Laura Carstensen

younger people are right to be concerned about their futures and their financial security.

I couldn't agree more.

I believe that people are going to work longer because we're living longer.

And most people, my colleague John Chauvin says every chance he gets, he's an economist at Stanford.

And he says, very few Americans can earn enough in 40 years to not work for 30 years.

It's just an impossibility.

And so I do believe, and we are seeing trends in this direction, that people will work longer.

When you ask people today over 65 who are working why, about half of them say it's because they love their work, and the other half say they need the money.

I think we need new models of financial security, however.

much more radical ones.

The ones we have today are about saving an increasingly larger pot of gold for the end.

And I think so many people struggle in their day-to-day lives that the idea that they're supposed to save millions of dollars so that they can support themselves when they're old is so out of reach that they give up altogether.

Instead, I think if we changed our models of work where we worked more...

hours at certain times during our lives, more days in the week, and then fewer at other times in life, we could have higher quality working lives for much longer.

Often when people hear me talk about financial security and retirement and how we can't afford it, I say something like, we need to work longer, and the audience moans.

It's like, oh, please.

And then I say,

Would you be willing to trade retirement in your 60s for four-day work weeks and six-hour days?

and almost everybody's ready to make that trade.

Well, we could make that trade.