time was to reduce the work day to six hours. Now, think about how we've advanced, socially and economically, since then. We've got so much stuff we don't even keep it for very long; do we really need more? Maybe we've finally gotten to the point where in the future we should go for more time rather than more stuff.
BIG SECRET HERE: You don't really need that much stuff. What you need is to have stuff you really want and not stuff you don't. For some reason, that's not a goal so easy to attain, because too often we get stuff because it's trendy rather than because it's stuff we really want. Given a level of "material decency" (that you, Jacob Bronowski), we can live with less fairly well if that "less" truly gratifies us.
SO... In return for raising the full retirement age to, say, 70, how about we institute a four-day work week? It's been reduced before--no reason to believe it can't be done again. Same amount of stuff, same amount of total time worked. Maybe in some future quasi-Utopia where we don't age and we live the full 120 years our hearts will allow us, we can work 20 hours a week until we're 100. Would that be so bad?
No way do I expect this to be the last word on the subject, so if anyone sees this, please leave your thoughts. Thanks.
UPDATE: I just now noticed that this diary has five recommenders. Thanks very much to all of you!
Updated by Panurge at Fri May 06, 2011 at 11:56 AM PDT
Bleah--didn't know what I was talking about. Tips, at least, then!