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In computer jargon, virtual memory is the use of a specially-designated portion of long-term memory to hold information that needs to be retrieved quickly. This chapter considers that the same type of function may occur in the human mind; long-term memory representations can be marked as relevant to the current context and thereby retrieved quickly, from a “virtual short-term store” that expands the capabilities of short-term memory. Evidence for this possibility is amassed from the short-term recall literature. The notion of virtual short-term memory was conceived contemporaneously with Ericsson and Kintsch's “long-term working memory”, which consequently was not cited. A different empirical base was used, so this chapter complements Ericsson and Kintsch. The chapter provides evidence against a “monistic view” in which the only type of working memory is long-term working memory; it provides evidence that true short-term memory also exists.

One of the barriers that has repeatedly derailed attempts to address the issue of work-hour restrictions is the long hours worked by resident physicians during training. It is very difficult for specialists in occupational health — who champion workplace safety issues ranging from hearing protection to exposure to chemical carcinogens — to argue that sixteen-hour work shifts are hazardous when physicians routinely care for patients working twenty-four-hour shifts. Though a consolidated episode of ten hours of sleep restores performance to baseline levels for a few hours, those with a history of chronic sleep loss deteriorate much more rapidly as the number of consecutive hours of wakefulness increases, particularly overnight. Once physician work-hour reform has been implemented successfully in the United States, it will serve as the foundation for implementation of safer work schedules in a wide variety of industries.

This chapter illustrates how the culture of long working hours continues to reinforce vertical segregation in the workplace through three processes: remasculinization of management; non-career-track women's low aspirations and their view of the difficulty of balancing work and family; and working mothers' disadvantages relating to men's lack of involvement at home. The custom of long working hours can incorporate women as long as they successfully emulate men's overwork norm by prioritizing their work over their personal and family life. Yet, long working hours polarize women's choices because the ideology of separate spheres places most family responsibility on the woman. The chapter also looks at how the custom of overwork in Japanese companies may lead to men's loss of personal health and family time.

The transition to service-based economies has been accompanied by large shifts in the distribution of work within the populations of the advanced democracies. This includes a rise of part-time employment, as well as changes in working time for those in full-time employment: an end to the secular decline in working time, or increases in working time. As Barnes describes in this chapter, the extent of change on both of these dimensions varies across countries. Furthermore, she argues that working time is an important factor influencing preferences over economic policy in general and redistributive policies in particular, suggesting that this variation is likely to be politically significant. This chapter complements Iversen and Rosenbluth’s analysis of part-time workers (Chapter 10) by examining the second, less studied, trend of rising long-hours work. She argues that many workers in today’s post-industrial economies faced with consumption costs which are difficult to adjust, work more hours (and sacrifice more leisure) than they would choose to in a more flexible environment. Among these workers she predicts (and finds) a predisposition to oppose redistribution, because of the costs, in terms of further forgone leisure, implied by taxation. Her analysis uses cross-national public opinion data from eleven OECD countries and finds evidence of variation in the size of the effect of working hours on political preferences across countries, linked to institutional features of the tax system, that amplifies or offsets this individual calculus.

This is the introduction to the ninth phase of the project on International Social Security. This project, which compares the experiences of 12 developed countries, was launched in the mid-1990s following decades of decline in the labor force participation rate of older men. The first several phases document that social security program provisions can create powerful incentives for retirement that are strongly correlated with the labor force behavior of older workers. Subsequent phases have explored how disability program provisions affect retirement, whether there is a link between older employment and youth unemployment, and whether older individuals are healthy enough to work longer. In the two decades since the project began, the dramatic decline in men’s labor force participation has been replaced by sharply rising participation rates. Older women’s participation has increased dramatically as well. Over this same period, countries have undertaken numerous reforms of their social security programs, disability programs, and other public benefit programs available to older workers. Here we explore how the financial incentive to work at older ages has evolved from 1980 to the present. We highlight the role of reforms in these changing incentives and examine how changing incentives may have affected retirement behavior.

This chapter looks at how people spend their time in capitalist societies today. Focusing first on free time as a scarce resource, it considers how this should be distributed and whether citizens' lack of time is damaging political life, before exploring recent research on ‘time-use regimes’. The final section considers whether long-hours working is an inevitable product of capitalist competition or whether it can be resisted; despite the increased pressures of global competition, it finds some grounds for optimism.

Financial advice tends to focus on financial assets, but other levers may be more important for most households. This chapter proceeds in three stages. First, we report a simple Excel spreadsheet exercise that provides a stylized example of the tradeoff between returns and time spent in the labor force. Next, we use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) on pre-retirees age 51–64 to see how the gap between retirement needs and retirement resources is affected by working longer, taking out a reverse mortgage, controlling spending, and shifting all assets to equities with no risk. Last, we use a simple dynamic programming model to calculate a risk-adjusted measure of the value for the average household of moving from a typical conservative portfolio to an optimal portfolio. Our answer from all three exercises suggests that the focus on asset allocation is misplaced.

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation. Cohort effects, in turn, are mainly a function of educational advances and greater prior work experience. But labor force participation rates of the most recent cohorts in their forties are less than those for previous cohorts. These factors may suggest that employment at older ages will stagnate or even decrease. But several other factors will be operating in an opposing direction and leads us to conclude that women are likely to continue to work even longer.

This chapter scrutinises the performance of the selected nation states and the regime types in relation to autonomy and relational harms. The harms included in this chapter are poverty, child poverty, financial insecurity, long working hours, youth unemployment and social isolation. The chapter demonstrates the facets of specific societies that appear to militate against or serve to exacerbate the production of these harms – in particular, the extent to which societies fetter the extraction of surplus value, therefore willing to regulate the capital–labour relation and provide support for those who are excluded from paid work.

As in the other countries in this volume, the employment rate in Germany for those aged 55 to 69 had been declining in recent decades, and then began to rise dramatically. Among the 12 countries involved in this volume, Germany has experienced the largest increase in the employment rate of the 55-69 age group. This chapter investigates the role of structural policy changes since 1980. We summarize the institutional changes and pension reforms in Germany that may account for the trend reversal, and calculate an implicit tax on working longer. We find that for both men and women the increase in the employment rate coincides with a reduction in the early retirement incentive. The reduction of incentives mainly stems from the introduction of actuarial deductions for early retirement. In recent years the employment rate additionally increased due to the abolishment of specific early retirement pathways.

We describe the history of state pension policy in the UK since 1948 and calculate summary measures of the generosity of the system over time and the degree to which it created implicit taxes on, or subsidies to, work at older ages. The time series of these measures, calculated separately for ’example-type’ individuals of different birth cohorts, education and sexes, are then related to the time-series of employment rates at older ages for the equivalent types of individuals. The generosity of the system rose over the period as a whole but has fallen in recent years, and in contrast to many countries there were generally never large implicit taxes on work arising from the state pension system. What implicit subsidies there were in the years immediately before the State Pension Age have been gradually eliminated and the system is now broadly neutral with regard to work incentives. Exploiting variation in pension wealth and work incentives across different cohort-education-sex groups, created by the timing and phasing of pension reforms, we show that both pension wealth and the implicit work disincentives in the pension system are correlated with employment outcomes for men, with the expected negative sign.

There have been a vast number of social security reforms aimed at increasing employment at older ages over the last two decades in the Netherlands. We examine the eligibility criteria and the generosity of the different social security programs from 1980 until 2016, and the changes during this period in the implicit tax rates on working longer at older ages induced by these programs. The reforms mainly lead to more stringent eligibility criteria for, and reduced generosity of, social security programs. Our empirical evidence suggests that these reforms are likely to have contributed to individuals working longer, but it is difficult to pinpoint which reforms have had the largest effects. In addition, we examine the importance of the state pension eligibility age (SPA) for working longer and show that the recent increase in SPA has increased employment. Planned increases in SPA for the current workers are likely to further increase employment at older ages.

Employment rates of older men and women in the U.S. have been rising for the past several decades. Over the same period, there have been significant changes in Social Security and private pensions, which may have contributed to this trend. In this study, we examine how the financial incentive to work at older ages has evolved since 1980 as a result of changes in Social Security and private pensions. We find that the implicit tax on work after age 65 has dropped by about 15 percentage points for a typical worker as a result of Social Security reforms; incorporating the change in private pensions, the decline is larger. We provide suggestive evidence that the evolution of retirement incentives has affected retirement behavior.

This chapter traces labor market reforms in Belgium over the last four decades. While Belgium was long characterized by low employment and labor force participation rates of the elderly male population, there was a reversal of this trend as the country witnessed a continuous increase in employment rates of older men from the early 2000s on. This chapter provides estimates of retirement incentives for a selected set of typical worker profiles across time and socioeconomic groups and links these series to the labor market performance in Belgium. The results show that the numerous retirement and social security program reforms have had a marked impact on incentives at the micro level. At the aggregate level, results are less clear-cut given the extreme diversity of programs and features in the Belgian institutional context.

Over the last fifteen years, France has experienced a reversal of older workers’ labor force participation and employment rates. Changes in health, life expectancy or education levels over the period are trend variables and thus cannot explain this “U-shaped” time profile. Pension reforms and associated changes in monetary incentives to retire are a more plausible explanation. Their impact is measured by the implicit tax rate on working longer, which combines induced changes in the level of benefits and the fact of foregoing one year of these benefits. We also account for changes in the relative importance of alternative pathways to normal retirement. Pension reforms and access to these alternative pathways have moved in ways that can account for a significant part of the “U-shaped” pattern of older workers labor force participation.

In this chapter, we analyze the association between financial incentives and retirement decisions using aggregate data over four decades in Spain. We first compute expected social security benefits from each possible retirement pathway at ages 55 to 69 for a representative worker for each cohort falling in this age range in our observational period. We allow representative workers to differ by marital status, gender, and earnings level. We calculate an implicit tax rate on employment, a measure that weights the gains and losses from working one additional year for each representative worker, and we examine its correlation with employment rates for older workers. The results suggest that financial incentives play a role in explaining the retirement patterns of both employed and unemployed workers.

American women are participating in the labor force more than ever into their sixties and even seventies. Their participation rates when 55 to 64 years old now differ from men’s by less than 10 percentage points whereas around 1970 they differed by about 40 percentage points. The nine essays in this volume consider potential reasons why older women are participating more than ever and assess whether the trend will continue.