 With this political, economic, and social tendency to think that everybody can and should work longer, we then have lost all support for better funded pensions, universal coverage of pensions, and indexation of pensions from longevity and inflation. So we've lost support for old people because we've actually turned old people into pretend young people. I'm Teresa Gillarducci. I'm the author of Work, Retire, Repeat, The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy, and I'm a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City. You probably remember the Washington Consensus, and for everybody else who doesn't remember it, the Washington Consensus referred to a doctrine that really guided a lot of policy, the International Monetary Fund policy, world policy. Most leaders in developed worlds, and that was the idea, that in order to make the world better, to make them more equal, to bring low income countries up to the middle and even higher income countries, to make people grow and grow in a way that was shared. Higher prosperity were free markets, lower trade restrictions, lower welfare payments, get everybody to work by taking away their benefits, and that was very much a consensus among people who were modern and progressive. It was the answer to everything, and it was hardly questioned. I find it another consensus being developed, and that's the idea that solutions to our aging populations, which is because we've really curbed a lot of infant mortality and people are living longer at age 50 and age 60, a little bit at age 80, but that's not as important. It's just really getting people into their retirement years, and the fact that we've underfunded pension plans. The solution to that has been this consensus that people should work longer, and it is so entrenched in all right thinking people's brains that it's very hard to question it. In my profession, among the group of intellectuals that I sit with, I've been an unwelcome guest. I have been the person to say, hey, there are hidden costs to this so-called policy free lunch, where we get to solve our pension system and our aging populations with this really neat, free fix, which is to make people work longer and to grow the workforce with people over 65. Why should this embracing that people are young at 65 and young of heart and young of mind and creative and productive and engaged at older ages? That seems like a very progressive cultural and political and economic fact to behold and to embrace. How does that good thing match with this bad thing, which is that the most people can't work longer at 65, and the conditions with which they are retired is much worse. It doesn't look like they're connected, but they are. Because with this political, economic and social tendency to think that everybody can and should work longer, we did have lost all support for better funded pensions, universal coverage of pensions, and indexation of pensions from longevity and inflation. We've lost support for old people because we've actually turned old people into pretend young people. But many people know in their bones that people can work longer, and we shouldn't have a society that throw people away. So I am not in favor of throwing people away, and I am in favor of a progressive country letting any adult who wants to work to work as long as they want without fear of age discrimination. So let's set that aside. But the myths behind the idea that it's good policy to solve our problems by making people work longer is based on three things that are wrong. The first one is that work is good for people. In fact, a big part of this book is to review the extensive literature in fields that aren't my own, that are in gerontology and psychology, sociology, even anthropology, that shows that being engaged, controlling the pace and content of your time, having meaningful things to do, those are all good things. But work does not deliver those good things to most people. And in fact, if you are, for example, an older woman who is in the service sector or in the home health care sector, the actually largest and fastest growing occupation in most countries, if you're an older woman in that profession, work kills. It kills by raising your cortisol levels because you're under constant stress of being subordinate. It kills because it disrupts your sleep cycle, which mediates through cortisol and heart disease. And it also kills because it's physically demanding. It isn't just women in those occupations. It's any older person who is in a physically demanding or job or a job where they're subordinate to somebody, which is to say most older people are in those kinds of jobs. One thing that I want to draw a picture for everybody is to, the next time you're out and about, scan the landscape of the age of the workers in the various places that you are at, or lift up the veil when you press the button on Amazon, because almost everything you're doing in your life now, every commercial transaction is involving an older person who has become a precarious because they don't have enough to live on in retirement. We are finding among the elder populations evidence for injuries that come from stooping and bending, and that's basically warehouse work, and it's basically in Amazon warehouses. Look behind the counter at CVS, and you're going to see Granny taking her cane and going to the cash register, and it's different other parts of the life. New York is a little younger workforce, but go anywhere else and you see this phenomena. Go anywhere else in Europe and you don't see this phenomena. There's another myth, and that's the idea that if somehow we pay for pensions, and we can talk about policies to do that and how much they cost, but if we pay for pensions or embrace this idea that older people should retire, then we're taking money away from children. This idea of greedy geezers are taking away from people, and I hear it all the time, just the other day. A progressive person said, well, teachers' pensions are so expensive and are causing schools to close their libraries. As if teachers were at public enemy number one, or old people were at public enemy number one because they need pensions. I look at 186 countries over a 30-year period, and the countries that take care of their old are also countries that take care of their young. Spending for children and spending for the old people are correlated, not uncorrelated. There is no evidence that providing for vulnerable older people takes away from children. The third one, the third myth, is that we can't afford for people to retire. It's a myth because we spend a huge amount of money on rich people's pensions through the tax code, and economics is called the Hidden Welfare State. It's the Hidden Welfare State. It's hidden because it goes to the top. We spend $250 billion per year in tax breaks for people to save in their retirement funds. The people who save in their retirement funds are higher-income people at higher marginal tax rates, so they get basically thousands of dollars from the government. Somebody who is at a lower wage, a lower tax rate, who saves the maximum into their retirement plan gets $100 or $50. It's like $100 to the lower middle class person, and $7,000 to $10,000 to the high-income person, and that costs $250 billion for a year. The money is already there, and so I know people don't like the word, but a little bit of redistribution is in order. It seems as though I'm just talking about what we need for people over 65, but I'm actually talking about the hidden cost of people working longer to us right now. Because if you increase a labor supply to an economy, you're going to shift out that labor supply curve. The labor demand curve doesn't catch up, and you have lowered wages or you've lowered working standards for everybody else. So I document in my book the cost of not having a good pension system to young workers. So that's that's one hidden cost. The other hidden cost is the increase in inequality of some of the most basic things we care about. So if one thing that we care about is dignity as you age and the dignity of worker, and part of that dignity is to have the time to create your own personal narrative, which often means controlling the pace and content of your time, connecting to what you care about, connecting to nature, connecting to other individuals, and you deny that to some parts of the population and not another. The hidden cost is the dignity of your nation. We know that longevity and health has become much more unequally distributed. So at the same time, we're forcing people without money to work longer. We also have built a system where they get sicker faster and die earlier. So the hidden cost is that foreshortening of healthy retirement time. And that's a reversal to what we used to have when Social Security and Medicare came in the 1960s and really increase in the 70s. You saw the bottom coming up. We saw more equality after age 65 than we did in those years before. And now we're just seeing the inequality supernova really grow in old age. So one of those other hidden costs is that hidden cost of inequality. The 401k system came in 40 years ago, and it's a failed experiment. It was never meant to be the American retirement system, or else it wouldn't have been called after an obscure section of the IRS code. It's called the 401k, but it has become the American retirement system. We know the system has failed. We are coming into a period of time in the next 10 to 20 years where we're going to have massive numbers of people who are middle-class workers be downwardly mobile into poverty. And the hidden costs of that are what it does to communities, what it does to the aggregate demand in communities, and what it does to the adult children who have to deal with impoverished parents. Not everybody has a spare bedroom or a garage they can refurbish for their aging and poor, stunned parents. That's a hidden cost. So the 401k system was a voluntary, individually directed, commercial plan. And we were waiting around for a whole generation to work under it to see whether or not it would get an A, B, C, D, or F. And all of us experts say, well, that system was an F, except for the top 10%. And then that may raise it to a D minus. So my great new deal reassembles the 401k system, reassembles the social security system, and reassembles our thinking about what people deserve as workers, what dignity as a worker means. And so the great new deal increases social security benefits. The great new deal universalizes pensions. There is a bill going to be introduced in Congress. And I have worked about 35 years for such a bill, so I want to talk about it a little bit. It basically universalizes a pension for everybody. And it's even better than what I thought of with my guaranteed retirement account plan 35 years ago and have written about it since. Because it delinks having a pension from a particular employer. And that really gives employers a relief. Because even the good ones have been trying to get their people to invest well and to put enough money in it. And the way the system is structured, the employer really can't do that. And so they feel what they're doing is a waste of time and money as well. So this bill that will be introduced in Congress will let everybody who doesn't have a pension today join the federal plan. The federal employees have something called a thrift savings plan. And it's a really good plan. It's paid for by the employer and by the worker. The administrative fees are very low because there's no profit motive in it. And so the bill will set up an ancillary or a sidecar benefit for 57 million people to join that plan. And the government will provide a 3% match to their contributions. And this is something Democrats would love. And they would have, if they'd been in control, they would have passed something like this 30 years ago. But this bill has support for Republicans as well. And a lot of that is because of the protests from the Occupy, from the good work by Nobel Prize laureate economists. From statements from the World Bank and the IMF, from the Black Lives Movement. That this inequality of wealth is not stable. So whatever the motivation on one side of the aisle of the one of the Democrats, the Republicans have other motivations for this bill. And I've been able to aid some good people who have lobbied for this. And it took a year and a half, but we've created a bill that will be introduced called the Retirement Security Act for All Americans.