Work and Retirement

I found Work and Retirement both stimulating and pleasurable reading.It covers a wide variety of complex topics in a forthright fashion and draws on the majority of relevant research in the process.Topics include a history of retirement, achievements and problems that result from retirement, definitions and concepts, theories of adjustment to retirement, preparing for retirement, the capacity of older people for work, the experience of retirement, work after retirement age, the relation between retirement and leisure, and policy alternatives.I consider the book good food for thought in most of the areas covered.The author is very honest about his position.He thinks that forced retirement is unnecessary age discrimination that harms a large number of older people and at the same time cannot be shown to help society all that much.From the point of view of the U.S.A., the stress placed on reinforcing this point over and over detracts from the value of many of his other points.I say this because forced retirement is apparently much more common in Britain than in the U.S.A., where less than 5 per cent of retirements were mandatory even before the Age Discrimination in Employment Act was changed to prohibit mandatory retirement prior to age 70.Thus, for the U.S.A. a book aimed at documenting the case against mandatory retirement is aimed at a policy issue of relatively little importance, especially in comparison with issues such as the minimum benefit age under Social Security or the implications of an ageing population for the future of pension financing.Despite the one-pointed focus on forced retirement, the book offers more than most available today in providing an overview of the research issues surrounding individual retirement.The discussion of