More Social Security

From John Tierney in the NY Times:

Men in their 70's raced on bikes for 40 kilometers in this month's National Senior Games in Pittsburgh. A 68-year-old woman threw the discus 85 feet, and a 69-year-old man hurled the javelin nearly half the length of a football field.

Is it possible that people this age are still physically capable of putting in a full day's work at the office?

I realize I'm being impolitic. In the Social Security debate, the notion of raising the retirement age is the elephant in the room, as Robin Toner and David Rosenbaum reported in The Times on Sunday. Both liberal and conservative economists favor the change, but politicians are terrified to even mention it to voters.

Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.

Amen brother. And I'd add this:

Today's notion of "retirement age" is a fairly recent one. Otto von Bismarck is often credited with craftily setting the retirement age at 65 because most people wouldn't live that long -- though in fact, Bismarck set it at 70, and it wasn't lowered to 65 until later. But the justification for retirement has always been that by retirement age people were nearly used up, and deserved a bit of fun and then a comfortable and dignified decline until death. Get rid of the decline and death, and you've given up the justification for living -- as Social Security recipients, at least, do -- off other people's efforts on what amounts to a form of welfare . Logically, retirement should be put off until people are medically old, or perhaps just replaced with disability, and those who are able to work should do so, while those desirous of not working should save up as for a long vacation.