Red Pen Edit: The NYRB on Senior Citizens in America
Wait, what?
Trevor Jackson, professor of economic history at Berkeley, recently published the article “The Aging Class” in the New York Review of Books (NYRB). What drew my attention was the subhead, “Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.”
Huh?
The United States has an incredibly generous retirement program. Senior citizens have money thrown at them, in some cases for decades, for no other reason than they are old. The subhead, however, seems to suggest the opposite, that the elderly are being taken advantage of. What follows are some excerpts from the article in block quotes, with my commentary below.
If modern retirement was born in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act, it is now entering its ninth decade. Over that time retirement has been diminished and degraded; Social Security in particular has survived several assassination attempts.
Diminished and degraded? By what standard? In 1970 the maximum payout for someone retiring at age 65 was about $190. Today it is $4,150. To be fair, there’s a lot going on here. Obviously inflation needs to be taken into account. Also, Social Security expanded its tax base to higher earners in the interim, meaning the max payout should increase. The reality is that after accounting for inflation and relative incomes, monthly payouts have stayed roughly the same over the last half-century. Some workers are probably moderately better off, some moderately worse off, but there hasn’t been a significant shift. This is a far cry from “diminished and degraded”.
…Although older Americans are far more politically active than younger ones, account for an enormous proportion of federal spending, and may constitute one of the most effective voter interest groups in the US (to say nothing of their gerontocratic lock on all national political leadership), they have seen no institutional changes to old-age policy for a half-century. What they’ve seen instead is a continual erosion of their ability to retire and their standards of living once they do.
Another claim that flies in the face of facts. How has their ability to retire been eroded? How have their standards of living decreased? This needs evidence, facts, statistics, ANY kind of support.
And further, according to Chappel, it is “responsible for the invention of old age in this country. Before 1935, there was very little sense that ‘old age’ was a coherent stage of life, with its own institutions and benefits.”
This is one of the key aspects of “retirement”. It didn’t used to exist. The whole idea that people should have a time at the end of their life where they are taken care of by the state is an invention of the 20th century. The reason many countries set their original retirement ages at 65 (or in Germany’s case, 70), was that this was beyond the life expectancy of its citizens. The original idea of retirement, far from funding an entire phase of life, was that those who live longer than expected should be cared for, the same way those who are sick should be cared for. The architects of Social Security didn’t plan on millions of healthy, able-bodied citizens being paid middle-class wages simply for being alive. That happened unintentionally, as life expectancy increased rapidly after World War II but the retirement age stayed the same.
The number of Americans with employer-sponsored pensions quintupled to 33 million. The first retirement community was established in 1954 by a utopian Russian immigrant in Arizona.
Love that fun fact. I had no idea retirement communities are younger than many of the people living in them.
Medicare and Medicaid were the landmark achievements—but these too were not intended to be steps toward universality, poverty reduction, or health care as a human right. Medicare was intended to help older Americans pay for emergency hospital visits, not to deal with disability, long-term care, or prescription drugs. Medicaid was funneled through the state-level welfare system, ensuring that it remained underfunded and stigmatized.
Again, please provide some, any, evidence here. Medicaid is underfunded? In the last 20 years spending on Medicaid has tripled! And why would state-administration increase stigma? That doesn’t make any sense.
One generation, who spent their prime working years in the 1950s–1970s, experienced the full benefits of Social Security, and as with so many other elements of that limited welfare state system, it was then dismantled, with the acquiescence or even active collaboration of that same generation.
This is a common canard: The US used to have a massive welfare state that was taken apart by neoliberals and Reagan and Clinton. This flies in the face of all facts. Across the board, programs have been created and funded. As already discussed, Social Security payouts, accounting for inflation, have stayed mostly the same. Medicare and Medicaid have increased dramatically. Many cities provide housing assistance on top of Federal aid. Nutrition assistance programs such as SNAP have ballooned in recent decades.
This claim gets made again and again and again by people who should know better. What programs have shrunk in the last 50 years? What benefit has become less generous? What has been dismantled? Because across the board, from healthcare to housing to food, the welfare state has expanded. Every article that claims otherwise is conveniently short on details and long on conclusions.
The rise of the AARP has been emblematic of the shift from old age as a social problem to old age as an individual misfortune. By 1988 the AARP had more members than any other institution in American life except the Catholic Church, and its magazine is the most widely circulated periodical in the country.
Again, I love the fun facts.
The creation of Medicare Part C in 1997 (to buy supplementary insurance) and Part D in 2003 (to provide for prescription drugs) has only increased older Americans’ reliance on private companies, transforming them from “beneficiaries into empowered but inept consumers.”
I’m not going to lie; I have no idea what this means.
Her point is consistent: older Americans are working more and working longer. They also have inadequate savings, insufficient Social Security payments, and risky defined-contribution pensions. As she summarizes, of Americans aged 62–70, only 10 percent are retired and financially stable. Another 11 percent could retire comfortably but choose not to. A full 51 percent are retired, but their living standards have diminished significantly since they stopped working, and 28 percent are still working and cannot afford to stop.
Ugh. Older Americans should be working more and working longer - they are living longer! It is perfectly normal for a 75-year-old to still be living at home, watching grandkids during the week, and playing golf on the weekends. That used to be vanishingly rare. This gets to the main tension here: in a society with increasing life expectancy and health, retirement programs are not fixed. They are growing. They are becoming more generous, not less.
As for the percentages, what a worthless statistic. Asking people, “Are you financially stable?” is totally meaningless. It’s like the surveys seeing how many live “paycheck to paycheck” or are in the “middle class”. Any question like this needs to be sorted out with an objective benchmark, not an amorphous standard like “financially stable”.
The reason for this consensus, she argues, is blunt class warfare. Working longer exacerbates the inequalities of the labor market, and the allocation of time between work and nonwork is about dominance, not efficiency. Longer working life spans, like longer working days, are not a requirement for improving economic efficiency and increasing national output; they are a result of the coercive power of employers over workers.
Was this written by AI?