This is the best of all possible worlds---keep that in mind while you’re enjoying your cat food supper

In another attempt to prove that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, Dr Pangloss of Harvard University writes in the New York Times that the fact that most of us can no longer look forward to a comfortable retirement and have to face the prospect of working till we drop is quite possibly a very good thing.

Dr P is Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard, who has written a book with the very Panglossian title Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, which makes me think he’s an expert at looking on the bright side of life.  I should refer to him as Professor G, but since he reduces a generation on the brink of a financially insecure old age to a cartoon he calls Dr B. Boomer, I figure he won’t mind if I reduce him to a literary caricature.

Dr P is quite chipper on behalf of Dr B. Boomer, a sixty-five year old dentist he’s invented who has to keep filling teeth and fitting dentures for years to come because she can’t sell her house in this market and the crash of ‘08 devastated her portfolio.  Working deep into her old age will be good for her and good for the economy, asserts Dr P.

Dr P seems to think that the collapse of the economy was just one of those things, like a tornado or a hurricane, nothing could’ve been done to prevent it, nothing to be done now, we just have to learn to live among the ruins and make the best of it, and Dr P is happy to assure us that there is a best to be made, even if he’s never quite specific about what that best is.

It doesn’t cross his mind that a lot of people’s retirement savings were essentially stolen from them by banksters playing dangerous games with our money.  He also appears never to have heard about wage stagnation or how the country’s wealth is being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few.  And he never stops to think about how corporations managed to convince politicians that real pensions should be replaced by opening tabs at the casinos for banksters and giving them workers’ savings to play with.

He acknowledges that some people can’t keep working at their current jobs into old age---coal miners, for instance---but he has no suggestions about how they’re to support themselves afterwards.  He just seems to assume they’ll find something.  All the other old people will just keep plugging happily and profitably away.  He seems confident that companies will be glad to keep all these elderly workers on the payroll until they drop.  He’s not all concerned that for a lot of people working until they drop means working until they drop in the aisle at Wal-Mart or behind the counter at McDonald’s.

By now you’ve guessed I don’t have a lot of patience for Dr P’s optimism.  But this is the bit that really steamed me.  Pangloss---Glaeser---thinks we’re going to be just fine with this:

The United States has always had a Calvinist backbone. We’ve long been comfortable with shorter vacations and longer workweeks. In this light, the mid-20th century retirement boom seems like something of an aberration. In a sense, the current rise in the working elderly is a reversion to form…

Sorry, no.  This is a cynically manipulative lie in the form of flattery apologists for the owner class tell to make workers feel bad about feeling bad about working long hours and long years with few breaks and little money.  We’ve had to put up with long workweeks and short vacations because the owners and bosses, who give themselves nice long vacations and take off from work any time they want, are greedy and exploitive.

The reason we don’t work more, that we don’t put in twelve to fifteen hours days, seven days a week, that some of us have paid vacations and can take sick days without fear of getting fired, that there are such things as pensions and retirements is that workers, far from being stoic Calvinists comfortable with their own exploitation, have fought for shorter work days and work weeks and weekends off, for higher pay and decent health care and the prospect of secure if not luxurious retirements.

This is not the best of all possible worlds, but it could be a lot worse if we listen to Dr P.

Comments

[Ohio Mom]

I wish on Dr. P an old dentist who no longer has quite the sight and dexterity needed to get a crown or dentures just right.

[actor212]

So let me get this straight: my working until I drop dead, AND collecting SocSec, is somehow a *good* thing for my daughter, who thankfully hasn't had to work a day in her life but is sat queued up and waiting for a job to open up for her, so she can *start* putting away money towards her retirement?

Really?

What an idiot.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

Here is some good news for all the working stiffs: nobody except the top quartile of income earners will be able to retire at 65 anymore, so plan on working until you die. Young people trying to find jobs? You will never, ever find a job because all the jobs will be taken by 80-year-old people, especially all those good Wal-Mart jobs.

• Those who earned between $11,700 and $31,200 will need to work till age 76 to have a 50% chance of covering basic expenses in retirement.
• Those who earned between $31,200 and $72,500 will need to work to age 72 to have a 50% chance
• Those who earned more than $72,500, those in the highest income quartile, catch a break; they get stop working at age 65 to have a 50/50 chance of funding their retirement.

Do you really love whatever job you are doing now? Good, you will be doing it for at least another fifty years.

Since more Working Old people means more deaths in the workplace, Rethuglicans will pass a bill which allows employers to charge the deceased for body removal. No last check for you, unless you Will your body for conversion to the delicious Soylent Green!

Time to privatize social security so that your hedge fund manager can retire at 40.

[Kaleberg]

Basically, the capitalists have given up on capitalism.

[Lemastre]

Does Dr P explain why employers would want to retain 70- or 80-year-old employees? Will it be that when the oldsters hit 65, their employers will be allowed to reduce their compensation sufficiently each year to make younger workers uneconomical?

[sbgypsy]

About 15 years ago I knew a man who was forcibly retired at age 60 because.. that's the rule at his former employer. We do not all have the option to keep our jobs until we die of old age.