From Arnold Kling:
I think that the central trend here is that people do not want to work. Bruce Bartlett notes that
According to the Social Security Administration, 43 percent of men and 48 percent of women on Social Security in 2008 began drawing benefits at age 62. An additional 15 percent of men and women started at age 63 or 64. In short, about two-thirds of those eligible are retiring before the normal retirement age.
... I do have a couple of worries.
I worry that many college graduates are unsettled nowadays because they did not really learn much.
I worry that twenty-somethings face so much social pressure not to work for a profit.
I worry that we send young people signals that they should run from adversity. I know of a couple twenty-somethings who landed good jobs and soon quit because they were criticized by their bosses. Look, nobody likes a difficult boss, but in my generation you would typically find a new job before you quit because the boss made you feel bad.
I worry about government engineering who gets leisure and who does not. Among the elderly, we already have a privileged class (retired government workers). Once we decide that the decade from age 20 to 30 is a public policy issue, who knows what mischief will be created?
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