Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008
The Specter Haunting Old Age
By Jeff Madrick
Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us
by Robin Blackburn
Verso, 328 pp., $34.95
Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge
by Alicia H. Munnell and Steven A. Sass
Brookings Institution Press, 288 pp., $29.95 (to be published in May)
The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing
by Greg Anrig
Wiley, 304 pp., $25.95
The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back
by Jacob S. Hacker
Oxford University Press, 240 pp., $26.00
When I'm Sixty-four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them
by Teresa Ghilarducci
Princeton University Press, 384 pp., $29.95 (to be published in April)
The industrial revolution is more than two centuries old, but the first rich nations to provide for the retirement of their elderly did not do so until roughly a century ago. Until the late 1800s, when agriculture still dominated the newly industrializing economies, old people, especially in America, usually owned their farms or passed them on to their children, who looked after them. Those who worked the farms were also often taken in. Suffering among the elderly existed, of course, but life spans were relatively short.
Review, 4158 words
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