Retirement and Work: Now and the Future

Summary

This chapter examines future retirement patterns in terms of the relationships among aging, health, and work. It is suggested that, due to improvements in health status, increasingly older persons will show the ability and desire to continue working—in far greater numbers than earlier projected—as opposed to the possibility that a predominating increase will occur in the older population unable to work due to health difficulties and chronic disability despite prolonged survival. In addition to better health, other factors such as better education and the probable inadequacy of future pension benefits will tend to delay both self-perceptions of being “old” and the actual age of retirement. Since the quality of workers’ jobs reciprocally influences their maintenance of health, potential improvements in the physical and psychological quality of work life must be considered another critical factor in the retirement patterns that will be seen among the future aged.