Particularly those who retired before they were of full retirement age, or retired early because they had no choice; their jobs and careers had dissolved into the new economy. I can speak with some expertise here, there's a lot of people in my shoes, and I'm one of the lucky ones. Most of my cohort are sucking canal water right now.

Its all academic, actually. The economy has structurally changed, and the old employment formula of "good jobs", high paying industrial labor or white collar positions in administration and management, is no longer there. It doesn't matter who gets elected, or how we screw around with interest rates, regulations and taxes, we're going to be stuck with unemployment around 10% for the forseeable future. The political ideology in charge can certainly make things worse, but it won't necessarily make things better.

Government jobs? high tech? service industries? Same old shoot-em up, same old rodeo. And we can't all be self-employed or entrepreneurs either; let's be realistic, we're an industrial corporate society, not a medieval village. Higher productivity? Rubbish, the US workforce is as productive as it has ever been. More employee training? I've got 3 college degrees and almost 40 years industrial experience and I've mastered two blue collar trades, and I can't get a job, not when sharp, hungry college kids desperate for work are fighting for unpaid internships and when the rest of the world is now a market for labor, skilled and otherwise. What's an unemployed, but highly trained, educated, and experienced high-tech worker who is 65 supposed to do, take a course in two-cycle engine repair? Get his hairdresser's license?

The fact is we have too many people. Or to put it another way, we don't need all the people we've got. This society does not need to employ everyone in it in order to supply everyone in it with the goods and services they need. If we really want everybody to work, everyone is going to have to work less.

Now think about that. There is nothing new or unusual about that. This is not a radical concept. There have always been "unproductive" people in society: women, children, the aged, the sick, not to mention many people who's labor was not directly involved in production, but was more abstract and indirect, like soldiers, bureaucrats, teachers, merchants, clergymen, bosses, landlords and so on. Even in medieval times, not everyone tilled the soil, and as long as there was peace and a good harvest, everybody lived well according to the standards of their day. And their high technolgy was the ox-drawn plow.

Surely, we should be able to figure this one out.