This unusual and interesting book investigates the influence of both the financial and housing markets together with labour market conditions on retirement decisions and subsequent retiree wellbeing. The discussion is narrowly located focusing on the United States of America (USA), where the economic downturn since 2008 has hit older Americans the hardest. Its underpinning theme is that Americans are poorly prepared for retirement and, against a background of corporate downsizing as one response to the recent economic crisis, many older Americans have lost their jobs and have been forced into premature retirement without adequate resources to maintain preferred lifestyles and ongoing health-care costs.
This, however, is not the whole picture painted by Coile and Levine who skilfully draw out the complexities of the interconnected impacts of falling property values, reduced returns from capital investments and the rising cost of health insurance, which mean that a significant proportion of older workers are unable to retire, or afraid to do so. Because in the USA financial security in old age rests increasingly on private savings, the diminishing returns on savings have forced many prospective retirees to cling on to their jobs, deferring long-held retirement plans. A dual picture is created, of delayed retirement for some and earlier retirement for others, showing retirement behaviour in the US context as subject to complex and diverse variables.
The book is well structured and is organised into eight themed chapters, providing the reader with a good framework of understanding about key aspects of the market model (in its widest sense) that can help shape decisions about retirement. The narrative has a strong fiscal emphasis and would have been enhanced by more information about social and community factors that we know are also influential. The second chapter, ‘Defining and Explaining Retirement’, is key in setting the context for the later discussion. The authors explain that their approach to defining retirement is shaped by the data at their disposal rather than by any particular philosophical view. This reads almost as an apology for the very limited discussion of aspects such as status and identity that other labour market theorists (see e.g. Casey and Laczko Reference Casey and Laczko1989; Porcellato et al. Reference Porcellato, Carmichael, Hulme, Ingham and Prashar2010) argue are theoretically and materially important to understanding the impacts of withdrawing from paid work. Because retirement has become a much longer and more important phase of life, these elements merit much deeper consideration, particularly in relation to the wellbeing of retired people.
The key findings of the research on which the book is based are presented in Chapter Seven; weaker long-term investment returns lead more skilled workers to delay retirement, while higher unemployment rates result in earlier retirement for less-skilled workers. The impact of changes to the US housing market does not appear to significantly influence retirement behaviour. These conclusions are discussed in relation to retiree wellbeing and I found this chapter to be the most engaging because of the theoretical and empirical connections made between work, leisure, health status and the capacity for consumer participation within the market. As with the authors’ attempts to define retirement in Chapter Two, the discussion of how wellbeing can be measured is brief and under-theorised with reference to constructs such as ‘happiness’ and ‘utility’ not sufficiently developed. That aside, the authors argue convincingly in the US context for the critical importance of financial market conditions at the point of retirement in having long-lasting effects on the wellbeing of retirees. Without much ability to alter income streams once they retire, individuals who are exposed to high unemployment or falling stock prices as they approach their expected retirement run the risk of reduced income for the remainder of their lives.
Although very specifically geographically located, this book contains material that will be useful to students, researchers and practitioners with interests in both ageing studies and labour markets. The book's final chapter, which discusses implications of the research findings for policy development, draws together some key issues for those involved in US policy making in this area. The ideas discussed by Coile and Levine, to underpin strategic social policy making, are also of relevance for those engaged in this task more widely beyond the USA.
