What is the Deal?

First there's this:

A quarter of middle-class Americans are now so pessimistic about their savings that they are planning to delay retirement until they are at least 80 years old — two years longer than the average person is even expected to live.

Then there is this reaction to it by Walter Russell Mead:

It isn’t as bad as it looks.  Work is a natural part of life; for thousands of years the only people who didn’t work were either under five, extremely ill, or dead.  My grandmother used to tell a family legend about a ninety year old matriarch who could no longer get out of bed; she insisted her family put hen eggs around her so she could incubate them with her body heat.  That, I suspect, was apocryphal, but one of my great-aunts was still mowing her lawn with a push mower in her nineties.  She only quit, I’m told, because her children begged her.  They were getting too much criticism from people in the neighborhood who couldn’t believe that her children were too cheap and selfish to hire someone to mow her lawn.
I don’t favor physical labor for nonagenarians, but having more people work longer in life is not a bad thing — for the country or for the people themselves.  Many of our nation’s economic problems could be solved by getting more people to work later in life. This is no terrible injustice; many people now remain in school well into their twenties — two generations ago many entered the workforce at sixteen. Paying for ten extra years of school when young with ten extra years of work at the end of life seems like a fair bargain. Changes in the American economy and the shift away from manual labor have made this bargain more attractive still. While it would be wrong to expect workers to continue to perform backbreaking labor in their late seventies, America’s economy is becoming increasingly service-based and much of our work can be done part time and from home.
Economic arguments aside, this is also good from a social standpoint. Work is not a horrible chore one endures just to pay the bills, it is one of the core things that constitute a healthy, active, and fulfilling human life. The fact that older people can continue to work into their seventies and eighties should be celebrated — greater engagement with the world in your old age is a positive thing. Modern medicine has made tremendous leaps in lengthening our lifespans; that precious of gift of life and health should inspire us to service and work for the common good.
The failure of so many Boomers to save may not just reflect fecklessness and folly.  People have been making a calculation that in fact they can work much longer than their parents and grandparents did.  They haven’t saved for a thirty year retirement because at some level they didn’t think they would have to. 

WTF? I don't know if Mr. Mead has noticed, but the job market is in a shambles right now.  Unless one wants to learn how to program machine tools, or learn other skilled labor, there aren't many damn jobs right now.  This is a freaking disaster, not something to chuckle about.  Social Security came about during the Great Depression, to get the old people out of the damn labor pool.  As I am trying to justify letting teachers work 30 years until retirement, even though productivity almost inevitably goes down over the years, as opposed to getting rid of tenure and canning "bad" teachers in the middle of their career, this guy is saying let boomers work until they are 80, because they didn't save for retirement, so they deserve the punishment/suffering.  Look, I worked 12.5 years at one job.  I had high points, I had low points.  When the Great Recession came, I got laid off.  I couldn't blame them, because business was business, and I could be unproductive at times.  But now I work with folks who may have 40 years on the job, and they're still only 58.  I can't see much productive coming out of them working another 22 years, especially at the same job.  We all have a productive cycle, and some are different than others.  But I have spent a lot of years around people who are over 65 years old.  Their faculties go down really quickly. They don't adapt well to technology, which happens to be a major part of a job today.   It would be nice to get contributions from older folks, and we will.  But most times, it won't be in paying positions, it will be in relating the history of what they've lived through, and donating time back to the community.  Don't get me wrong, older people can work well, and hard.  I unloaded straw with an 82 year-old in a hay mow in July, but he will be the basis of a post which I've been intending to write for months, and doesn't qualify as the normal elderly person.  Right now, the economy is so bad that young people have a very hard time finding jobs.  The idea that it won't be tough having 75 year-olds in the labor force because they can't retire is crazy.  This is a disaster, not some time to get holier-than-thou and preach that people are getting what they deserve for not saving right.  Even the idea that it is good for them to work doesn't hold any water.  We have a shortage of jobs, and we can't afford to have people who have already worked for 40 years trying to keep a paying job for longer.  We need to get young people working, so they can buy homes and start families.  Having people much past their prime competing with the future of the country for a wage to live on isn't a good thing.