Ball and chain: the human cost of raising the retirement age
Barrett thinks about her genes: the grandmother who made her first overseas trip at the age of 80, traveling to Italy. At 89, her grandmother “still runs circles around me,” Barrett said.
Barrett hopes she will be that vital in her own old age, but adds that both her grandfathers died in their 70s. “They didn’t get to enjoy retirement at all,” she recalled. Working until 69 would mean losing some of her best retirement years. On a scale that measured potential pleasure versus potential difficulties, she said, each year’s delay in retirement would reduce the enjoyment and bring more worry.
“It probably would look like less travel. Less fun,” Barrett said slowly. “You start getting into the period where you can’t travel as easily or as often.” Such a change, she predicted, would force her to fundamentally redraw her retirement plans from scratch.
Thinking about the options under discussion for Social Security, Barrett confesses a deeper worry than the age at which she could stop working. She fears that when it is her turn, Social Security will run dry.
All of the public discussion to date has convinced her that payments into Social Security are simply insufficient to support the number of retirees drawing benefits. “We’re already in the mindset that it’s not going to be there,” Barrett said.
Raising the temperature…slowly
Barrett’s assumption, that Social Security is teetering toward bankruptcy, is hardly unique. A 2005 public opinion survey found that four out of five 18- to 30-year-olds assume Social Security will not be there for them. As a result, they pay little attention to the debate over Social Security’s future, and their interests are largely unrepresented in policy discussions.
“The politics are poisonous, because all sorts of misapprehensions have become intrinsic to the debate,” said Richard Parker, a lecturer and senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “There’s no discussion of alternatives for raising revenue of these systems.”
Parker likened proposals that extend the retirement age gradually, over the course of many years, to the famous experiments in which frogs were said to have adapted as the temperature of water rose slowly, rather than jumping out of a pot. Ultimately, the frogs adapted so thoroughly that they were boiled to death.
At stake, Parker said, was the mainstay of retirement in America, and a larger battle over the shape and form of government for generations to come. “This is a contest between interests,” he said. “The real but weakly imagined interests of the many versus the real and very well understood interests of the few.”
A way for lawmakers to understand the consequences of their proposals?
The disconnect between young people and the debate over their future retirement raises a crucial question: How to introduce the human cost of proposals to lengthen working life into the public discussion? Scheinthal, the geriatric psychiatrist, offered a novel proposal. He suggested a war game for lawmakers and proponents of overhauling Social Security, one that would force them to confront the implications of at least some of the changes they are debating.
In this game, lawmakers would be forced to glimpse what it is like to grow old. They would wear weighted shoes that make it difficult to get around. They would don glasses smeared with Vaseline to simulate the effect of cataracts. They would wear special gloves to feel how arthritis can limit their ability to pick up a briefcase or open a jar.
Then they would work for a few days at a variety of jobs: restocking shelves in a supermarket, teaching a class of second-graders, going down a mine shaft or working the assembly line in a factory.
“Let them try to do that,” Scheinthal said, “and see what happens.”
The game might give legislators insight into the physical impact of having to work longer. But how might such a game convey the emotional toll of having to persist in a job with little or no satisfaction until nearly the age of 70?
The psychiatrist wasn’t able to invent a version of the game that would illustrate those psychological effects in the course of a brief exercise, but he noted: ”When you don’t have passion for what you’re doing and it’s a necessity, you’re not happy. And when you’re not happy with what you do and you have to do it for four or five years longer…it opens a whole host of problems, starting with depression.”
The follow-on consequences from depression, Scheinthal said, “are not a game. They’re deadly serious.”