Jane the Actuary General Interest, Retirement

Forbes post, “When WEIRD People Have Weird Retirements: Some Comments On The ‘WEIRD’ Explanation Of Western Distinctiveness”

Originally published at Forbes.com on October 17, 2020.

 

Who are “WEIRD” people?

It’s a clever acronym, to denote people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But the acronym is meant to indicate something else as well, that psychologically, those of us whose ancestors hail from Western Europe, or who live in counties shaped by their culture, are weird, that is, different, in terms of our psychology, our norms, our sense of right and wrong, than the rest of the world. This is part of the thesis of a new book, The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich. The more remarkable part of that thesis, though, is something unexpected: that those differences have their origins in an unexpected source, the prohibition by the Catholic Church of marriages by people who were closely, or even distantly, related (as well as the requirement that the couple consent to the marriage and the prohibition of multiple spouses).

Now, readers may be wondering what this has to do with retirement — unless you’re a diligent enough follower of my writing to recall my April 2019 article about retirement in the Middle Ages. We may think that the notion of “retirement” is a modern one, and that as long ago as that, one worked until death or was simply cared for by one’s children, but that’s not true — even then, in Europe, newlyweds lived on their own, rather than staying in the family home to care for their parents as they aged. And that’s quite different than the “filial piety” of Confucian cultures or practices elsewhere (and, incidentally, the “Middle Ages” is a label that really only makes sense to use for Europe so that, as far as I’m concerned, “European Middle Ages” is redundant). Which means that Henrich’s theory provides insights that are helpful in thinking about retirement cross-culturally.

So let’s start with this: what are the psychological differences between WEIRD people and the rest of the world? Here are some of their traits: they (we) are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical.” Henrich writes in his first chapter that

“We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be ‘ourselves’ across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. . . . [W]e are less willing to conform to others when this conflicts with our own beliefs, observations and preferences. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. . . . When reasoning, WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world . . . . That is, we know a lot about individual trees but often miss the forest. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification. . . . WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We think neoptism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and expediency. Emotionally, WEIRD people are often racked with guilt, as they fail to live up to their culturally inspired, but largely self-imposed, standards and aspirations. In most non-WEIRD societies, shame — not guilt — dominates people’s lives.”

Henrich provides many examples of psychological studies (e.g., experiments conducted among university students globally, or by anthropologists in small villages) which show that WEIRD societies are the outliers in all these traits. One particularly striking one for me was the Passenger’s Dilemma: if you are in a car with a friend, and he gets into an accident, do you lie on his behalf to save him from legal consequences? Henrich shows the results in a graph rather than a table, but as it turns out, the footnote send me to a source with the numerical results, among which are that the the following percentages of people would refuse to lie, believing, that is, that universal norms of right and wrong are more important than the desire to protect our kith and kin:

  • Switzerland, 97%
  • USA, 93%
  • Canada, 93%
  • Ireland, 92%
  • Sweden, 92%
  • Australia, 91%
  • UK, 91%
  • Germany, 87%
  • Spain, 75%,
  • Japan, 68%,
  • Greece, 61%,
  • China, 47%,
  • Russia, 44%
  • South Korea, 37%.

What’s more, this particular book (Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner) focused on the importance of culture in global business and the questions were posed to individuals in business, which means that, one presumes people from non-WEIRD cultures would be more likely to be influenced by WEIRD norms (and, possibly, immigrants and minorities within WEIRD cultures themselves would be underrepresented in the survey group).

After establishing the distinctiveness of WEIRD culture, Henrich gives a lesson in the development of clans and states, and explains that, as people began to live in larger groups, clans developed, and, in most parts of the world, even when premodern states developed, intensive kin-based institutions remained important: extended households, arranged marriages with relatives (cousins), reliance on kin for protection and caregiving, and prevalence of polygynous marriages. This is still the norm in many parts of the world, and might have been the case in Europe, too, but for the “money wrench” of the Catholic Church’s regulations around marriage and family, what he calls the Marriage and Family Program, or the MFP. Beginning in late Antiquity, the Catholic Church promulgated prohibitions that increasingly expanded the restrictions placed on marriage, first to remarrying the sister of one’s deceased wife, then marriage between cousins or step-relatives, then second-cousins, second-cousins once-removed, third cousins, and eventually sixth cousins, before, in 1215, dialing back the prohibition to extend only to third cousins.

Why did the Church implement these prohibitions? The short answer is that the bishops and popes of the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages considered them incestuous, but why? There’s no particular theological answer, and the prohibitions of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church(es) are much looser. Certainly, the overall discouragement of marriage benefitted the church directly, when people entered religious life and donated their land to the church (e.g., religious orders). Loosening the ties of kin and clan also strengthened people’s identity as “Christian.” What’s more, the shift from a third-cousin to a sixth-cousin prohibit was, to some extent, a fluke; Roman civil law counted each step up and back down a family tree as a “degree of consanguinity” but the medieval/Germanic method counted each step up alone (as we do today; our third-cousins have a shared great-great-grandfather), doubling the size of the family tree of prohibited relationships.*

This last bit fits in neatly with Henrich’s explanation that, from a cultural evolution perspective, in the same manner as in “regular” evolution, random mutations simply occur and enable to species to be more successful if they are useful, so, to, this was a mutation by chance which helped Christianity become more successful in spreading through formerly-pagan Europe, as the new norms of the MFP had its beneficial effects.

And, interestingly, these prohibitions, and their impacts, were not experienced Europe-wide. Southern Italy, in whole or part, was ruled by the Byzantine Empire during the early Middle Ages, and for a fair stretch Sicily was controlled by Arabs, as was, of course, Spain. And Sicily remains distinctive for its disproportionately high rate of cousin-marriage relative to the rest of Europe.

So how can you know that there is a connection between cousin-marriage, and high-intensity kinship institutions, in the first place? In the first place, Henrich compiles some truly remarkable graphs pairing Kinship Intensity Index (which looks at historical norms, from around the 1900s) and rates of cousin marriage even today with differences in psychological “norm” enforcement (more cousin-marriage, more community norms), individualism (more cousin-marriage, less individualism), trust of people outside one’s on group (more cousin marriage, less out-group trust), belief in universal ethical principles, such as the obligation to be honest at the expense of protecting kin or family (more cousin-marriage, less universalism), and so on.

He then traces the path that brought Western Europe from its early medieval “backwardness” (relative to the Byzantines and, later, the Islamic Golden Age) to the Industrial Revolution. Although the feudal system had lords, knights, dukes, kings, and the rest, the cities of the High Middle Ages were self-governing, with democratic institutions. Universities were likewise self-governing, as were the guilds for craftsmen (and women), and even monasteries voted on their Abbots, rather than this being a hereditary role. Merchant’s guilds enabled trade. Craftsmen took on apprentices from outside their family, and journeymen literally journeyed outside their hometowns, to further develop their skills — and all because, with clans and cousin- and arranged-marriage dismantled by the church’s prohibitions, new institutions arose to meet those needs instead, but in a way that enabled far more development, markets, even self-control and patience:

“Intensive kinship, through its strong normative obligations to a web of distant relatives, may create pressures that similarly disincentivize the cultivation of self-control or patience. I’ve seen this frequently in Fiji: an industrious person works hard to save money, but then some distant cousin-brother needs cash for a funeral, wedding, or medical procedure, so the nest egg evaporates. This makes sense because intensive kin-based institutions manage risk, retirement, and harmony collectively — through relationships — instead of via individual self-control and secure savings” (p. 377).

And, yes, Protestantism had the effect of intensifying the emerging WEIRD psychology, as well as emerging because in some respects it was a better fit for the new mindsets, with its emphasis on individuals relating to God directly rather than through institutions, and its promotion of individual literacy and Bible-reading. Finally, when it comes to the inventions that sparked the Industrial Revolution, they were the outcome of cities in which resources were available and knowledge was shared with a “collective brain.” Here, too, religious orders played a role: the Cistercians had monasteries which he labels “monastery-factories” all across Europe, and the abbots shared their knowledge with each other not just about theology but about “their best technical, industrial, and agricultural practices” in the medieval and early modern periods, and the monks then shared this knowledge with their local communities (p 446). But it was the teeming cities where innovation mushroomed — and, indeed, the number of people living in cities of over 10,000 increase 20 fold in the millennium from 800 to 1800, while at the same time, the number only doubled in the Islamic world and remained flat in China.

Finally, Henrich addresses the rapid development of Japan, South Korea, and China in modern times. How did this occur even though they weren’t WEIRD? In the first place, “these societies had all experienced long histories of agriculture and state-level governments that had fostered the evolution of cultural values, customs, and norms encouraging formal education, industriousness, and a willingness to defer gratification” (p. 476). Second, they each had top-down governments which, when they observed the development of Western countries, were able to copy many Western institutions in an “off the shelf” manner even if they hadn’t developed organically as the eventual result of the MFP.

So what ultimate conclusions do we draw from Henrich’s insights?

Looking at global retirement, one can easily enough connect Japan’s troubles, for examples, in transitioning from a norm where children take care of their elderly parents, to a social welfare state and/or expectations that one saves for one’s own retirement.

But is there a take-away for Americans? Could an understanding of WEIRD psychology provide insights into not just retirement in the past but what policy might be most successful in the future? That is, at the least, a question to ponder.

And one last note: do I recommend the book to readers? Depends on your patience — he takes 500 pages to make his case; the book is well-written and explains the issues well so you don’t need to be an Ivory Tower scholar to make sense of it, but, let’s face it, I’d still like to see a version for the more casual, less committed reader.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.

Jane the Actuary Retirement

Forbes post, “April 15, 1981: A Snapshot In Retirement Policy History”

Originally published at Forbes.com on May 28, 2020.

 

Yesterday, as it happens, was slated to be the long-awaited launch of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, the first reusable rocket, the first private-sector spacecraft, and the first manned launch from the U.S. in nearly a decade. While it was postponed to Saturday due to weather, the prospect of this new era in spaceflight inspired me to dig out and show my children the newspapers I had personally saved (and recently rediscovered in the process of cleaning out my parents’ longtime home): the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, and the New York Times for April 15, 1981, the day after the space shuttle Columbia landed after its inaugural flight.

According to the Detroit News,

“Astronaut [John W.] Young caught the mood of much of the country yesterday. ‘We’re really not too far — the human race isn’t — from going to the stars,’ the world’s premiere test pilot said.”

According to the Free Press,

“The flawless return of the space shuttle Columbia to earth Tuesday opened a new age for Americans in space — an age that will allow space flight to become routine.”

According to the New York Times,

“Ultimately officials envision the shuttle being able to turn around in a matter of weeks. Each shuttle would have a life of 100 missions.”

In reality, the Columbia was returning from its 28th mission when it disintegrated in 2003 and the entire program, with a fleet of 5 space shuttles, had a total of 135 missions.

Of course this is a cautionary tale about believing grandiose claims, and a recognition that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

But — hear me out on this — the same is also true with respect to retirement issues.

Featured on the front page of the Free Press, just below the photograph of the Columbia touching down, in an article with the headline, “Young gives council budget and warning,” by Ken Fireman.

“With a warning that Detroit has one final chance to avoid fiscal disaster, Mayor Young Tuesday presented to the City Council a 1981 – 82 budget containing over $270 million in uncertain revenues.”

The budget contained 5% pay cuts for city employees, a hike in resident and commuter income taxes, and the sale of $100 million in bonds. Specifically,

“Another proposal certain to provoke controversy is Young’s call for the city’s two pension funds to buy ‘their full share’ of city-issued long-term bonds needed to liquidate the current deficit.

“The city currently owes a total of $18 million to the two funds from last year, and lingering bitterness over the longstanding debt may lead pension trustees to balk at buying any city bonds.”

On the op-ed page, syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote, “There’s new hope for Social Security.”

“A House subcommittee last week made the first intelligent move in many years toward rescuing our Social Security system from the mess it is in. The subcommittee voted to increase gradually the age at which full retirement benefits are paid from 65 to 68.”

(Half a year later, the Washington Post reported that this legislation was killed in the Democratic-dominated House Ways and Means Committee.)

In the Detroit News, the secondary front page article was, “Plan threatens aid for elderly,” by Gary F. Schuster, which reported, with no details, that “President Reagan has decided to slash Social Security as the primary means of balancing the federal budget by 1985, White House aides said yesterday.”

And, finally, in an April 4 edition of the Detroit News (for which I can discern no reason it had been saved), “Pension dispute continues” (author name no longer legible) reports on court proceedings in which the police and fire pension fund were fighting to for the city to make pension contributions. While the first paragraph is no longer legible, the article reports,

“Olzark opened hearings two days after 6,000 police and fire retirees missed their April 1 paychecks. Faced with only $500,000 in cash to meet the $6.5 million monthly payout, the board’s trustees refused last week to liquidate short-term assets to cover the payment. . . .

“City officials had publicly acknowledged the $14.6 million debt since the suit was filed Feb. 25.

“But Sachs said he learned through ‘a flurry of paperwork this week’ that the city now claims it owes only $59 million, instead of the $102.5 million approved last year by the pension’s actuary and trustees and appropriated by Young and the Detroit City Council.”

(The article does not indicate the pension plan’s actual assets, liabilities, or funded status at the time.)

It’s no surprise that politicians and number-crunchers were worried about Social Security in 1981, and state and local governments have been kicking the can with respect to their pension funds for far longer than these 39 years. But it’s startling that even on a wholly arbitrary day, there’s so much material to illustrate this. And it’s still important to bear in mind how very longstanding these issues are when debating them now.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.

Jane the Actuary Retirement

Forbes post, “From The Archives: The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund Was Unfunded From The Start”

Originally published at Forbes.com on November 16, 2019.

 

Why are public pension plans so poorly funded? Sure, you can blame politicians’ meddling, or irresponsible benefit increases, or decisions to take contribution holidays, but, to take the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund as a case study, it was not designed to be funded in the first place.

Here’s the story, as assembled from articles in the Chicago Daily Tribune from 1894 and 1895:

The Chicago teachers’ pension was the result of enabling legislation passed on June 1, 1895, which permitted Illinois cities with populations greater than 100,000 to set up pensions for their teachers and school employees. The legislation provided for benefits for women with more than 20 years of service and men with more than 25 years, with no minimum retirement age specified – which meant that teachers as young as 38 would be eligible (because only a high school diploma was required). However, to receive a pension was not automatic; the Board of Education controlled who would and wouldn’t be given the pension, either by accepting or denying requests or initiating retirements themselves. The benefit was fixed at 50% of final salary, up to a maximum of $600 (the original proposal was $1,000), and would be funded by an employee contribution of 1% of pay, plus any fines the Board of Education might levy for neglect of duty and any donations they might receive.

In the run-up to the vote, promoters of the bill cited its strong support among teachers, 3,500 out of 4,000 of whom had signed a petition in favor. A Miss E.K. Burdick of the Teacher’s committee objected to claims that this amounted to “charity” or “State socialism” and supported giving the Board of Education the relevant decision-making authority since

“it is reasonable to assume there would always be fair-minded people on the board, and, unfettered by any bias or selfish interest in the matter, they certainly would deal justly in all cases” (”Proposed Teachers’ Pension Law,” March 9, 1895, p. 16).

A separate letter to the editor labels the pensions as equivalent to being “honorably discharged from active service” and insists that teachers will fund the program themselves and that

“Should any expense connected with this fund be necessary, I think the teachers are willing to assume all the responsibility and see that such accounts are met and settled from direct tax” (letter to the editor from Mrs. S. Mather Gibbs, Jan. 5, 1895, p. 14).

The Tribune, however, provided skeptical commentary.

“It is evident that it will take some years to accumulate enough money to pay a comparatively small number of pensions. But there must be at this time a number of teachers who have served their twenty years, many of whom would be glad to retire on half pay if they had a chance. . . .

“How far the board would use wisely its power to retire teachers cannot be told in advance. If the pension fund were small, as it will be for some years to come, and the number of teachers who wanted to be pensioned was large, there might be a good deal of log-rolling to get these coveted positions, where there was a steady income with nothing to do. . . .

“If all the teachers were starting in fresh this 1 per cent and the money collected from other sources might make a sufficient pension fund. For there would be a great many lapses among the female teachers. Many would die and more would get married. But the proposed system will start off with numerous candidates for retiracy, and it may be that after a short time the young teachers who will have to way from fifteen to twenty years for pensions will not like to be paying out a hundredth part of their salaries for the benefit of pensioners who may live for thirty years after they have been retired.

“Very possibly one of the first demands made on the board if the bill passes will be for a small increase in pay sufficient to cover, and a little more than cover, the 1 per cent withheld. Then the taxpayers would be called on to pay the pensions rather than the teachers. Or if the number of deserving applicants for retiracy was large and the fund was not large enough to provide for them all the taxpayers would be called on to contribute to the fund in some other way” (”Pensions for School Teachers,” Dec. 21, 1894, p. 6).

The Tribune also published a letter from a teacher among the minority who objected:

“Only a few teachers remain in the employ of the board for twenty years. For the benefit of these all are to be taxed” (”A teacher,” Mar 11, 1895, p. 4).

But the skeptical voices did not carry the day, and in November the Board of Education turned its attention to implementing the system, first by electing the teacher-representatives to the Board of Trustees (the remainder of the board was comprised of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of Schools), and then by identifying the potential retirees, so as to set the actual assessment on the teachers, a number that climbed from 10 teachers (November 10, 1895) to up to 225 eligible teachers (November 26, 1895), based on reports from school principals – among whom were a woman hoping to take her pension and start a “literary career” and another hoping to “retiree” and get a new job out-of-state.

So from the lack of advance funding, to the lack of vested rights, to double-dipping, there truly is nothing new under the sun.

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.

Jane the Actuary Retirement

Forbes post, “And Now Their Watch Has Ended: Retirement in Game of Thrones, Er, The Middle Ages”

Originally published at Forbes.com on April 24, 2019.

 

Viewers and readers of Game of Thrones/A Song of Fire and Ice are no doubt familiar with the phrase used when a man of the Night’s Watch passes, just as much as will have heard/read the vow of the Night’s Watch (available online at Wikiquote.org):

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. . .

which viewers/readers were first introduced to in season/book one.  Now it’s season 8 of Game of Thrones, and everyone is speculating about who will end up on the Iron Throne, and who will die along the way.

And while it may be true that not “all men must die” (as the phrase Valar morghulis translates to from the book’s invented High Valyrian) early, untimely and violent deaths, and, indeed, though there are scattered old characters on the show, both nobles and poor longsuffering peasants, one imagines that it was rare to live to old age in both this fictional version of a medieval world, and in the actual past of the Middle Ages.

What’s more, I suspect that most of us, knowing the life expectancy of even a century ago was so much lower than in our modern times, imagine that “retirement” and “retirement planning” simply didn’t exist until the twentieth century.  In the Middle Ages (and in Europe specifically, since the markers of the Middle Ages weren’t relevant elsewhere), life expectancy at birth was on the order of 33 years old (see Our World In Data for more premodern life expectancy data) –which certainly suggests that no one lived to what we now consider “retirement age”!  Like the men of the Night’s Watch, you work (or battle) until you die.

But if fictional Westeros were like medieval or early modern Europe, it was actually the deaths of infants and children which was the greatest contributor to low life expectancy, and improved treatment of childhood diseases and better understanding of public health (that is, the provision of clean water) which brought about the greatest degree of increase in life expectancy.  For individuals who made it past childhood, it would not have been unusual to live to something close to what we think of as “old age,” an age, which according to Barbara Hanawalt’s The Ties That Bound, a study of family life among medieval English peasants (1986), was perceived of as being about age 60 (p. 228).  Hanawalt cites estimates that a not-inconsiderable portion of the population reached that age; while there are no census records, she reports,

Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parish registers show that roughly 8 to 16 percent of the population was over sixty.  And in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany 6 to 15 percent of the rural population was over sixty.

What’s more, in Europe, the nuclear family was not just a modern invention but stretches much further back, which meant both that young couples waited until comparatively later ages to marry, in order to be independent financially, and that older couples did not simply expect their children to provide for them as would have been the case in other cultures where all generations lived together in a single living quarters/family compound in which elders were cared for.  As a result, those who reached old age needed some sort of retirement provision rather than simply taking it for granted that they would be cared for by the next generation.

So how did people live once they were too old to continue to work?  For the poor, there aren’t always historical records to tell us, but there are, at any rate, two interesting parallels between retirement in the Middle Ages and our own times, as some oldsters used the equity in their homes to finance their retirement and others purchased annuities.  Of course, these are modern ways of expressing medieval approaches, but they still describe what occurred.

What I’ve labelled “using the equity in their homes” is what Hanawalt calls the “retirement contract,” an agreement between the aging peasant or peasant-couple and a child, other relative, or wholly unrelated person looking to get started in life.  Hanawalt writes,

these contracts provided that the retiring peasant would relinquish the use of his buildings and lands in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing from the person, whether a kinsman or not, who took up the contract.

Some instances of such contracts in the records describe the precise amounts of food and clothing to be provided.  Additions to houses might also be built in which the newly-“retired” couple would live, or the medieval equivalent of a “granny flat,” though sometimes they would be relegated to climbing a ladder to an attic or loft.  Of course, more well-to-do peasants could bargain for better provisions, and small landowners, or cottars, would be obliged to promise that

all of their household equipment, clothing, and other movables would go to the person who agreed to provide for them in their old age.

One might also guess that a young person would expect a lower “price” for supporting a poor cottar by undertaking a retirement contract only under circumstances in which that individual was relatively more infirm (and closer to death) than in the case of a better-off peasant landholder.

If the retirement contract was the equivalent of using home (farm) equity, then the “annuity” had its analogue in the purchase of a spot in a hospital.  The concept of a “hospital” at the time was far broader than now, and encompassed not just institutions to care for the sick but also institutions that evolved into almshouses/poorhouses (before these institutions disappeared) and “bedehouses” (in which residents were expected to pray daily for the benefactor), which  cared for the poor and/or served as a retirement home for those who could afford to pay, yes, an Entrance Fee, which would guarantee room, board, and the necessities of life, for one’s life.  The BBC website HistoryExtra explains

The going rate varied over time, between and within hospitals, but at St John’s Hospital in Sandwich most new brothers and sisters paid 6s 8d. (A Margery Warner paid with 1,000 tiles, perhaps floor tiles), whereas at neighbouring St Bartholomew’s the fee to remain at the hospital for the remainder of the inmate’s life might be as high as £19 (the equivalent of around £8,500 today). Although this sounds expensive the new brother or sister might pay in installments and live for several decades at the hospital, expecting in return to receive board and lodging, clothing, shoes, fuel and other necessities, without further payment.

The website Pensionados of the Past, written by the Dutch scholar Jaco Zuijderduijn, provides instances of hospital-retirement homes in the Netherlands.  In one instance, documents from 1573 describe a woman’s woes when certain documents, ruined by water damage, turned out to be financial instruments intended to finance her pending retirement at a hospital in Leiden.  Separately, the author describes a case in Amsterdam:

That living conditions in medieval retirement castles were not always very rosy was also discovered by the woman Katrijn Hilbrant. She retired into Saint Peter’s hospital in 1482, paying the entry fee this required. In 1485 she paid another seven guilders – equivalent to a month’s wages – to be relieved from labour duties. In her own words, she ‘only wanted to sew, weave and spin if she felt like this’.

 Apparently Katrijn did not mind to do textile work once in a while, but not so often as the labour regime in Saint Peter’s hospital prescribed. Based on her account it seems that some of the elderly women were put to work in the hospital’s sweat shop, producing textile that earned the institution some money. Apparently the only way to prevent spending one’s final years in hard labour, and to retire altogether, was simply to pay up.

Of course, besides these “respectable” means of support in retirement, there were plenty of poor elderly who were dependent on charity in villages and cities, and still more who we can assume were supported by their children without any records documenting the fact, but my point is this:  retirement planning is not a new endeavor brought about by a lengthened and even unnatural life span in excess of a normal working age.  The particulars of retirement planning in 2019 are different than they were in 1219, but it is an age-old, not a brand-new concern.

 

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.