Ready Or Not, Here Come The Boomers!

I like being a member of the Leisure Class. I like receiving a monthly payment from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the Social Security Administration. I like having more "take home money" than I received while working fulltime as a laborer in the groves of academe otherwise known as Almost College. I like not having to be at work. I like not having to hunt for a parking place. Most of all, I don't miss the slackjawed louts who peopled my classrooms. I may call the community where I live, Geezerville, and I may call the Senior University, Geezer College, but I like all of it. Thank you, Del Webb (1899-1974), wherever you are. If this is (fair & balanced) self-indulgence, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Time to Rethink Retirement: Is the Concept of the "Golden Years" Still Something to be Longed For?
By Marc Freedman

On New Year's Eve 1959, the team launching the new Sun City retirement community, the first such large-scale venture in America, sat around a table at Manuel's Place, a Mexican restaurant in Peoria, Ariz. The mood was anxious. For months the team had run national advertising touting "An Active New Way of Life" for older people. The next morning was Sun City's grand opening. Would anyone show up?

The group had reason to be worried, according to materials from Sun City Areas Historical Society. Their boss, Del Webb, had sunk $2 million into the community exclusively for the group he called "55 and better." The heart of the company's market research? A quick trip to the retirement haven of St. Petersburg, Fla., where one of Webb's lieutenants interviewed seniors on park benches. Every psychiatrist and gerontologist consulted by the Webb executives had told them they were crazy; older people would never leave their friends and family to head off to the desert of 1960s Arizona.

There were other hurdles. Breaking the uncomfortable silence around the table, Owen Childress, the manager responsible for sales, voiced his long-held fear: "How am I going to get a 30-year mortgage on a guy who is 65 years old?"

The next morning, however, the group saw a scene they could never have imagined. Lined up for two miles, cars filled with older men and women converged on Sun City from all over the country. Their destination: the converted cotton field where six tiny, Levittown-style model homes sat incongruously on the edge of a makeshift golf course.

By the end of the weekend, 100,000 people would turn up.

From this, an entire industry would grow around the dream of retirement as leisure — the "golden years," a phrase coined by Webb and his company. Instead of being dreaded years of decline, retirement would become something for which people longed. Retirement was sold as the beginning of a new, even a better life.

This dream would ultimately sow the seeds for today's alarm about the graying of the baby boom generation and the viability of Social Security and other pension programs. How will we be able to afford a leisure class that makes up a quarter of the population?

Marketing reshaped ideal

Sun City's success was fueled by not only marketing genius but pent-up demand from people unhappy with their lot. A gradual marginalization of older people had taken place over the previous 25 years. Though the goal of the Social Security Act in 1935 had been, as President Franklin Roosevelt said, to "give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age," a key side effect was to lure older workers out of the labor market to make room for the hordes of unemployed young people who were seen as a potential source of social unrest.

With the end of the Depression and World War II, growing numbers of Americans retired, cutting themselves off from work and thereby much of society. They assumed "roleless roles," in the words of a leading gerontologist of the time. As people began to live extended, healthier lives, and the period between the end of work and the end of life grew longer, the question of the purpose of this period in life grew more urgent.

"Too old to work, too young to die" was how, in the late 1940s, labor leader Walter Reuther characterized it. Even the language seemed to contribute to this conclusion; the word retirement comes from the old French "retirer," meaning "to go off into seclusion."

So many people dreaded retirement during the early postwar years that it created economic as well as psychological issues. The financial services industry found it hard to sell pensions to Americans loath not only to plan for but even to think about the grim existence awaiting them.

To make retirement more appetizing, pension and annuity marketers in the 1950s seized on the notion of aristocratic leisure, depicting retirement as an age of liberation — from responsibility, from work, from the constraints of midlife. It was the chance at a second childhood. Graying as playing.

It would take the better part of a decade, and Webb's entrepreneurial genius, for this concept to be fully realized. Once communities such as Sun City and its chief rival, Leisure World, emerged as emblems of retirement, developers, the pension industry and a vast leisure sector followed. In a relatively brief period, they transformed the ideal of aging into one of an ongoing vacation.

And a remarkable transformation it was: In 1950, half the men older than 65 remained in the workforce. By 2000 the number was less than 18 percent. Older adults emerged as the biggest consumers of leisure activities in America. The goal of retirement was replaced by a new dream: early retirement.

Balancing work and play

A half-century later, America finds itself in the midst of a demographic revolution, propelled by the aging of 78 million baby boomers. By 2030, these individuals will make up 20 percent to 25 percent of the overall population. A wave of "greedy geezers," some policy experts say, threatens to wash away our fiscal health. While the full force of these demographics has yet to be felt, there is a degree of consensus in much of the current debate over Social Security and national savings: Graying means paying — for those who are younger.

But those who declare that social insolvency lies ahead fail to understand that another transformation is unfolding, as profound as the change during the early days of Sun City.

In 1900, the average American lived to the not-so-ripe age of 47. Today that number is 77, and rising. And that's long enough for retirees to get bored. How much golf can you play?

Now people seldom think of retirement as a final stage of life but rather as an interlude between stages. More individuals are "retiring" for a period to catch their breath before making the transition to a new chapter in life. Surveys show that the ideal of the golden years is going into eclipse.

But what's next for these individuals, many of whom face an identity crisis? Neither young nor old, they are finished with midlife, yet they can look forward to the likelihood of decades of vitality before becoming truly old. What might they rightly aspire to in the next phase? How will they define success?

While much remains unclear, a central, defining feature is emerging. It is work. The vast majority of the boomers plan to continue working — full-time, part-time, paid, unpaid — in their so-called retirement years. A recent AARP study shows nearly 80 percent of boomers plan to continue paid labor during their 60s and 70s. In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted in February, almost two-thirds of Americans who have not yet retired said that when the time comes they will work for pay after retiring. The reason given most often has nothing to do with money: They simply want to stay busy.

This new generation of aging boomers seems poised to swap the old dream of freedom from work for a new one built around the freedom to work — in new ways, on new terms, to new ends.

The trend is welcome news, and not just for public coffers. We now know that work is good for aging individuals, for their health as well as their wallets. At the same time, the nation faces the prospect of a labor shortage in many areas over the coming decades.

In the end, reinventing retirement will take more than marketing, more even than retooling Social Security. It will require a new generation of policies, pathways and priorities.

A tall order, but the history of aging in America is one of innovation. Social Security and Medicare were invented out of whole cloth within the past 70 years. We didn't even have retirement communities or senior centers 50 years ago. In just a half-century, we redefined aging so thoroughly that the "golden" years image seemed as natural as oxygen in the air.

Now, a little more than nine months before the first of tens of millions of baby boomers begin to turn 60, we need a transformation no less bold. We must create an aging America that swaps the old leisure ideal for one that balances the joys and responsibilities of engagement across the life span. And that could produce a society that works better for all generations.

Marc Freedman is president of Civic Ventures, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that develops opportunities for older Americans to serve their communities. He is author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America.

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