slate.com - 12/1/2008
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You think the economy is bad? I have worse news: We're living longer.
Well, that's not exactly news. Steady increases in life expectancy have been a regular topic here at Human Nature. Now they're relevant for an awkward reason: The longer you live, the longer you have to stretch out your ...
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The Joys Of Modern Retirement
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan —
Saletan makes an obvious, unsettling point:
As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it's on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can suddenly shrink—as, for example, it's doing right now—and, at the same time, the longevity you've gained from all this lovely industrialization requires you to carve that pie into more and more annual ...
The best arguments for Social Security
Newshoggers.com —
... By Fester:
William Saletan (via Andrew Sullivan) inadvertantly makes two very strong arguments for Social Security as a means of multiple risk spreading across the entire population and thus the entire risk pool:
As the latest Reuters report notes, over the last four decades, U.S. life expectancy has climbed from 70.8 to 77.8 years. By 2015, it's on track to hit 79.2 years. Meanwhile, unlike other industrialized democracies, the United States has replaced pensions with 401(k) plans. So your retirement-income pie can ...
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Creative destruction at risk
powerlineblog.com 11/19/2008 — Niall Ferguson is a bestselling author, a professor of history at Harvard, a senior research fellow at Oxford, and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Ferguson is also as engaging a speaker as one could wish to hear.
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