Does a Uniform Retirement Age Make Sense?

In the face of rising life expectancies, many policy experts argue that today’s workers can retire later and still spend the same fraction of their lives in retire­ment as past generations. But such an argument assumes that all workers, regardless of socioeconomic status (SES), have experienced the same increase in life expectancy. In fact, evidence suggests that life expectancies for low-SES individuals have been improving more slowly than for high-SES individuals in recent decades, causing the life expectancy gap to grow. This brief, based on a recent study, builds on prior research by estimating trends in mortality (the flip side of life expectancy) from 1979-2011 by education, a common measure of SES. These estimates are then used to see how much longer each educational group can work today if the goal is to maintain the same ratio of retirement years to working years as existed in 1979. The discussion is organized as follows. The first section describes the data and methodology used in the analysis. The second section presents the results. The final section concludes that, due to growing mor­tality inequality, policies aimed at extending worklives uniformly may not be fair to low-SES individuals.