Back to the office...

1. Let's get back to work. Somewhere.

During the pandemic, tens of millions of workers abruptly shifted to remote work, and, despite the efforts of many companies, only a fraction of workers have returned to the office. Recent data from Kastle, the company which operates security systems for office buildings and tracks entries and exits, shows that only about fifty percent of workers are coming into the office each day. It’s an astonishing shift in how we work, and how we will work, as it is unlikely that this particular genie is going back in the bottle.

A debate rages about whether this is a good thing or not, and like most things in life, the story is complicated. Here are two perspectives worth checking out: from Robert Putnam, social capital guru and author of Bowling Alone, a deep concern that remote work is fostering even greater social isolation, which is troubling for personal health, community development, and political engagement. Putnam argues that trying to force workers back to the office will likely backfire, as employees will seek more favorable employment elsewhere, but that companies and CEOs should invest in fostering an engaging and communal work environment that will make employees want to come back to their desks.

Counterpoint from Chris Farrell of Marketplace who argues that the rise of telework has been a boon to workers with disabilities, including older workers who as a class are more likely to face mobility challenges. He notes that all the post-pandemic growth for workers with disabilities has come in remote work categories, with the implication that job growth would not have come without the widespread acceptance of remote work. He predicts that remote work will continue to be crucial to providing opportunities in the future to workers with disabilities.

Our Solomonic judgment: both are right.

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2. A license to spend.

We really want one of those, but the DMV keeps telling us that we are not qualified. But according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income, we’re looking in the wrong place. A new report by David Blanchett and Michael Finke for the Alliance has found that retirees with annuitized income spend twice as much money as retirees with equal amounts of non-annuitized income.

The study gets at one of the emerging challenges facing the Baby Boomer generation (and other retirees as well). In the post-pension world, most workers have spent their careers grappling with the accumulation challenge of retirement: how to save enough money to retire comfortably. Now many are reaching retirement and facing a new challenge of how to decumulate and spend money appropriately in retirement. It’s an inherently difficult challenge, since retirees lack critical information such as how long they will live and how their investments will perform.

Spending twice as much money doesn’t inherently sound like a good thing, but Blanchett and Finke argue that it is. The uncertainties of decumulation means that retirees might either overspend or underspend, but in practice, underspending is the real challenge. With underspending, retirees run the risk of depriving themselves of earned luxuries or even basics such as health care. The data from Blanchette and Finke suggest that turning retirement assets into guaranteed income leads to significant increases in spending, greater stability in spending, and reduced uncertainty, to the benefit of retirees.

Despite some of the advantages of annuitization, only about 10% of Americans own annuities, and many workers and retirees remain poorly informed about annuities or skeptical of the products, even if they want some of the benefits of guaranteed income.

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3. Check out your grandmother's report card. Your health may depend on it.

It’s long been known that life expectancy is highly correlated with education levels. College graduates can expect to live about nine years longer than adults without a high school degree. The correlation between health and education is not limited to, for instance, those with college degrees and those without; people with graduate degrees and PhDs, for instance, are healthier than mere college graduates. Every year of education reduces your probability of death.

Much of that is correlation, not causation. Education is connected with everything from higher income to better access to health care to lower stress and safer work and home environments. But even granting that, the connection between life expectancy and education is too large to ignore. It is so strong that it is inheritable: If you have lower educational levels yourself, you pass on a life expectancy disadvantage to your children, even if they themselves end up among the better educated.

And if that’s not enough, researchers from Drexel and the University of North Carolina this week released a new study that shows a statistically significant link between grandparent’s education levels and their grandchildren's epigenetic-based "real" age as reflected in cellular level data. The study found that the grandchildren of the college-educated grandparents showed slower biological aging across five different established epigenetic aging clocks.

How can the fact that good old granddad squeaked through State Tech 60 years ago possibly affect the health of children born today? The researchers believe that education levels in this case form a crude proxy for childhood stability and early life stress levels. The offspring (and the offspring of offspring) of college graduates as a class may be better supported and face less toxic stress in early life, both of which are strong predicators of later life health. The fact that it carries back and forward generations is a profound example of how environment plays a critical role in our life course, including how long we get to live.