Is Retirement Over?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2016
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For millennia human beings worked until they dropped. Then in the late 19th century, Otto von Bismarck started the first state pension in Germany. The idea caught on. By the 20th century, advances in medicine meant that many more people were surviving childhood and living longer and longer into old age.
This was great news for those individuals, but not such good news for governments and companies who found themselves having to fund ever-longer retirements. Many of the most generous schemes have now been withdrawn and it’s increasingly up to the individual to save for their retirement – but many aren’t saving enough.
Volatile stock markets and low interest rates are making the situation worse. Many think retirement will turn out to be a "blip" in human history; it didn't exist in the past, and it won't exist in the future. So, is retirement over?
Our expert witnesses are: Professor Noel Whiteside of the University of Warwick, UK; Thomas B Jankowski, research director at Wayne State University, US; David Blake, director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, London, Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School.
Presenter: Ruth Alexander
(Photo: Clayton Fackler, 72, works at the check out at a supermarket in Ohio. Credit: J.D. Pooley/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the inquiry with me Ruth Alexander. |
| 0:07.0 | Stanley Collins works in a DIY or hardware store in Guilford, an affluent town in southeast England. |
| 0:15.0 | Like his colleagues at B&Q, his duties are varied, helping customers, organizing stock, and even dispensing home improvement advice. |
| 0:24.7 | But the remarkable thing about Mr Collins, what really sets him apart from his colleagues |
| 0:30.1 | is the fact that he's 91 years old. |
| 0:33.0 | Good for Stanley Collins, you might think, |
| 0:36.0 | and good for being Q which employs plenty of elderly staff. |
| 0:40.0 | But would it be good for you? |
| 0:42.0 | Well, if you're under 20 as you listen to this program, |
| 0:45.0 | there's a pretty good chance that one day you'll find out. |
| 0:50.0 | Most people in the world's richest countries expect to retire, but as people live longer and pension funds wither, |
| 0:58.0 | it's increasingly likely that many people, despite those those expectations never will. |
| 1:04.0 | That's why this week we're asking. |
| 1:07.0 | Is retirement over? Part 1, the invention of the pension. |
| 1:25.8 | We have no God-given human right to retire. |
| 1:30.7 | Noel Whiteside is a professor at the University of Warwick in the UK. |
| 1:35.0 | She studied how different countries look after their elderly. |
| 1:38.0 | For tens of thousands of years, people worked until they could work no more. |
| 1:42.0 | They'd hand over their land to their families |
| 1:44.9 | and then rely on them for support. |
| 1:50.7 | It's the Industrial Revolution and Urbanization that ruptures these sorts of arrangements and ruptures them very badly |
| 1:58.0 | and so it's with industrialization that you find various countries starting to address the issue of old age poverty. |
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