75. Retirement Kills

[0] From APM, American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace.

[1] Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl.

[2] Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio.

[3] It's that moment every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co -author of the books and the blog of the same name.

[4] It is the Hidden Side O Everything.

[5] Dubner, welcome back.

[6] Hey, Kai, thank you.

[7] Listen, I've got to, I'm curious.

[8] Don't take this wrong way, but you're not thinking of.

[9] retiring anytime soon, are you?

[10] No. Do you know something I don't know?

[11] I do not.

[12] No, no, no. But, you know, since you're not, that puts you in good company, you know, the great recession has put a lot of retirement plans on hold for a long time, often at the behest of governments who can't afford to pay pensions, you know.

[13] Right.

[14] Yeah.

[15] Germany, the UK, France, they've up their retirement ages.

[16] And we're seeing a lot more older workers in the U .S. as well.

[17] Here's Lisa Boyle from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[18] Okay.

[19] In 2000, 55 and older, that group was 13 % of the labor force.

[20] In 2010, that group was 20 % of the labor force.

[21] By 2020, our projections show that that group will represent 25 % of the labor force.

[22] My gut tells me that my initial inclination on this is wrong.

[23] That's just people getting older, right?

[24] Isn't that the deal?

[25] Demographics are real.

[26] There are more older people, but people also are working longer.

[27] So the share of workers over 65 in this country is the highest it's been in more than 50 years.

[28] And so we're going to have to work until not, you know, 60s, but mid -70s sometime, right?

[29] Well, look, it may sound terrible, but, Kai, I'm happy to say there is a hidden side, a little silver lining here to consider, okay?

[30] Yes.

[31] So the economist Joseph Zweymuller at the University of Zurich recently did a study that looked at two fairly identical groups of blue -collar workers in Austria, one group that got early retirement up to three and a half years earlier than the other.

[32] And what Zweimler found is that early retirement, as much as we may think we crave it, actually has a considerable downside.

[33] I mean, actually, what we find in our study is that among blue -collar workers, we see that workers who retired earlier have higher mortality rates.

[34] And these effects are pretty large.

[35] Higher mortality rates, they die, right?

[36] The people who took the early retirement?

[37] Correct.

[38] The study showed that for every extra year of early retirement, you look at.

[39] lose about two months of life expectancy.

[40] And I should say this is not the first study to show there's a fairly strong relationship between early retirement and earlier death.

[41] What do we know, though, about the causes of death?

[42] I mean, you know, right?

[43] Is it hard at that?

[44] What is it?

[45] Yeah.

[46] A lot of them, cardiovascular, likely due to things like more smoking and drinking, worse diet, not enough exercise.

[47] But there's also evidence to show that it goes beyond the physical, that working longer is tied to better mental health as well, okay?

[48] Here's, here's Mo Wang.

[49] He's a psychologist at the University of Florida who studies retirement.

[50] Working actually gives you a way to structure life, and that's very important.

[51] Usually, it's interesting.

[52] You see people travel right after they retire, but then after like one or two years, people just sit at home watching TV.

[53] So this raises a little bit of an existential quandary, right?

[54] Life expectancy at birth in the U .S. has doubled over the past century, miraculous, which means that we've gained more and more years potentially of retirement, but we're still figuring out what to do with all those years.

[55] So here's my free economics friend and co -author Steve Levitt, as you know, he's an economist at the University of Chicago.

[56] So now we've created this artificial sort of absurdly long chunk of years, for many people, 25 or 30 years, where you've got nothing to do, but the government essentially pays you to do nothing.

[57] And so I think, I think retirement as we have today is crazy.

[58] Says the academic who sits around and thinks all day, right?

[59] I mean, come on.

[60] And says the economist who wants to squeeze more productivity.

[61] He wants us to work longer and hard.

[62] Right.

[63] Right.

[64] But here's the thing.

[65] It may be for our own good, right?

[66] If early retirement leads to worse health outcomes, you start to see the virtue of working longer.

[67] Now, of course, it all depends on how you define work.

[68] And And if maybe you can kind of have your cake and eat it too, that is exactly the way Steve Levitt, by the way, is planning his retirement.

[69] So my second career will be to aspire to be a professional golfer.

[70] So it's not something I'll ever actually attain, but I'm going to call my full -time golfing work.

[71] Nice work.

[72] If you can get it, Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics .com is the website.

[73] We'll see you in a couple of weeks.

[74] Coming up on the podcast next week, the paradox of food, which is to say food today is cheap.

[75] more abundant and often more delicious than ever, but it's not without its problems, junk food and obesity, to name just a couple.

[76] We'll talk about all that, including how American food got so bad before it got good.

[77] You'll hear from foodie economist Tyler Cowan, food writer and philosopher Michael Pollan, and Chef of Chefs, Alice Waters.

[78] All next week on the podcast.