Can’t Retire Yet…We’ve got good news for you!

A recent study seems to say that “use it or lose it” hits the nail on the head…so to speak….for retirees. (We all knew that..right?)

The researchers find a straight-line relationship between the percentage of people in a country who are working at age 60 to 64 and their performance on memory tests. The longer people in a country keep working, the better, as a group, they do on the tests when they are in their early 60s.

The memory test looks at how well people can recall a list of 10 nouns immediately and 10 minutes after they heard them. A perfect score is 20, meaning all 10 were recalled each time. Those tests were chosen for the surveys because memory generally declines with age, and this decline is associated with diminished ability to think and reason.

People in the United States did best, with an average score of 11. Those in Denmark and England were close behind, with scores just above 10. In Italy, the average score was around 7, in France it was 8, and in Spain it was a little more than 6.

Laura Carstensen, Director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University found the study incredibly interesting and exciting. The two economists, Susann Rohwedder and Robert Willis, who published the  paper “Mental Reitrement” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives said that “Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s that is both quantitatively important and causal.”

They came to this conclusion after testing retirees and non-retires from the U.S., England, and several European and Scandanavian countries. (Surprise…the U.S.scored pretty well for a change.”

Good news/Bad news- – – depending on your outlook; the sooner you retire the more likely you are to lose some of your cognitive ability.  ” In an informal manner  we are arguing that public policies that affect the age of retirement may be used as instrumental variables to generate cross-country variation in retirement behavior in order to identify the causal effect of retirement on cognition.”  (Pension variations, taxes, disability policies, etc.) http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.24.1.119

Not surprising is that not everyone is convinced. (Perhaps those striking workers in France?) At Harvard Lisa Berkman, director of the Center for Population and Development Studies said; “If you do Sudoku, you get better at Sudoku. You get better at one narrow task but you don’t get better at cognitive behavior in life.”  (So what does she know..said William Halpin of Seal Beach.)

This is a very exciting story for those of us who wonder if we’re losing it.  Maybe not?

For the entire N.Y. Times article and to see test results GO TO: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/science/12retire.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1