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Retirement at Risk: Is Work Is Failing the Next Generation of Retirees? | Matthew Rutledge
01:10:33
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- [00:04]
A
A job isn't a good job unless it's offering us more than just wages. It's offering health security, it's offering retirement security. It's offering other insurance benefits like disability and workers comp. I don't know that if we were to set up a system today that we would have put these benefits on employers because there's some inefficiency in that. There's obviously a lot of inequality across different employment. You have to be very picky about what kind of employer you work for, and if you don't have the ability to be picky about that, you're going to be left behind. Sometimes people don't leave their jobs because you're now going to have to go and navigate that health insurance system yourself. And as a result, it's not necessarily unfair for us to ask less of the employer to try to get away from a system that may be pretty inefficient right from the start.
- [00:52]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. A well designed job ensures that you can take care of your family now, but it also sets you up to be able to take care of yourself in later life. So how well designed is work today? Is it living up to those requirements? In the United States, the shift from pensions to personal retirement savings has transferred a lot of risk from companies to individuals. Individuals have to somehow save 15 to 20% while at the same time paying for the rising cost of living. And even if they do everything right, they can still lose a market crash at the wrong time, an unexpected layoff, a health emergency, the death of a spouse. These are real challenges that determine whether someone's retirement is stable or whether they end up struggling to make ends meet in later life. So I wanted to have someone on the show who could talk to us about these and other issues. Matthew Rutledge is a leading researcher on labor markets and retirement security at the center for Retirement Research at Boston College. His work examines how public policy, economic shocks, and personal behavior affect financial stability for older workers and what workers need to know to protect their future. In this episode, we talk about what's working, what's not, and what we can do to design employment that lives up to the needs of people, not just in their present, but in their future. All right, if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss future episodes. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Matt Rutledge.
- [02:41]
C
Matthew Rutledge, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:44]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:46]
C
I have asked Many hundreds of people. The question what they hire their job to do for them, including over 100 people just on this show alone. And one of the most common responses that people have is I want my job to take care of my family. I want my job to pay for my benefits, pay my bills. Much less often they do mention it, but I want my job to take care of me in retirement. I want to set myself up for a comfortable retirement. And so it's just an obvious question and you're a leading expert in this area, which is how well are we doing this today in terms of the work product that we're selling? You know, that's my framing. I frame work as a product.
- [03:32]
B
How are we doing and how could we do better?
- [03:34]
C
So let's start with the first question, which is how are we doing? And I know we're mostly going to talk about the U.S. first of all, I'm going to want to clarify things we talk about sometimes for international listeners, like when we say 401k, what does that mean? Or IRA or something like that. But also I'd like to know what the US could learn from other countries. So first, the big question is how are we doing?
- [03:56]
A
We could be doing worse. I try to put an optimistic spin on things, but it's hard to be completely optimistic when I think we have a picture in our head of the way that things used to be. I'm not sure that it's completely accurate picture and that's probably something we'll discuss a little bit later. But certainly we've been worse in the past. It wasn't that long ago, you know, 120 years ago or so actually. And Social Security was coming up on its 100th birthday soon. That retirement wasn't even really a thing where people pretty much just had to keep working until they no longer could. We have obviously improved upon that, but we still have some room to go. We still could definitely benefit from a more forward looking view both within ourselves and at the corporate level, us as our interaction with employers, and certainly at a policymaking level. But for the most part, I think people do retire. I think a lot of people fear that they're never going to be able to retire and then they find themselves doing it not necessarily exactly the kind of retirement they would like, but at least close enough that they can make ends meet. One measure that we look at that's in a lot of the surveys, including the Health and Retirement Study, which is a source of a lot of the data that I've used from my Work. One of the things we look at there is life satisfaction. And it seems like people generally are pretty satisfied when they get to retirement. Now, you can argue with that. You can say, well, people are justifying. You don't want to live your life being completely unsatisfied. You tell yourself that you're satisfied even if you're not. And that might be true, but people find satisfaction eventually. And it's not necessarily because things are going great, but it's because things are going well enough. We'll talk more specifically, I think, throughout this discussion about what kinds of ways that we can measure how well people are doing and what we can improve upon. But I don't think we have to be completely pessimistic about the way that retirement is working these days.
- [05:45]
C
That's really good. I'll tell you. This is something I worry about for everyone on a fairly routine basis. And in terms of people being satisfied, it may be a false reporting, but it may just also be that people are incredibly adaptive to their situation and they eventually hit equilibrium. Because happiness is a biochemical state.
- [06:04]
A
It's a coping mechanism. Right?
- [06:06]
C
Well, and it is, but it's also the reverse, which is you could have a billion dollars and be just as happy as if you had, you know, So I want a definitional thing. Retired. There must be a difficulty sometimes saying, is that person retired or is that person just old and unemployed?
- [06:22]
A
Right.
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C
How do you make that distinction?
- [06:25]
A
It's tough. There's not one clear definition of what's retired. In fact, in some of the studies, we've actually had to lay out three separate definitions, all within one study, that definition could be claiming Social Security retirement benefits. Once you get that, at least told the government that you're retired, it could be that you're no longer in your career job. And I think 20, 30, 40 years ago, it was pretty clear that when you left that career job, you were pretty much done working forever. But now where people are leaving a career job and then having some sort of echo career or bridge job to their retirement, it's a little hard to tell whether people really think of themselves as a working person still. And then sometimes we can just look at, okay, well, if they're not working is the reason because they say that they are retired. And none of those definitions are always going to line up perfectly. I think for our purposes, it's probably safe to say that leaving your career job is probably the biggest step in terms of retirement. And again, career job is also kind of hard to define. But I think when we're sort of leaving that job that you used as your identity. The answer that you gave in cocktail parties for 30 years, what do you do? Well, I do this. I think once you leave that, that's probably considered to be retirement. But even then I think we see some people having these second careers or continuing that career in a sort of a consulting role or contracting work. That makes that definition really hard to parse.
- [07:46]
C
Right. Doesn't help that I make up things. When people ask me what I do.
- [07:52]
A
What do you say?
- [07:54]
C
Interestingly, of course, I make myself look good. I have not had a career as an HR middle manager. I've been head of business architecture for a Fortune 50 whatever. But yes, they are still career, regardless of how I fluff it up. And I can see that distinction since I happen to be on that cusp right now. I'm like, am I retired? My wife says, you're not acting retired.
- [08:18]
A
That's the thing. We tend to fill our days in ways that aren't necessarily what we're used to when we're say 40 or 50 or even 60 years old. But it makes it hard to say what actually counts as being retired. Just because if you look at somebody's activity level, it isn't necessarily going to be so clear.
- [08:34]
C
No. Although this is one of the distinctions you make, which I think is really important. But I think I'm going to wait on that. The distinction between traditional work and non traditional work, which we'll get to. You said something about how things have gotten better and in particular that Social Security made a difference. What is the history of. We're going to talk about U.S. policy, the U.S. policy that have made things better over time.
- [09:00]
A
Before Social Security, it was a very scattershot process. The first pensions came about out of the Civil War and it was just the union side. You got to bet the right course to make sure you get that money later on. There were some state programs in the 1920s, and it really wasn't until the Great Depression really hit that there was a mass national movement to have some sort of retirement system. So Roosevelt comes in and he puts Francis Perkins in charge of an economic security committee. And they find that there are models out there from other countries. Several European countries already had a social insurance system similar to what our Social Security is, but they deliberately left the program pretty small. At the beginning. You were only getting taxed 1% of your earnings and your employer was kicking in an extra 1%. So that employer employee split was right there from the start. It was only up to something like $3,000 at the beginning, which I think translates into a very middle salary these days, not the relatively high salary that we get from a tax maximum right now. And you had to be fully retired. There's none of this. You can receive your benefit but still work a certain number of hours or earn a certain amount of salary before you lose your benefit. They really wanted it to go to the people who desperately needed it. And actually, because it had to build up some finances, it didn't pay benefits right away. So it. It definitely wasn't responsible for the end of the Great Depression. We didn't really even start to get benefits until the doorstep of World War II. And it actually did leave out a lot of people, perhaps deliberately, to get Southern senators involved. A lot of domestic workers and agricultural workers are left out. And I think you can read between the lines that those were largely black workers. So this was a racially scarred system to begin with that eventually had to expand. In the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the 1970s, it was expanded and covered more people. So it filled in some of those gaps. It started adding state and local workers, although not completely. Even to this day, there's something like 25% of public sector workers at the state and local level aren't part of Social Security. It got more generous in terms of its benefits. It got options to claim your benefits at 62 instead of at 65 later on, extending the full retirement age. Beyond that, to try to shore up its finances, it started increasing its tax revenue so that it could actually pay out benefits. That would be something that people could live on. And we see that it was a very gradual decline in the elderly poverty rate as each of these improvements to Social Security were coming online. So it's not like we went from a very high elderly poverty rate to no poverty the very next day. It definitely didn't work that way. It was something that needed several decades to really become the program that we rely upon today. And we haven't seen that kind of expansion in a while. It's worth talking about whether we can afford it. It's also worth talking about whether we can afford not to have that kind of expansion. But at an international level, I think Social Security is not among the more generous programs out there. That's in part because I think there's an American ethos to not leave people too reliant upon government programs. There's a piece of our social insurance system that really does worry about the moral hazard of giving people too much coverage if they're too supported by the government. Maybe they won't do the right thing and save for themselves. They won't demand their employers set up some sort of retirement savings vehicle for themselves, so they won't put aside money themselves. And so what we do is we basically make it so that Social Security system is only going to replace something like 35 to 40% of what you're used to making while you're working. And that's less than a lot of other countries. I think if you compare that to the other OECD countries, the other big developed countries in the world, we're only better than maybe a third of those countries, and we're worse than 2/3 of them in terms of what we're setting up as what we call a replacement rate. Your replacement rate, from a definitional perspective, is how much you make post retirement divided by how much you make pre retirement. So basically, you can think about how much of a step down are you taking when you retire. And for the United States, we ask people to take more of a step down than they do in other countries. And I think that's in part because we want to make sure that it's not Social Security that they're completely reliant upon. It's that they also are saying taking some individual initiative themselves.
- [13:04]
C
Have studies been done to find out if those other countries are full of sloth and vice?
- [13:11]
A
It's hard to separate, because a lot of that's going to come down to social and cultural norms and attitudes from employees and employers in the workplace. And I think this is going to actually get to a lot of the work that you do, I think, is just in terms of how these workplaces are set up. It's hard to compare a country like the United States that has a very individualized system where people can be fired very easily.
- [13:32]
C
Oh, it's called right to work.
- [13:34]
A
So everybody's employed at will in the United States. This isn't like Germany, where there's all sorts of labor sharing systems, where there's very heavy union role, where there's a lot of employee representation on boards. You know, it's very hard to compare the sloth or the worker leverage in a country like the United States to someplace that's just set up completely differently. So I don't know that there's going to be a large difference, though. I think for different reasons, we probably work harder than other countries. And I don't think it's because necessarily we set up our social insurance systems to make sure we do it. I think it's because Some of it's about the worker leverage and some of it's just about that Protestant work ethic, even for us Catholics, that we just feel like everybody else is working hard, so maybe we should too.
- [14:16]
C
Part of the reason I can see why it's so hard to compare and that I want to dig into in terms of how it works in the US that there's all these dynamics you might call externalities to whatever retirement programs or anything like that. There's the cost of housing, there's the cost of health care, there's family structures. But there's one other program that got started along the way that we haven't discussed besides Social Security, and that's 401 s for people who are international or whatever we're going to call those tax advantaged savings programs. There's probably a better name. But if you're not in the United States, you've never heard of a 401k before. It's the ability to save money pre tax, and so you can put away a certain amount of money pre tax. So there's a way in which it is subsidized savings in that way. And there are very often employer matches where if I put away $10, my employer is going to put away $5 or something like, well, I've been lucky to work for companies that had 50% matching, but lots of companies have like 2% matching or something like that. So when did that come about? And sometimes the way we talk about that is we talk about that as a con. And the reason we do that is because we think once upon a time there were defined benefits programs. Again, for international listeners, defined benefits programs are those programs that pay out in a very predictable way and are a classic pension. So when did 401ks come along? Were they a con? What was their purpose?
- [15:52]
A
Can I just get a definition on the con? Do you mean a confidence game or do you mean like a disadvantage?
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C
No, no, no, no. I mean a confidence game. Let me say where this comes from, which is the feeling that companies may have lobbied for a program in which they are less on the hook. And it puts more responsibility on individuals, which has some benefits, but it also doesn't spread out risk. And so one of the things that happens is your 401k does something horrible or you, you invested wrong, you could be screwed. There's not a lot of distribution of risk.
- [16:30]
A
It's worth backing up, I think, to what I understand to be the creation of the defined benefit pension in the first place. I think like a lot of other employee benefits or employer sponsored benefits. It came from the wage controls that came about during World War II. You were not allowed to try to attract workers by paying them more than the going rate or trying to push up that going rate in any way. So that's where employer sponsored health insurance came from. Jobs distinguish themselves by taking care of you, by giving you access to healthcare that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford. They distinguish themselves by offering you money that you would receive even after you retired, that the employer would take care of you, not just in the short term while we need you, but in the longer term. And that's the kind of thing that I think was pretty sticky. It was hard to give these benefits to people during just that period of time and not expect them to continue to receive it.
- [17:27]
C
Definitely an unintended consequence of wage controls.
- [17:31]
A
Right. And we see its legacy. I mean, more so with the employer sponsored health insurance, where it's something that we expect to be part of a good job. A job isn't a good job unless it's offering us more than just wages. It's offering us economic security writ large. It's offering health security, it's offering retirement security, it's offering other insurance benefits like disability and workers comp. It's treating us nicely and giving us flexibility and autonomy and all that. But it's certainly going to be including those benefits that were kind of an accidental legacy. I don't know that if we were to set up a system today that we would have put these benefits on employers, that we would have made them part of the employment package because there's some inefficiency in that. There's obviously a lot of inequality across different employment. There's across employment status across different firms. Firms like it that way because the generous firms get to say, hey, we're generous, come work for us. And maybe we pay you a little bit less now, but we'll put that more on our health benefits or put that more on our retirement benefits. But it does mean that you have to be very picky about what kind of employer you work for. And if you don't have the ability to be picky about that, you're going to be left behind. It's expensive because I think that there are some benefits that are offered to people that aren't necessarily appreciated at their full cost. Health benefits have gotten quite expensive and that's a good deal for the people that have a lot of health needs. It's not necessarily such a good deal for people with fewer health needs. Or people who just feel because of other reasons that they don't want to go to the doctor or they're afraid of even the small co payments that we sometimes attach to the systems. So there's also the concern about job lock. Job lock is a term that we use in economics that refers to the idea that sometimes people don't leave their jobs because they don't want to sacrifice the benefits that that job has already had. Job lock is eased a little bit because it is a little bit easier now to switch from one health insurance plan at one firm to another health insurance plan at another firm because of some rules about pre existing conditions. But it's still very difficult to go out and start your own business. If you wanted to start a new podcast empire, it's going to be hard for you to do so because you're now going to have to go and navigate that health insurance system yourself. So I don't know that we would have set it up that way at the start. And as a result, it is a little bit of a confidence game in terms of how things changed. But it's not necessarily unfair for us to ask less of the employer to try to get away from a system that may be pretty inefficient right from the start.
- [19:59]
C
Well, and many of those pension plans are not risk free, which is that employers, for instance, have a lot more variation in risk than the Social Security program, for instance. And your employer can crash and burn and lose your pensions. And so at least with a 401k where you can distribute your investments over lots of things, you might be at a better position.
- [20:26]
A
Yeah. So maybe we can talk a little bit about what happened in terms of the transition for 401s. So defined benefit plans, I think most sort of reached its peak in right before their own crash in the 1980s. They were set up as benefits that tended to be backloaded, that tended to reward people for staying at one firm for a really long time. Which meant that in your first couple of years, maybe you didn't receive any sort of pension benefit for just working for one to five years. Say there's usually something called a vesting period where you didn't get anything until you stayed a minimum amount of time. And then the benefits would grow initially pretty slowly, five to 10 years, maybe you'd only get a couple of extra percentages, but then they would go up really fast. If you can just picture a graph going way up really fast once you get start getting to 10 or 20 years at a company. The reason for that is because at least at the time, companies really valued keeping employees around for a really long time. They felt the pain of having to retrain new employees, of having to make new connections with their clients, of having to get new people slotted into the manufacturing plant or onto the sales floor, into the accounting division or into the secretarial pool. So they wanted to keep those employees around for a long time and they set up the system to try to incentivize that. Then once people retire, oftentimes those pension benefits would max out at a particular age. And that was a very bright neon sign to those employees to hey, you should leave now before you start to get at least perceived to be less productive, if not actually less productive. And so people would take the hint and leave about that age. If it was 30 years in the company and you started at 25, you'd probably retire about 55. Or there'd be some flexibility on the back end in terms of what money you receive depending on when you claimed it, but then once you claimed it, you got it for life. So you were insured against outliving your money in a way that we definitely don't see with 401 s these days. And the money that was received was somewhat of a function of how much you earned while you were working for that company and for how many years you worked there. But it was set up in such a way that it was especially in a time in which wage inequality was much smaller, made much less of a difference in terms of the pension benefits received by the top level executive versus the janitor versus the secretary, which is, I think, harder to do in a 401 world. And then one other thing that I think was really valuable about the way that defined benefit pensions pay out was that it was easy to spend and not necessarily in a bad way. Economists like to talk about annuities as being kind of an ideal product that nobody buys. It's something that insures you against longevity. So if you live longer than you were expected, you don't have to worry. It's kind of the reverse of life insurance, really. Life insurance pays out if you die too young. Annuities pay out if you die too old. So longevity insurance is a pretty valuable thing that people don't always necessarily, especially at younger ages, when we're not thinking about how long we're going to live, realize that we should need. And even at older ages, when we underestimate how long we're going to live, we don't realize how important it's going to Be. So longevity insurance is an important aspect of annuities. I think there's an underrated aspect of annuities which is they're also quite budgetable. You, during your working years, are very used to receiving a regular paycheck, and you know how to spend that paycheck. You know how to allot certain amounts to your credit card statement, to your mortgage, to your rent, to your health insurance premiums or whatever. When you get to retirement, if you've saved, well, sure, you have a pile of money, but how do you spend that down? How do you make sure you don't spend it too fast, and how do you make sure you don't spend it too slow? At least with an annuity payment or with Social Security, which is the best annuity there is, you actually get a regular check and you know how to spend that because it's exactly the way that you built up your financial literacy over the years. It's exactly the way you figured out how to budget right from the first paycheck you got when you were 14 years old. So pensions were set up in a nice way for several reasons, but they might have been unsustainable right from the start, which is why they went away so quickly.
- [24:16]
C
Yes.
- [24:17]
A
And why they went away basically as soon as employers found the excuse to get rid of them. And that's probably where the con comes in.
- [24:25]
C
Right. I can't remember where I saw this book, but you might know about it. It was a book that basically said, here are all the companies that were dragged down by their pension plans. It was an interesting thesis, actually. And the thesis was that in the same way that people might not prepare for later life effectively, companies were negotiating with unions in such a way that they could make a deal this year that would make them insolvent 20 years later. Does that ring a bell?
- [24:58]
A
Not as a book, although the thought definitely makes a lot of sense, especially from a human natural focus on the short term. Also, I guess one of the things we can talk about now or we can talk about in the future is that unions were kind of in on the con. Not necessarily from a bad perspective, but just based on the structure of unions.
- [25:19]
C
Well, and I think we're not saying con. I think what we're saying is in on the change, because it's not a universally bad thing, and it wasn't necessarily with universally bad intent. It was something where companies were divesting risk. But how were unions involved? And I will tell you, I've heard a story which I might like to confirm with you that at the time when benefits were becoming legislated essentially and benefits were something that were going to become mandatory for companies of a certain level, that there was actually a push and pull between unions who wanted to be responsible for those and companies which at that point they're like, no, we hate benefits, but we don't want unions to have that. They'll have a lock on the employees forever. Was that true?
- [26:04]
A
I think that's true. I think it's true for a couple of reasons of why unions work the way they do. Unions definitely like to be seen in the eyes of workers as representing their interests and by being able to get a big win in a battle with the employer. And there's no bigger win, I think in a job, especially like a manufacturing job or something that's physically demanding to be able to retire with a generous benefit at a relatively young age. And so that sounded pretty great to I think a lot of the workers that were represented by unions in the 70s and 80s and even to the 90s and even a little bit later. I think in terms of public sector unions where unionization held on a little bit longer and were defined benefits, not coincidentally held on a little bit longer. I think the other thing that's about the structure of unions is that who's union leadership, it's going to be mostly the senior employees in the company, the people that are probably looking that much closer at retirement, the people that are thinking about just from their own self interest that retirement was going to be a very important thing for them very soon. And so I'm sure it wasn't an accident that the people negotiating on the other side said, hey, you are getting older yourself. I bet you really want this generous pension benefit that we don't have to pay right now that my successor or two successors from now is going to have to deal with. Let's make this deal so that we can actually kick the can down the road. But everybody seems like in the short term is going to feel like it's a win.
- [27:32]
C
Now we're in this situation where there's Social Security, but that's the minimum and.
- [27:37]
A
Not enough to live on for sure.
- [27:40]
C
Certainly not enough to live on the way you're living today. I certainly know people who live on nothing but Social Security. They have moved to a mobile home park somewhere outside of Sacramento, which is not great, but it's really cheap and they can afford to live there.
- [28:01]
A
I think Nomadland was something that struck chord.
- [28:04]
C
Yeah, Nomadland, yeah.
- [28:06]
A
I'm not sure that people realized it at the time. I remember reading the book shortly before the movie came out that it was really sort of a retirement story. It was something that kicked around our office at the center for Retirement Research in part because we realized when we talk about people's replacement rates not being high enough, when we talk about them not being able to support themselves relative to their past living standard, this is the consequence of that is that you are often living in the back of a van or that you are moving from one job to the next based on the national park seasons in the way that that movie and the book really portrayed. Well, I think that's scary. It's a useful scare, I think, to get people to say, well, I got to save something, because I know I'm not going to completely rely upon Social Security because if I do, I might be stuck in the back of that van, that converted van.
- [28:49]
B
A lot of the data that I've.
- [28:50]
C
Seen about retirement talk about people who are 65 plus and group that population into a single population. But it seems to me that's not exactly the population that we need to worry about most. It's people who are 90. It's the people who are most at risk of outliving their savings. Have we broken down the data in that way? And have we looked at how is that population doing compared to others?
- [29:23]
B
Hey, everyone, I want to let you know about some upcoming speaking events if you happen to be in the Great lakes area on September 30th. I'm keynoting the HR track at the UWEBC 27th Annual Emerging Best Practices in Technology Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference pulls in some fabulous speakers to discuss topics across all of business, not just HR. Also in Oakland, California, September 17th and 18th, two of our past guests and work for humans will be speaking at the Responsive Conference. Brie Grof will be talking about her sparkling new book Today Was Fun. And Simone Stolzoff will be talking about his next book. So check it all out@revolutionive.org use promo code 11fold. That's 11fold to get a substantial discount. All right, hope to see you there.
- [30:16]
A
This is where I will stray a little bit into economics territory. We do acknowledge that in some ways, retirement gets more scary the longer it lasts. That's in part because just the longer it lasts, the more that we except our human frailty. And I mean that physically, mentally, cognitively, things from a health perspective for sure get scarier. And as a result, sometimes they get more expensive. The elephant in the room in all of our discussions is long term Care. And that's something that of all the aspects of our retirement well being right now is the most broken aspect of it. I think for the most part we have done a pretty good job of income security, especially in the first half or first two thirds or even 90% of your retirement years. It's that last part that's the scary part because that's where it would be impossible. Even if you were a really good saver, even if you had a generous defined benefit pension and got the most out of Social Security and you had a Social Security system that was as generous as these other countries, it would be impossible to afford long term care purely out of your own pocket for all, but maybe the top couple of percent of the income distribution. So we have a very complicated system. Once you realize that you're part of that 98% that isn't going to die right away and needs more than just what their income itself can provide and what your wealth itself can provide. That's where we start relying on Medicaid as a backup plan for long term care and system that is designed for the poor and low income and the unhealthiest of our citizens probably shouldn't have to be the system that is the safety net for everybody. That's a deliberate effort I think, to not completely see through what a long term care insurance model would look like. It's a hard model to do because what it involves is getting a lot of people to buy into a system well, well, well before they need it, the people that are contributing to a System in their 20s and 30s and 40s, well before they need it in their 80s and 90s. So I think there's been efforts to think about what people are going to need from a money perspective that are separate from what they need from a health insurance perspective in terms of what they would need to actually afford to pay for a regular visit from a home healthcare worker or a more intensive hospital housing arrangement where the nurses are on site, not even to mention the very almost hospital like care that people get in the last six months of their life, which is hard to predict because you don't ever know when you're in the last six months of your life. So the hard part there is first, how do you structure a system where we give less money to people at the beginning part of their retirement years and say you just have to wait for it, you're going to need it down the road, so we're just not going to give it to you yet, but we'll give it to you later, right when people are naturally impatient and want to enjoy their lives now, they say, but I wanted to go visit the Holy Land, I wanted to tour Australia. Why are you saying that I can't do that? What if I don't even make it that far? What if I don't even make it to those years that you're holding back for, that you're holding back for. Against me and against my short term needs? And then that there's inequality in terms of who actually gets to those ages. So one of the ways in which, when we look at the data, the people in their 80s in particular, because 80s, I think there's still plenty of people in their 80s that are healthy in a way that I'm not sure that's true at 90 or over 100 in your 80s, I think we see a surprising preservation of people's well being and that's in part because of sample selection bias. The people that are most likely to live into their 80s are those people that have been probably pretty healthy all throughout their lives and probably better educated and have higher incomes. So what we're seeing is just those people who were strong enough to survive. And that in part includes financial strength. So I think when you look at the data, you expect to see this sharp drop off as people's human frailty starts to take over, especially cognitive and mental frailty and to some extent social isolation as well. But from a very unfortunate humanitarian perspective, those people don't live long enough to stay in our data to show that things really fall off in their 80s and their 90s. And the people that do live long enough in their 80s, at the very least are the strong ones that survive. So we don't get that unless we account for that sample selection bias. We don't get necessarily that people's wellbeing falls off as quickly as we might think, especially where we look at any one individual. Before we started recording, I think you mentioned this is where looking at a population level study is probably the wrong way to approach it, even though that's the way that economists do everything, where case studies actually are more revealing or qualitative studies are more revealing. And that's where I think we would get that, where we can get around that selection bias, because we would be able to highlight those people that aren't just the strong that survive.
- [35:12]
C
Let me explain what I was asking before. A lot of what I see, and I saw this because we had a conversation with the director of research from Pew. And the thing about population studies where you're essentially Doing counts of who's there and what state they're in is that it misses the narrative aspect. And you gave it a better term than I did, which is case studies, which is that people are rolling dice all the time. And sometimes the dice come up 12, sometimes ones somebody might roll a bad number a lot of times in a row. So that's one thing that's happening going on. But the second thing is that people are highly adaptive, which is they do move to someplace outside of Sacramento to make it affordable or they do move in with their kids. So there's a way in which it's the accidents that happen along the way and then the decisions we make in the face of those accidents that really add up to two outcomes that you don't get in population data.
- [36:14]
A
Yeah, it would be very hard to get the level of detail that I think would capture that somebody has made an adjustment that isn't necessarily what they wanted to do, but they found a way to do it. I think we do see pretty clear evidence even in population data that people are taking an increasing caretaking role as they themselves and especially their spouses and to some extent their parents get older. One of the things we even see in population data that I think would hold up pretty well in a qualitative or case study is that the caretaker themselves often bears more of the health burden than the person who was originally being taken care of.
- [36:53]
C
No kidding.
- [36:54]
A
Some studies have found that the caretaker actually dies sooner, which is a tragedy in so many ways. Right. It's impractical tragedy. Then what happens after the caretaker is gone? Also, I think it's not going to make the person who's being taken care of feel very good either, you know, that it was their burden that might have weakened that other person in their life. And it certainly complicates things from a financial perspective, because then what happens next? One thing we have started to worry about just because of the family trends over the course of the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, is not just social isolation, but caretaking not necessarily being as much of an availability as it used to be. In particular, I think we worry about divorced dads a lot. Fathers who lost touch with their kids because marriages fell apart are much less likely to have that backstop of their kids, to be able to take them in when all else goes wrong in ways that I don't think mothers have necessarily suffered in the same way, Even as the divorce rates rose in the 70s and 80s and 90s. I think that's something that's still a major concern, especially among the less than college educated, where divorce rates are still quite high. What's going to happen, I think, to those divorced dads in particular, I think is a major concern that we have to have both in a Mediterranean level and at a policy level, because we can't rely on the same family safety nets that we used to. And especially as people start having fewer kids, that just means that the burden doesn't get spread out as it used to. And my mother's family had, you know, she was one of eight and she had two kids, you know, and that's a pretty typical path. So my sister and I are going to have to take on the responsibility for her in ways that her mother's responsibility could be shared among her and her seven siblings. And that's even in an intact family. Obviously, some families are not as intact as that.
- [38:42]
C
I did a little bit of research on marriage and who is most likely to be single, and it was interesting to see because LGBTQ very likely to be single and black Americans very likely to be single, more likely than others. And so I don't know the nature of the singleness. It may have been never being married or it may be divorce. And there was one other statistic which is that there are a lot more unmarried older women, but that's because of the longevity of men, I think.
- [39:15]
A
Although that is closed quite a bit. There was something like a five or six year gap in life expectancy for women over men. That has closed to something more like three or four years now. One thing that was even broadening that gap was that women tended to be the younger in a heterosexual couple, and that would be by two or three years on average. And now it's more like a year or two. My wife's a little bit older than me, actually. There's plenty more examples like that than there used to be. So if you add a five or a six year longevity gap to a three year age gap in the couple, now you're talking about a full decade almost where a wife can count on being a widow near the end of her life. And now that's shorter. But widowhood's still pretty scary no matter who it's happening to. Our systems are in place, especially from Social Security and to some extent from whatever's still left of the defined benefit pensions to make sure that those widows and widowers are not completely left out to dry. But it's still a big decrease in terms of how much your household is taking in from those systems when you Lose one of the two people that was counting on those benefits. So to use Social Security as an example, it's actually the couples that are relatively equal incomes that see the biggest decline in terms of what they receive from Social Security. So imagine each member of a couple is receiving $1,500 from Social Security. And it's built because they have relatively equal incomes over the course of their lives. So that's $3,000 that's coming to the household while they're both alive. Now, they don't benefit from the spousal benefit because they relatively equal earnings. When you only get the spousal benefit when one person's working a lot and the other person's working not very much. So $3,000 coming into when they're both alive, then say the husband dies and now there's only a fifteen hundred dollars coming into the household. So fully 50% of what they used to be making have their expenses gone down by 50%? Almost certainly not. They're housing expenses are probably relatively the same as they were before until there's some sort of upheaval that gets the widow to move. Their health expenses are certainly less, although that's going to catch up soon. The food expenses may be somewhat less than 50%. The utilities are probably not much less than 50%. So the household has a lot of adjustment to do when that couple no longer stays intact in that way. A couple that is more reliant on spousal benefits would say, okay, well the husband's receiving $1,500, the wife's receiving half of that $750, that's $2,250. And then the husband dies and the wife just receives the husband's benefit. So that's $1,500. So now they've gone down by $750, but it's not quite as bad. So it's actually kind of ironic that the greater income equality between men and women has actually made the widowhood question a little bit harder to deal with. So I think as a result, widowhood is just that much more scary as we've become more reliant upon ourselves rather than Social Security or our employers to make up some of that difference.
- [42:04]
B
So we talked earlier about how the.
- [42:06]
C
Risk has been localized to people through their savings. How did that work through the big economic shocks? So there was the pandemic, there was a 2008 financial crisis, there was the dot com bubble. Did that push retirees into precarity?
- [42:24]
A
The Great Recession certainly did. I think the dot com bubble was probably not that big a deal. Ultimately, in part because given some patience, the stock market did bounce back. And I think at that point, this is 2001 through 2004, really, by the time we fully get out of that recession, employment was certainly in a bad state. But the stock market relatively bounced back and found another bubble to inflate after that. And so people that could be patient could wait things out. But I think also stock ownership was probably still relatively rare at the time because the 401 hadn't been completely adopted as the primary mode of supporting people for their retirement plans at work. They had been, but they're still pretty immature at that point. But by 2008, 2009, 2010, when you get all these shocks all at once, that's when we see the real negative effects on our retirement security. We saw it from. There had never been a recession before the Great Recession, where older workers lost job rates at anything close to what younger workers were losing jobs at. Younger workers always bore the brunt of job losses during a recession. It's in part because especially in a world in which employers really valued sticking around for a long time, they didn't want to lose those longer tenured employees. And so what they did was more of a last in, first out sort of approach. If you had to lay people off, it was going to be the people that hadn't been around long enough to make themselves valuable enough to try to keep. And that had gone away by the time the financial crisis of the late 2000s hit. In that recession, in fact, I think a lot of employers really felt like this was their excuse to finally get rid of the deadweight people that they saw as not necessarily being as valuable. And I think that was especially the big in companies that didn't necessarily value the tenure in the same way that past employers did. Companies like the tech industry actually don't want you to work for that one company for a really long time because they worry that your ideas are going to get stale or that you're not going to be able to keep up with changing technology. And so older workers, unlike any recession before that, had job loss rates that were very comparable, if not in some cases higher, than younger workers. And when you lose a job at that stage of your life, when you lose your job in your 50s, it's. It's very hard to bounce back from it. How do you get an employer to take a chance that you are worth investing in, that you are somebody who's going to stay in the workforce for long enough to make it worthwhile for them to hire you, that you are not slipping in terms of your abilities to keep up with new technologies, with new innovations, with your clients, that you are somebody that they want around. I think there was a fair amount of employer discrimination against older workers, in part because the people doing the hiring were probably younger because they had survived this job loss and they probably had a less positive view of older workers at the time. I'm still relatively new researcher in retirement, but I was doing a lot of podcasts like this and I was saying, I wish I had some brilliant idea because there's so many workers out there, older workers in their 50s and 60s, that I think can really do the job still, that really need that job and would do a great job with it, and they're just ignored in such a way. The vast increase that we saw in people who are unemployed for not just a year, but two years, three years, was largely coming from older workers. And it felt pretty helpless at the time. These days, I teach a retirement policy class to undergrads at Boston College and actually bring my father in. He's 69 years old now, and he was in the prime of his career in 2010, and he was at an insurance company, and he knew that things were starting to fall apart, that they were going to do some restructuring, quote, unquote. And he knew it was either his boss or him, and they chose his boss. And so he had to have that awkward conversation. It's so admirable the way he walks into my class and bears his soul and says how painful it was for him to have to experience and tell these students that are 20 years old now how painful it is to lose a job. Right when you think that things are going well. Right when you think that you have that security that you've been craving forever and that you'll be able to have the glide path to the last decade and a half of your career and to have the rug pulled out from under you. I think so many people experienced that during the Great Recession. The other thing that happened during the Great Recession is Social Security was lined up pretty nicely. We hadn't extended the life of the program in the same way that we had in the 1983 reforms that the Greenspan Commission underwent. That was supposed to last until 2057. That's the 75 year horizon. The trust fund's only going to last to the2030s. And it's in large part because of what happened during the Great Recession. Tax revenues went down because people were unemployed. So you weren't getting the payroll tax revenue that supports Social Security. Lots of people received benefits earlier than they were counting on, which means lower benefits for them, but more immediate expenses for the system. And a lot of people ended up on the disability system because they were in their 50s. They weren't eligible for those retirement benefits yet. And I'm not saying that people were faking injuries or illnesses. A lot of them were dealing with health problems, but then suddenly couldn't deal with those health problems when there were just no jobs to accommodate those health problems. And so lots of people ended up in the disability system rather than trying to survive and stay in the workforce. And as a result, that got very expensive for Social Security at the worst possible time. So the crisis that we're facing is really largely because the Great Recession got so out of control, and that was a scarring effect on older workers and a scarring effect on our Social Security system that we're still suffering from now.
- [47:54]
C
It's just really interesting to see the downstream effects, the very long term downstream effects of an event which arguably could have been avoided with regulation, with oversight. And it was. Greenspan famously said, oh, these vehicles are getting so complex that they really can't be regulated. To which the right response is, if they're too complex to be regulated, maybe they shouldn't exist. But this idea that a lack of regulation is causing so much long term harm is really sobering. Was Covid different?
- [48:29]
A
Covid was different, but not in ways that I think we anticipated when we were first sent home in March of 2020. I think the scars of the Great Recession are pretty deep and certainly remembered pretty well in early 2020. Everybody assumed, and we're correct, that a recession was coming because you can't shut down spending and expect the economy to stay resilient no matter how much money you throw at the issue. And we threw a lot of money at the issue. We did our best, and I think we learned the lesson that insufficient stimulus really can hurt the economy, even if it's pretty painful to take on immediately and maybe went a little too far, although that's a topic for macroeconomists that I'm not really qualified for. What happened with the COVID recession, though, was that it was short. Even as the pandemic itself lasted longer than we were anticipating. The economic effects of it were less deep than I think could have otherwise been, in part because of the macroeconomic response and the policy response, and in part because people were resilient economically in ways that I think wouldn't have worked at any other time before that. The ability to work remotely, and I think the ability to work remotely in particular helped middle and late career workers who probably didn't need to have quite so much in person time as I think they would have thought even just a few years before that. It's a little bit too early to tell because in our initial data what we found is a lot of people left the workforce in Covid, not necessarily voluntarily, and a lot of older workers who might have been hoping to postpone retirement at least decided not to keep.
- [50:05]
C
Working because it was dangerous for sure.
- [50:08]
A
Especially if you're talking about a disease that mostly has this nonlinear curve to it, that people in under 40 are probably fine mostly, and the people that are in their 40s are less fine and the people in their 50s are definitely less fine, and the people in their 60s are at outright danger. And then of course it gets crazy after that it made sense for them to stay home and to not work, especially if they weren't able to adapt with remote work. I think some of them came back. It's hard to tell because the data's a little bit hard to parse. But I think we probably saw more on retirement than we've ever seen before. And I think that's in part because of technological advances and changes in norms that you're not necessarily quite so scared of hiring somebody on a short term basis in a way that we didn't see before the Great Recession, especially so that it wasn't such a big deal. You didn't have to take a chance on somebody that they would be staying around for five or ten years. You didn't. You only needed them for a couple years and people could unretire into a job like that. But I think it's still a little bit early to tell whether the people who retired stayed retired in a way that would benefit them. And what we do see is that retirement security didn't really fall off a cliff the way that we were anticipating in early 2020, in part because the stock market was pretty resilient. So anybody that was invested in equities actually did pretty well. The housing market in particular was very strong. And if you were somebody who owned a home, which is a big if, that was something that you at least could feel more financially secure because that home was probably worth a lot more than it had been in 2019. And the inflation that I think was such a major issue in the election just recently and has been a major issue in elections around the world was felt much less by Seniors because of the Social Security cola, the cost of living adjustment. And so a rising inflation of 8% that we saw in 2022 was mostly not going to change the actual purchasing power Social Security benefits, because that inflation rate just meant that the benefits that they got in early 2023 were that much higher. So the elders were probably pretty resilient in ways that we weren't necessarily expecting when Covid first hit. And certainly because of lessons we learned during the Great Recession and also just in part because it just happened to hit at the perfect time technologically and from a work culture perspective that allowed even older workers to be more resilient than they were 15 years prior.
- [52:31]
C
So I want to talk about what we can do about it. Before I do that, though, there was one finding in your work that was really interesting that I think my listeners would like to know about, which is that automation is associated with an increase in non traditional jobs for older workers.
- [52:48]
B
What was that?
- [52:49]
C
And the reason it's important is that we often say, you know, is automation going to take jobs? Isn't it? Isn't it? It is, it is. And so what was that finding?
- [53:01]
A
So back up a little bit to talk about what non traditional work really means. It's best to think about it what it isn't. It's best to start as what's the opposite of non traditional work. And it's traditional work. Picture your grandfather's job, especially if your grandfather had a pretty decent living, right? And I do say grandfather here because I think we're mostly talking about a world where the employment was mostly run by men. That's why grandfather instead of grandmother. That grandfather's job, at least in our nostalgic backward looking view, was something where he worked for one company for 35 years and had a steady raise over the course of that time, might have had a promotion or two along the way, but in particular that income stability and the stability of always having health insurance and retirement benefits and maybe other things to a company car and whatever else that hasn't gone away to the extent that I think the popular press has made it seem and that I think Gen Z is worried about. When we first started looking at what we ended up calling non traditional work, it's because we were interested in findings that other economists were finding, but especially popular press narratives about the gig economy. We had first called it something like contingent work and gig work, realizing though not right away, but only later that the gig economy is still a relatively small percentage of workers. It's more prominent now and it's probably higher among both the youngest workers, people that are my college students age or older, workers that are just trying to make ends meet with a little bit of extra money here and there. It's more common to drive for Uber or deliver for DoorDash, or to do chores on TaskRabbit or just take some contract work that might be set up through online platforms, but it's still something like 1 or 2 or 3% of the workforce. It's not bigger than a breadbasket quite yet. What is more common and has been more common for decades is contract work is working for temporary agencies. It's working as a consultant rather than a full time employee. And that especially took off I think in the 2000s as employers restructured to not necessarily have so many employees in house, but to contract with outside contracting groups. There was an excellent example. There was a story a few years ago, I think it was in the New York Times about Kodak. I believe this is in Rochester, New York. Right. I think that's where Kodak is based. Kodak had a marketing executive who had worked her way up from the janitorial staff, and she did so in part because the janitorial staff several decades ago when she was burst at the beginning of her career, were Kodak employees. But what they did was they contrasted that against Kodak custodial staff now who are not Kodak employees. They're staff of a local cleaning agency. Contract work, exactly the same job, but done without the benefits of working for the company that you actually show up for any day. Right. So you're not considered to be part of the employee pool in the same way. So you don't get the health and retirement benefits. So that's one aspect that we really focus on is our non traditional work is are you receiving the things that count as being a good job? Retirement and health benefits in particular, are you facing more instability? Is your paycheck bouncing around from one period to the next? Are you more likely to be working short term? Are you working one quarter on but another quarter off? Or are you doing seasonal work or are you doing anything where you're being paid piecemeal rather than as a regular paycheck? So basically pooling all together all those sorts of definitions of, I think what I'd like to call precarity, but seems like it gets a little bit too normative that way. That precarious work does seem like it has always been pretty common, but that it may be at least somewhat more common than it used to be. Well, I think what Surprised us, although now that we think about it, maybe not so surprised is that a lot of that precarious work was done by people in their 50s and 60s. And so what we especially wanted to look at first we wanted to look at the effect of automation. And we know that older workers are particularly affected by automation in part because they were doing the kinds of jobs that they were trained for before machines came online to do those jobs for them. And so they were going to be in industries that had largely were either on the decline already or were trying to stem the decline by replacing expensive workers with cheaper machines. Or we actually were looking at import competition, sort of the China shock as well. And we didn't actually find that that was quite as big a deal as the automation. But we were also interested to see whether non traditional work would allow people to not just feel negative effects, but actually feel some positive effects, actually to try to use non traditional work as a way to stay in the workforce that where I'll be able to find some positive effects. So automation does seem like it is pushing more people towards non traditional work, which I don't think is better. It's certainly not better than traditional work. You like to be secure, you like to mean a good job. But when we did see people going into non traditional work, it wasn't necessarily all bad if the alternative was them leaving the workforce altogether. So non traditional work could actually be a way to try to lengthen your career in ways that could really benefit you, not just financially, but also potentially socially and also maybe from a health perspective.
- [58:16]
C
So what you saw is that automation is associated with an increase in non traditional jobs. It could mean a decrease in traditional jobs. And that that's the question is, are workers being pushed out of quality jobs, we might say, and into lower quality jobs?
- [58:34]
A
Are they being pushed? Yeah, what we were finding is I think that precarity was more likely to be happening in places both like geographic places, but also places in industry where automation was more of a competition for those workers, jobs that they used to be able to rely upon and used to be able to keep all the way towards the end of their careers. I think this was a study that we did before the adoption of AI. We're talking about industrial robots really, when we were looking at automation. And I think the automation that we think about this decade is going to look very different. The workers that were getting pushed out by automation then were manufacturing workers to some extent, service sector, but mostly the work that you do with your hands these days. I think when we talk about the employment disruption effects of automation. We're mostly talking about it affecting knowledge work. And that's the kind of thing that I think a lot of workers haven't fully grasped that they are at danger of. We haven't really gotten the word out even to our college age students, our high school age students. My son's considering going to a vocational school in part because he likes working with his hands. I don't know that they are getting the word out enough that what you want to do is find a career that is not routine, that is not programmable. Because whether it's programmable at a physical level like with an industrial robot, or programmable from a computer code that is just going to be able to collect information and generate that information in a way that isn't nothing special, that doesn't involve a lot of flexibility, that doesn't involve a lot of human to human interaction, that work is going to get replaced. And so what you need to find is some sort of job that's going to be non programmable, that is going to involve that human touch, that's going to involve the adaptability that humans are probably just going to be better at than computers. I think we used to talk about that in pretty apocalyptic terms for our trades, but I don't know that a computer or a machine is ever going to replace a plumber. Where plumbers have to identify small things that are going wrong underneath your sink or in some sort of industrial pipe situation right in the sewer system. In the same way that I don't think that professors will ever go away. I'm hoping I still have some years under that I'm looking forward to. Or certainly medical care that involves the human touch is not something that I think computers are really going to be able to take away. No matter what Japan does with its nursing robots, I think we're still going to have to make sure that we leave room for ourselves to be adaptable. And that's probably the skill that we should be spending the most time making sure we're including as part of our education. Because that's the thing that I think will just be the last thing that computers are able to take our chops away from.
- [61:23]
C
On the topic of the young, you've mentioned one thing you wish they knew. What else do they need to know? And maybe we should bake into our.
- [61:33]
A
Education system beyond the adaptability point and especially where I even tell my 20 somethings in my classes that eventually they're going to want to make sure they find a job that they can age with because they're probably going to have to work longer than their grandparents did and certainly than their great grandparents did. We live longer, so we should be able to. There's still a lot of work capacity in people in their 60s and 70s, I think, for most of us. And we should, I think, try to find work that gives us fulfillment in a way that we actually want to keep working. But beyond that, I'm kind of a pessimist. Whereas I'm an optimist about retirement security. I'm kind of a pessimist about financial literacy, but in ways that I think are potentially fixable. But the hard way, I think there's been a lot of studies on how financial literacy has been largely ineffective. Studies where people have gone into, and this is even case study stuff, this isn't necessarily population based. People have looked at companies that instilled some sort of financial literacy class that might be related to making sure that people are saving the right amount in their 401 and their dying contribution plans and finding that there's sort of a short term bump in how much people are saving, but that that bump fades pretty quickly as people start to forget the lessons that they get from those classes. There is financial literacy seminars that people have to take sometimes before they file a mortgage. And I think what people have found is that the mortgage default rates really aren't all that different. There's an initial decline and then it kind of regresses to the mean. Even in high schools that have implemented required financial literacy classes, they aren't longer term. Those students that are in those areas, the school systems that have implemented that don't seem like they're appreciably different than those places that sort of our control group where you're sort of taking your typical high school curriculum, which means that neither long term nor short term financial literacy classes or lessons seem to be helpful all that much. I think the natural response to that is to set it up so that financial literacy is less important. That you can set up what's called choice architecture so that we are nudging people towards the right answer. That the consequences of making a bad decision or not knowing enough is just that much smaller. The one thing that people have been able to find in terms of financial literacy that actually does seem to have an effect is related to the concept of numeracy, which is really basically people's math skills. Now, I don't necessarily mean the ability to add and subtract because again, we have calculators and computers to do that. So the Arithmetic part is definitely not something that I think we need to focus on in education, but a comfort with math and not accepting the attitude of I'm not a math person, making sure that that's somewhat stigmatized, that like, okay, yeah, yeah, you say that, but I bet you can do this. If you just think about it, and especially if we give people real life examples that actually will get them to grow in comfort with math, then the financial literacy part that does feel very mathy can feel a little less daunting. So that's the part that I'm optimistic about. I think that math education, we have a high school freshman and an 8th grader right now and I'd see little different attitudes between the two of them in terms of their comfort with math. But I keep trying to instill in them, don't say you're not a math person, you can do this as long as you set yourself up to actually want to do this. And that's the part that I think we need to change. New math, I think has been pretty scary to a lot of parents in terms of different ways that they learn to add and subtract these days. That part gets way too much attention. The part that is been improving and isn't getting enough plaudits is that math teachers I think have done a better job with this generation of making the math feel more real in ways that I think are going to have long term benefits to us, but needs to be scaled up. It needs to be something that we can get out of that rut of not feeling comfortable with math so that we can improve upon our financial literacy. Later.
- [65:19]
C
When I was 30, I started doing the math and I remember walking the dogs and doing compound interest in my head and trying to figure out what was going to happen. And it scared the crap out of me. And that fear was really good. It was really good. It's worked out.
- [65:39]
A
Yeah. A little bit of healthy fear is not so bad necessarily.
- [65:41]
C
Fear, yeah. As you know, I ask at the end of the show, what do you hire your work to do for you?
- [65:48]
A
I love that question and I love it in particular because of the way that we've been talking about the labor side in my micro theory class these days where we talk about what we're sacrificing by our work. We are trading off our leisure time for the money being used to spend on stuff. So it made me think a little bit about what am I trading off in my job. And I am certainly trading off time with my family to work harder and to have exciting new opportunities. So it better be worth it that what I'm hiring my job to do is worth the time that I'm sacrificing with family, especially since for housing cost reasons I live like an hour away from my job, which I think is not unusual for people in my situation. But luckily I'm finding fulfillment in my job. There's a discussion we have at Boston College about vocational discernment that goes back to Father Michael Himes, who passed away just recently. He had these three essential questions that we always bring up to our students. And the three questions are, what brings you joy? What are you good at? And what does the world need from you? And I realized just a few years ago, I think, as I was trying to figure out what kind of economist I wanted to be, that what brings me joy and what I'm good at. Actually, I had the good fortune of having in common or having the same answer, which was explaining things to people. And I hope I've done a decent job with that. I've been mildly intelligible today.
- [67:12]
C
We have lots of evidence now, so.
- [67:14]
A
So it was a great opportunity for me to find out the researcher I wanted to be, which was the kind that can try to write in ways that I think can reach a general audience and can present in front of either a large audience or a small audience, can do these kinds of media appearances. But I think it's been particularly helpful on the professor side of me where I've been able to get students excited even about things that seem very far in the future, like retirement or disability or healthcare. At older ages. I hire my job to make sure that I keep getting reminded that what I'm good at and what brings me joy and that I think the world needs from me is that ability to impart understanding on people and to get them excited about the things that I'm excited about and to see that their economic lessons are everywhere. That economics is not a story about your equity investments. It's not a story about what kind of a stockbroker we can make you, or an investment banker or a MA lawyer we can make you. It's really about what you're doing in every day. How is your interactions with your family an economic story? How is your interactions with the airline that you're trying to get on before your other passengers. How is that an economic story? The economic naturalist essays that Robert Frank from Cornell Institutes in his class is something I've adopted and my students have loved. They write two page essays that tell a little story about some mystery they saw in the world and they get to explain with the economic principles that we have in our class and they get so excited and I get excited to read it for them. So I'm so glad that I've been able to hire my job to impart that understanding and that excitement in another generation of people. And I hope I get to keep doing that for a while as long as automation doesn't take my job.
- [68:57]
C
That is quite lovely. And the mission of I think the University of California is the creation and dissemination of knowledge and to work for a place that aligns so well. A mission like that, which I think is many universities missions, is really great. Where can people learn more about you and your work?
- [69:20]
A
Well, I would start with the center for Retirement Research at Boston College at CRR BC Edu. We have a lot of great work and a lot of it's very accessible in terms of being available to media, to policymakers, but even to just average citizens. I'm surprised when I run into people in the community. They're like, oh wait, I've heard of you. I use your stuff, the CRR stuff all the time. And it's not just financial advisors. Sometimes it's just like regular people. And then come to Boston College, especially if you have teenagers that you want to get excited about economics. I think we have a really great program and I spend most of my time doing that these days, so I hope you'll give us a serious look.
- [69:54]
C
Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [69:58]
A
Thanks so much for having me. This was a fascinating conversation and thanks for asking the questions about what we want from work that I think are just so essential and I'm excited to be able to tell part of that story.
- [70:12]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans.
- [70:14]
C
If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating.
- [70:17]
B
We're wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it. Believe it or not, this really helps.
- [70:24]
C
Us grow the show and reach more.
- [70:26]
B
People who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are.
- [70:39]
C
My own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.