We need to change the subject in discussions about retirement from the economic (in)solvency of Social Security to the meaning and significance of retirement. My thoughts on this were sparked by a new book by Teresa Ghilarducci titled Work, Retire, Repeat. Her argument is that many people are working past retirement age not because they want to but because they have to: their “retirements” are inadequate to live on. Ghilarducci and I both believe people have a right to a retirement. (Full disclosure: I’m slated to exercise that right come December).

But the question of whether people can retire often gets mixed up with the question of the financial health of retirement systems which, in turn, mutates the question into whether people should retire (and crush those systems). I don’t deny that U.S. retirement systems are facing real economic challenges and I’m willing to say both the Left and the Right, both Democrats and Republicans, bear responsibility for that mess.

Yes, Social Security has problems. If anybody except a government constructed a financial system like Social Security, he’d be prosecuted for fraud. He’d be charged with running a Ponzi scheme. 1 + 1 ≠ 4,000, even if FDR signed it, even if LBJ raised it to 8,000, even if Barack used his pen and phone to push it, and even if Joe Biden waited to collect.

Yes, private pension schemes have problems, too. The 1980s push away from defined benefits pensions to “do-it-yourself” 401(k)-like schemes also had built-in problems. The problems include their DIY nature. First, with low wages and Uncle Sam already deducting for Social Security and everything else Washington hands out your money for, young employees are deterred from getting in, especially in the deep end of the pool. I’ll admit I did not participate during my first job because, working in New York and living in New Jersey, the “grand” salary St. John’s University was willing to pay me started at $19,000/year. (Happily, they didn’t expect this Catholic theologian to lecture on how other employers should follow the principles of Catholic Social Teaching). So, while the financial experts say “start early and rely on compounding,” I lost six years. Given the bearish job market many young college graduates experience today, I suspect my experience is often repeated.

Second, the DIY nature of many 401(k)-type arrangements are poorly managed because — let’s be honest — most people are not experts in quality investment decision-making. Yes, there are well-managed systems like the federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan or academia’s TIAA-CREF but, in my experience, they are not representative of most retirement plans. These systems will not do what they should be doing absent a broader professionalization of retirement management for most if not all workers.

Now, I am not crying for the old defined benefit plan systems, either. Some are lucrative, e.g., in the public sector, which is why states like New Jersey or Illinois have the budget problems they do. But most of the old defined benefit plans were also in reality limited. My father labored 20+ years before his death as a factory worker, after paying into his refinery’s defined benefit pension plan. When he died in 1970, my mother began to collect only $115/month. She continued to collect $115/month for the next 17 years until she died in 1987. Over those 17 years, the cumulative rate of inflation totaled nearly 200%, but her monthly pension remained a static $115.

So, I admit, there are financial problems facing retirement systems. But there are also financial problems facing retirees and, as in the workforce, the teaching of Laborem exercens (no. 12) remains applicable here: labor has priority over capital. I say that because the retirement problem is first and foremost a human problem, not a financial problem. When we allow that perspective to be inverted, we reduce the human person of the retiree into simply a producer/consumer, a denigration of his human dignity. And that has ramifications up and down the line.

That said, there are no few number of “experts” who support that inversion. Writing in the Sept. 1 The New York Times (here), C. Eugene Steuerle and Glenn Kramon insist that “Young Americans Can’t Keep Funding Boomers and Beyond.” I don’t disagree with their conclusion; I do with their means. Their answer is: “’Old age’ must be redefined and retirement ages raised so that living longer doesn’t mean retiring longer on workers’ taxes, particularly for wealthy retirees. After all, longer lives for most people should mean more productive years.”

Where to start?

The core cultural issue here is “productive years.” For Steuerle and Kramon, that equates to work years. Retirement is, presumably, “unproductive” and, in an Oscar Wilde world where the “experts” know “the price of everything and the value of nothing,” it is wasted time, maybe even parasitical time on the part of those who don’t “pull their own weight” economically.

But should human life, particularly at the retirement stage, be seen primarily through an economic lens? I have argued (see the link below) that retirement should be seen as a contemplative phase of life. I note there are barriers to that way of thinking, especially when people invest so much of their identity in their “job” that it becomes their only identity. As Oren Cass points out in The Once and Future Worker, asking as part of introductions “what do you do?” is not just an information-seeking query. It’s often also a class- and status-pegging mechanism.

The contemplative — the time to “stop and smell the roses,” and think about their significance — is increasingly eroded in our culture. That was once the purpose of the Lord’s Day, a time to turn from economic activity to contemplating existential questions that have a longer relevance than your contribution to GDP. The proliferation of “greedy work” squeezing out time, making readiness to work long hours a sign of “professionalism,” has in tandem with secularism eviscerated the Lord’s Day. Secularism said religion is wholly private (and, therefore, nothing of which the public order should take account, much less encourage) while consumerism so tilted “work/life balance” that it left only the weekend to do all the things squeezed out on weekday workdays. Amidst that compressed competition, worship got sidelined and the qualitative difference of Sunday was elided in a generic, religion-optional “weekend.”

Now we’re told to do the same thing at the end of life. Let’s face it: Retirement normally coincides with the end of life. And, as Ghilarducci notes, pushing up retirement ages simply means people will work more and rest (and collect) less. The Steuerle-Kramon “solution” does not fix retirement funding problems; it merely shafts people by pushing them to work longer, die faster, and reduce their outtake from the kitty.

I won’t even get into the ways the culture of death, increasingly ascendant in our society, can plug into this. We already see from Canada’s example how “medical assistance in dying” is a euphemism for solving social problems through killing. We saw hints of this in the debate over potential rationing under Obamacare. If our optic for judging retirement age is “productiveness” (with the implicit assumption that the retired are unproductive), how long will it be before the latter are also classified “Lebensunwertes Leben” (life unworthy of life) or even “useless eaters?” I’m sure we’ll even find some revisionist theologians to find “proof” in the New Testament to justify the new order — say, 2 Thes 3:10.

If you don’t think the culture of death fits into this, consider an unspoken thread in the Steuerle-Kramon essay. The authors complain that Baby Boomers as a large cohort are withdrawing more than their fair share of money from Social Security, which imposes greater burdens on the smaller demographic cohorts of millennials and Gens X, Z, and alpha, given that Social Security is a “pay-as-you-go” system. Nowhere, however, do the authors suggest that those cohorts, with their “fur baby” parents and “cat lady” singles, reconsider the Lord’s first blessing and get “fruitful and multiply.” That policy suggestion is not on their table, nor is mention of the 63,000,000 missing workers paying into Social Security, the result of fifty years of Roe v. Wade. No, the closest the two authors come to addressing the people paucity is to “repair our immigration system so that new Americans can help support benefits for older ones.” In other words, import a workforce. Of course, the “wealthy” should also contribute their “fair share” (as determined by bureaucrats) to alleviating Social Security’s insolvency by foregoing what they also paid into it — an idea indicative of the underlying generational conflict this article aims to stoke. In line with identity politics, it seeks to pit generational cohorts, e.g., Big Bad Boomers against Meager Millennials, against each other. No doubt they would probably be impressed by French “defender of democracy” President Emmanuel Macron who, against popular opposition, rammed through an increase in the French retirement age by employing a rarely used Constitutional provision to bypass a vote in Parliament. And while such class conflict may win votes in the short term, it has always been Catholic social teaching that playing one social group off against another is fundamentally unjust because it fundamentally contradicts the principle of love of neighbor, who remains a neighbor irrespective of income or earnings tests.

Which brings us back to the opening question: Should the contemporary retirement crisis be seen primarily through economic or through cultural lenses, through the prism of the solvency of retirement systems or of a balanced life — especially towards its end — for human beings?

[For more on this topic, see my article here.]