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Social insecurity: Linking retirement and personal responsibility

One of the greatest fruits of high productivity and rising incomes in a country like the U.S. is the financial ability people have to retire. This possibility was beyond the imagination of pre–World War II workers and is still far beyond the expectations of most people living in Third World countries. For most of human history, people simply worked until their bodies gave out and then depended on their children to care for them in the last years of life. Now, in advanced economies, retirement figures into almost everyone’s expectations.