IN DEFENSE OF EARLY RETIREMENT: A LETTER TO THE ECONOMIST (June 29, 2009)

Although I agree with much of your leader about the need for new retirement policies in the aging rich world (“The End of Retirement,” June 27, 2009), I very much disagree with your wholesale attack on early-retirement policies, which you go as far as to dub “demographically insane.” It all depends on where and when, though. Both for personal and social reasons, I was an outspoken advocate of early retirement in the British higher-education system in the early years of this decade. Clogged up by the babyboomers, the oldest among whom were already fifty-five years of age in 2001, the universities needed a way to open professorial ranks to younger and feistier colleagues. Research in the most propulsive academic disciplines rarely gains by the advancing age of the researchers. In addition, retired professors can easily find much to do outside their laboratories and classrooms. By way of a proof, only consider that early retirement was introduced by the leading American universities nearly an entire decade before it gained momentum in the bureaucracy-ridden British universities. The former outperform the latter by a wide margin.