Ready to work until you die? America needs you

Tight situation: People walk through downtown Manhattan in New York. According to surveys, most Americans don’t have enough to survive in retirement, much less live comfortably or extravagantly. — AFP

SHORTFALLS in retirement savings have been widely regarded as a crisis of our times. Perhaps.

The history of the relationship between old age and work reveals a more complicated picture, one that calls into question the idea that retirement is both necessary and desirable. It turns out that the modern concept of retirement, far from reflecting a desire to give the elderly a break, was the product of something more insidious: age discrimination.