Why work has failed us: Because no one can afford to retire anymore
<i>If you turn 65 in 2040 or 2050 or 2060</i><p>Some historical perspective: My understanding is that when Social Security was created, the average life expectancy was 67. So offering it for people age 65 was intended as providing for people in <i>extreme old age</i> who had probably worked physically hard their entire lives and were pretty beat up.<p>I&#x27;m not saying we don&#x27;t have genuine problems here, but this article is bellyaching about, basically, a golden era when the world was relatively briefly unusually comfortable and acting like that was the norm throughout all of history. The reality is that money per se only became common place something like 300 years or so ago. So the very concept of <i>retirement</i> and <i>saving for retirement</i> is relatively new.<p>This makes it a little hard for me to take this article seriously, so I confess to not reading it in full. Some of the things it gets right: Pensions are going out of style precisely because people are living longer, so pensions wind up being financially unsustainable.<p>Given that people are living a whole lot longer and are generally in better health at 70 these days than 65 used to be, it isn&#x27;t really some huge hand-wringing drama that older Americans need to continue working. Instead, it is evidence of how successful we have been in some sense.<p>This is a good problem to have. We need to make adjustments to the system, but people living longer and this requiring cultural adjustments isn&#x27;t some giant tragedy.<p>Retirement for, say, two decades or whatever is hardly some historical and long standing human norm. It&#x27;s really rather out of touch with reality to act like it ever was.