Apr 28, 2003
By Betty Booker
Seventy seems a sensible retirement age. Maybe 75, if you have fire in the belly and stamina to stoke it.
Seventy seems a sensible retirement age. Maybe 75, if you have fire in the belly and stamina to stoke it.
Wrong, says futurist Maddy Dychtwald: "I think people should work for as long as they can."
Here are her reasons for "unretirement:"
Most 65-year-olds are healthy and energetic and therefore too young to retire from productive work.
There's a growing worker shortage, so 78 million baby boomers sitting on their duffs is something the country can't afford.
The economy would be better off if people didn't start drawing Social Security while they can contribute to it.
Retirement without contributing to society is an obsolete concept.
Dychtwald, author of "Cycles: How We Will Live, Work, and Buy" (Free Press; $26), thinks the historical practice of defining people by age is disappearing fast.
"By the time you were 50, you were over the hill. That's just not the case anymore," she says in a phone interview from California.
"We have the opportunity - at any age - to reinvent ourselves. This is new, in that it's happening to a lot of people. It's in the beginning stages, but it's spreading like wildfire. We're so in the middle of it we don't see it as a trend."
Like racism and sexism, age discrimination will disappear, "and there are some very good reasons, most of which have to do with demographics."
By 2008 the median age of the workforce will approach 41 (up from 39 in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). In 2011 when the first boomers reach 65, half of all workers will be over age 45, she says.
"If you play that out - with more older people and fewer younger people - the labor force participation by people over age 55 is going to need to increase by 25 percent - just for the U.S. to maintain our current level of productivity, which is not very high right now.
"Some CEOs are understanding this: They just look at the facts," notes Dychtwald, senior vice president of Age Wave, a San Francisco baby-boomer research company.
"They look at the population figures in their futures" and "suddenly their only route to success is this other, older workforce they never paid any attention to. But it's intelligent, experienced and wants to work, but perhaps in a more flexible manner like flex-time, part-time and job-sharing."
Many retire because they're tired and bored with routine and want to rethink whether to revamp old jobs or start something new: "A three-month or longer sabbatical would take care of that."
A recent Age Wave study of retirees found that while today's retirees want security in retirement, boomers want freedom. Two-thirds of future retirees, however, will have to work because their savings are insufficient.
"I'm optimistic about the future," she says, but businesses and workers are going to have to consider "unretirement."
"We're taking some of our best resources, people who are trained, experienced and we're putting them out to pasture when society needs them?
"If we in this country continue to do this, it will really be the end of us. Survival is the issue here."
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