Cultural Elephants in the Retirement Room, by John M. Grondelski

As Labor Day approaches, it’s worth thinking about something that is inevitably a phase of everyone’s life: retirement. Discussions about retirement these days often devolve into talk about the pending crisis of Social Security. That’s an important question, of course, but shifting what should be a reflection of the years of life after work into worries about the Social Security system’s economic health masks a deeper issue.

Teresa Ghilarducci’s new book, Work, Retire, Repeat, examines American assumptions about retirement from the perspective of people who are retiring.  Her views are not encouraging: she believes we face the resurgence of a phenomenon many thought the New Deal had banished: elder poverty. ….

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