Retirement is bad for your health, this new paper finds:
Retirement increases the risk of being diagnosed with a chronic condition, e.g. heart attack, stroke, or cancer…retirement on average harms individuals.
In a study of English retirees, Stefanie Behncke estimates that being retired increases the risk of being diagnosed with heart disease by three percentage points and with cancer by three percentage points. This controls for age and causes of retirement (of which, of course, ill-health is one), and it corroborates evidence from a Greek study, that retirees have worse health.
This suggests the adverse health effects of retiring - leading a more solitary life, not having something to distract you from stress - outweigh the positive ones, of having more time to exercise, eat healthily or see the doctor.
However, these adverse effects are confined to older retirees. There’s no evidence that retiring in one’s 50s affects health one way or the other - which is a relief for some of us.
What’s more, they also seem confined to workers from higher-status jobs. Retiring from a good job can bring on arthritis in particular, whilst leaving a manual job doesn’t affect health, and might even improve it, albeit not statistically significantly so.
One big caveat here is that this looks at diagnoses, not onset of disease. This means that if someone has a health problem whilst in work, but only gets round to seeing a doctor after retirement, it will look in these data as if retirement caused the health problem, which it didn’t. But how likely is that someone in work will avoid going to a doctor with symptoms of heart disease or cancer?
This has policy implications. If staying in work keeps people healthy, then the arguments for raising the retirement age get stronger.
However, this paper doesn’t really support this case, as it suggests that it is later retirement that worsens health, not earlier retirement.
This suggests the adverse health effects of retiring - leading a more solitary life, not having something to distract you from stress - outweigh the positive ones, of having more time to exercise, eat healthily or see the doctor.
However, these adverse effects are confined to older retirees. There’s no evidence that retiring in one’s 50s affects health one way or the other - which is a relief for some of us.
What’s more, they also seem confined to workers from higher-status jobs. Retiring from a good job can bring on arthritis in particular, whilst leaving a manual job doesn’t affect health, and might even improve it, albeit not statistically significantly so.
One big caveat here is that this looks at diagnoses, not onset of disease. This means that if someone has a health problem whilst in work, but only gets round to seeing a doctor after retirement, it will look in these data as if retirement caused the health problem, which it didn’t. But how likely is that someone in work will avoid going to a doctor with symptoms of heart disease or cancer?
This has policy implications. If staying in work keeps people healthy, then the arguments for raising the retirement age get stronger.
However, this paper doesn’t really support this case, as it suggests that it is later retirement that worsens health, not earlier retirement.
But how likely is that someone in work will avoid going to a doctor with symptoms of heart disease or cancer?
It doesn't have to be very likely to explain only 3 percentage points of difference.
Posted by: Gareth Rees | July 02, 2009 at 03:18 PM
Your body goes when your mind goes: and it is the mind going that is the big problem with retirement. So many people just switch off from life and it is at that point that the rest of their body goes to pot. The concept of having earned the right to disingage from social responsibility is also a toxic notion. A healthy person should rage against the machine right until they go in the grave.
Posted by: Bob Macdonald | July 02, 2009 at 03:48 PM
Schoolteachers, I believe, who retire at 60 last on average an extra 17 years. Those who retire at 65 do NOT last another 12 on average - but a mere 3.5.
Posted by: kinglear | July 02, 2009 at 04:27 PM
I think we have a problem of endogeneity here, bad health causes retirement.
Dirk
Posted by: Dirk | July 02, 2009 at 05:30 PM
The negative effects of retirement will only get more pronounced as pensions shrink and life gets harder for the vast majority of retirees. Retirement will not be the extended vacation that it is for very many pensioners today.
Posted by: Straus | July 02, 2009 at 10:04 PM
Dirk - we would have a problem of endogeneity if the paper looked only at raw correlations. But it didn't. It controlled for pre-retirement health conditions.
Posted by: chris | July 03, 2009 at 08:34 AM
Kinglear...
surely you need to control for gender! (P.S. Do you have a source for that statistic - it seems to extreme to be real to me.)
Posted by: reason | July 03, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Having good condition of health is a big aspects or factor in retirement processes. But make sure your being taken care of your employer after the service you've done.
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