Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy

by Teresa Ghilarducci, E. J. Dionne Jr. (foreword)

A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.


While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.


Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.


But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Finance, Politics, Audiobook

276 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 6, 2024

About the author

Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist, author, and labor economist, and retirement security expert. Her widely circulated New York Times op-ed "Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement" brought attention to her fresh and comprehensive critique of the America way of provisioning for retirement. Her book, When I'm 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, presents her cutting-edge policy recommendations for restructuring the United States’ deteriorating retirement income security system. Her book Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. For the past five years, she has served as a court appointed trustee of the $50 billion retiree health care fund for ford, GM, and Chrysler retirees. Before coming The New School she was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Ghilarducci was the 2006–08 Wurf Fellow at Harvard Law School; her research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, Ford Foundation, and Retirement Research Foundation.

Reviews

[Kim]

A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it. While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign. Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat , Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must. But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.

[Mark Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author advocates for a return of defined benefit plans (traditional pensions) and a “New Gray Deal.”

[MNBooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was significantly different from what I expected. There were a few interesting nuggets in here, but I didn’t enjoy the author’s style. I think most acknowledge that retirement reform is needed, but I didn’t totally buy into her suggested plans. American people always seem to find ways of opting out of something that’s good for them (we tried this with health care, but some refused to pay and now we can not penalize people for not having health insurance despite it likely costing society a lot more). We will continue to have people who don’t or can’t save for retirement. I think this book showed me some of my bias that it is somewhat on the individual to plan ahead—it can’t be totally on the government to support someone for 20 years. I do think the author may challenge your thinking a bit, maybe not change your mind but at least get you pondering about other factors.

[Howell Murray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gets five stars for its ideas and one star for its writing, which is so repetitive that it is almost unreadable. The author must think that the more you say something, the more people will get it, but actually the more you repeat something, the more you dilute your message. This could have been a much better (and shorter) book or paper.

[Jakub Dovcik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere disappointing, this book focuses on refuting what it calls the ‘working longer consensus’ - a shift in discourse about retirement and retirement policy in the United States towards encouraging delaying retirement. It has a lot of interesting points about the negative impacts of working longer if one is only forced to (but also disapproves forced retirement), about the various reasons for the precarious situation many older workers are in (and very much in favour of defined benefit plans), or about the negative realities of some generations, like the baby boomers, whose pensions are deflated by the size of the age cohort.

But generally, the only chapter that actually deals with overall and national-level retirement policy is the last one and recommendations are extremely limited - it effectively only recommends a something like the UK civil service-style model of compulsory retirement saving plans with contributions by both employers and employees, with central management. The only really interesting idea in it is the proposal for 5% match for low-income savers by the government, which would mitigate the top-heaviness of retirement tax breaks, where the top 20% of taxpayers currently receive over almost 2/3rds of the $267 billion spent.

There is also some space given to more traditional wage-growth policies, like increases in minimum wage or support for unionisation, but those parts are relatively vague. The author is very right on the benefits on lowering Medicare age and advocates against any age-related discrimination, or even ageist talk - which is very commendable.

Retirement policy is a complex topic and while this is a persuasive argument for relatively modest reform of the US system (although the author used a grand name ‘the grey new deal’, the proposal leaves a lot of the structure untouched), it does not show what a true alternative progressive vision for pensions would look like.

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read on the subject of retirement so I don't have much context for its positives and negatives. But as a person early in my career with a retirement plan I know almost nothing about, I learned a lot, and realized how much more I have to learn.

Others have noted the book is a bit repetitive, and I agree, but since I’m new to the topic I appreciated the reminders.

My one criticism is that the author doesn't talk much about the mounting long term care health costs that seniors are facing in late retirement. If you can't take care of yourself at the end of your life and you don't have kids willing to take you in or lots of money in the bank, your options are so limited. What you believed to be a healthy amount of savings can be eaten up in just a few years when someone needs 24/7 care.

I think the author is correct that politicians and other white collar professional workers tend to enjoy their jobs and derive power from them, so they don’t want to retire if they don’t have to. Which leads them to neglect the very real desire for retirement that exists in most older Americans.

3 / 5 stars.

[Tony Wohlfarth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I accessed this as an audio book and then as a textbook. I recommend the latter as it is full of details which are best accessed in paper format. I first learned about this book by watching CNBC:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/06/06...
As this interview makes clear, the author challenges number of shibboleths e.g. work longer for higher pensions. The reason? It is all about longevity, not job satisfaction. The author uses tangible examples (e.g. her mother). It begins with a familiar scene i.e. meeting an elderly greeter @ Walmart. She talks to them and discovers they are working to make ends meet i.e. not to enrich their lives. According to her research, the US lags behind other G7 countries - incl. Australia and Canada. It is thought provoking and makes tangible suggestions how to solve the crisis. Highly recommended.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated the in-depth research behind this book. All we ever hear is "work longer" and "save more", with little discussion about the many people in low paying jobs that need their income just to stay afloat. And given how many retirees are at or near the poverty line, there is definitely a systemic problem with our US approach to retirement security.
My only negative comment is that the book could have used a bit more editing. There were some repetitive passages that could have been cut.

[Bella Del Hierro · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book started slowly, laying out the history of how we got to the current retirement crisis and diving into the impacts with robust data. Although I found the beginning half of the book quite repetitive, Ghilarducci makes a compelling case and concise plan, The Grey New Deal, in the later half which I thought was much better written.

Overall an enlightening and informative book on retirement in the US, I’m glad I read it.

[Chad Stephenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am far more interested in retirement and personal finance than your average person but found this book extremely boring. I also think she is a little too hard on 401Ks and a little too kind to pensions. I absolutely believe that annuities like social security and traditional pensions are a necessary aspect of a retirement plan, but I think 401Ks add ownership, diversification, flexibility, and potential upside in a way that earns them a place in the equation.

[Jeff Brimhall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook: Discussion of need for “new gray deal”, how do-it -yourself retirement plans (401k-type) are failing America, and how the “work longer” answer to our retirement problem is the wrong answer.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this instead of Unretirement.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

An accessible, clear-eyed account of the many reasons that our retirement system is broken

[Maggie]

Sobering.

[Andrew Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was fine.. nothing groundbreaking, but not horrible. Getting old an retiring can cause of a lot of financial issues if not planned for well enough

[Parish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cliffs notes: pensions rule.

[Susan Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about the need for better pensions and retirement security.