The retirement system in transition: the 2007 Retirement Confidence Survey

WORKERS SLOW TO SEE OR ADAPT TO A CHANGING U.S. RETIREMENT SYSTEM: The 17th annual wave of the Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS) suggests that American workers may be slow to recognize how the U.S. retirement system is changing, and those who are aware of these changes may not be adapting to them in ways that are likely to secure them a comfortable retirement. HALF OF WORKERS LESS CONFIDENT ABOUT PENSION BENEFITS: The RCS finds pension-plan changes by employers have left nearly half of workers less confident about the benefits they will receive from a traditional pension plan, but that those experiencing a decline in retirement benefits often fail to react constructively. Moreover, although Americans will rely increasingly on 401(k) retirement savings plans and other personal savings and investments to fund their retirement security, data suggest that many may not follow professional investment advice when it is offered to them. MANY WORKERS COUNTING ON BENEFITS THAT WON'T BE THERE: Many workers are counting on employer-provided benefits in retirement that are increasingly unavailable. Only 41 percent of workers indicate they or their spouse currently have a defined benefit pension plan, yet 62 percent say they are expecting to receive income from such a plan in retirement. Likewise, workers are as likely to expect as retirees are to receive retiree health insurance through an employer, even though the number of employers offering this benefit to future retirees is declining. MANY WORKERS UNLIKELY TO HEED INVESTMENT ADVICE EVEN IF THEY GET IT: More than half of workers indicate they would be likely to take advantage of professional investment advice offered by companies that manage employer-sponsored retirement plans. However, two-thirds of these workers say they would probably implement only some of the recommendations they receive and 1 in 10 think they would implement none of them. AMERICANS OVERESTIMATE LONG-TERM CARE COVERAGE: One-quarter of workers and more than one-third of retirees report they have long-term care insurance (separate from health insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid) to help pay for care they might need in a nursing home, assisted living facility, or at home. But only 10 percent of Americans age 65 and older are estimated to have had private long-term care insurance in 2002, suggesting that many are counting on coverage they do not actually have. MOST SAVINGS LEVELS ARE MODEST: Almost half of workers saving for retirement report total savings and investments (not including the value of their primary residence or any defined benefit plans) of less than $25,000. The majority of workers who have not put money aside for retirement have little in savings at all: Seven in 10 of these workers say their assets total less than $10,000. CONTINUED IGNORANCE ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY COVERAGE: Despite the longstanding increase in the eligibility age for Social Security, only a small minority of workers are aware of the age at which they can receive full retirement benefits from Social Security without a reduction for early retirement.     

First and second best voting rules in committees

A committee of people with common preferences but different abilities in identifying the best alternative (e.g., a jury) votes in order to decide between two alternatives. The first best voting rule is a weighted voting rule that takes the different individual competences into account, and is therefore not anonymous, i.e., the voters’ identities matter. Under this rule, it is rational for the committee members to vote according to their true opinions, or informatively. This is not necessarily true for an anonymous voting rule, under which members may have an incentive to vote non-informatively. Thus, strategic, sophisticated voters may vary their voting strategies according to the voting rule rather than naively voting informatively. This paper shows that the identity of the best anonymous and monotone (i.e., quota) voting rule does not depend on whether the committee members are strategic or naive or whether some are strategic and some are naive. One such rule, called the second best rule, affords the highest expected utility in all cases.

“Wasn’t he sweet?” said Yossarian. “Maybe they should give him three votes.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

     

Work in unemployment - occupied or preoccupied? A review

This review explores the literature on the concept of work in unemployment and its relationship to health. A range of literature about the activities of unemployed people is reviewed and discussed with reference to three questions: What do unemployed people do?, What activities are associated with the health of unemployed people? and Do unemployed people work? From the literature, two groups of unemployed people are described: those who are characterised by active patterns of activity and those characterised by passive patterns. It is argued that the active group is psychologically healthier than the passive group. Concepts of work in both groups of unemployed individuals are presented, arguing that the active group seeks to replace employment with other work activities and that the passive group are engaged in work also, but that this presents as fret and preoccupation about their situation. These concepts of work are presented in the context of three major theoretical models of the personal impact of unemployment. Finally, implications for practice and directions for future research are suggested.     

Women's financial planning for retirement: the impact of disruptive life events

Providing care for an aged parent has immediate financial, emotional, psychological, and physical consequences for the primary caregiver. This pilot study of 138 middle aged and older females analyzes the long term financial consequences of providing care to aged relatives for female caregivers. The impact of this disruptive life event (e.g., caring for an aged relative) on retirement planning among middle aged and older adult women was analyzed using quantitative data collected from women residing in the Midwest region of the United States.     

On inference from inconsistent premisses

The main object of this paper is to provide the logical machinery needed for a viable basis for talking of the consequences, the content, or of equivalences between inconsistent sets of premisses.With reference to its maximal consistent subsets (m.c.s.), two kinds of consequences of a propositional set S are defined. A proposition P is a weak consequence (W-consequence) of S if it is a logical consequence of at least one m.c.s. of S, and P is an inevitable consequence (I-consequence) of S if it is a logical consequence of all the m.c.s. of S. The set of W-consequences of a set S it determines (up to logical equivalence) its m.c.s. (This enables us to define a normal form for every set such that any two sets having the same W-consequences have the same normal form.) The W-consequences and I-consequences will not do to define the content of a set S. The first is too broad, may include propositions mutually inconsistent, the second is too narrow. A via media between these concepts is accordingly defined: P is a P-consequence of S, where P is some preference criterion yielding some of the m.c.s. of S as preferred to others, and P is a consequence of all of the P-preferred m.c.s. of S. The bulk of the paper is devoted to discussion of various preference criteria, and also surveys the application of this machinery in diverse contexts - for example, in connection with the processing of mutually inconsistent reports.     

Families formed as a result of donor insemination: the views of semen donors

This paper reports the views and feelings of semen donors at two London donor insemination (Dl) programmes regarding the recipients of Dl and the families created by this method. In particular it reports on: the types of recipients that donors wish to assist; their understanding of the legal position of donors and Di fathers; their views on the'matching' of donors and Dl fathers; their perception of Dl offspring's need or desire for information about the donor; their views on whether parents should tell their offspring about their Dl conception and regarding the secrecy surrounding Dl in general; and what they believe the community thinks about Dl. Overall, the donors perceive Dl families as being normal, and are very supportive of the autonomy and privacy of these families, but they also have concerns about the needs of the offspring. The authors draw attention to the need to take into account the views of donors in forming assisted reproduction policies, and also the need for the interests of the child to be paramount, as they are in the case of adoption.     

Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

This quarter's column features a report from the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference, held March 25–28, 2015, in Portland, OR; a couple of reports from the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL) Conference, held May 18–20 in Terre Haute, IN; one report from NASIG, held May 27–30 in Washington, DC; and several reports from the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference, held June 25–30 in San Francisco, CA. Topics discussed range from scholarly publishing, copyright and authors’ rights—including as they relate to zines—privacy and analytics, and linked data.     

Paradoxical Peace: A Scholar-activist's Auto-ethnography on Religious Pacifism and Anti-capitalism

Abstract

How can one subscribe to forms of ethico-religious pacifism and revolutionary communism or anarchism simultaneously, let alone conceive of their adherents as comprising the same transnational social movement? The author explores this conundrum via a playful probing of her own paradoxes related to violence and peace, dualism and non-dualistic thinking, and activist engagement along with more contemplative and quiet reflection. It experiments with expressive auto-ethnography in order to convey what living in and through these paradoxes feels like, and to access and convey other kinds of insights, (self) knowledge, and wisdom, unavailable or inadmissible by more orthodox forms of social science inquiry and writing. It embraces the postmodern relationship among authors, audiences, and texts and valorizes storytelling as deeply pedagogical, constitutive, meaningful, and meaning-making phenomena. The essay weaves together newspaper headlines, apocryphal diary entries, and dream poems into a methodological bricolage drawing from postmodern, poststructural and postcolonial scholars Deleuze and Guattari, Michael Shapiro, Anna Agathangelou, and Ruth Behar among others.