Yes, physical labor ruins the body (and the mind, depending), but where retirement is concerned it would be more useful to have hard data of disability claims than subjective ideas of pain tolerance.

BTW, lets not privatise SS, unless the aim is to have old folks dying in the street.

If you can work in your profession, I see no reason why the government should pay for your retirement. If you’re too old or infirm to work anymore, than you’re disabled and you should get SSDI benefits.

i read in these comments about all the people whose loved ones “need” to retire at 65 (and get full SS) cause their bodies are shot. well, that ethic didn’t seem to matter when the system was established. should it now? are our jobs harder physically (even manual labor jobs)? i’m not so sure…

We really shouldn’t get so far off-topic, but you clearly are reading the wrong books. :)

There is a reason why we can’t see anything walking into a dark room from the street, but we start to after a while. There is a reason why people living close to a waterfall, let’s say, can have a normal conversation standing close to it whereas we wouldn’t be able to hear each other. It’s called accommodation – reduction in sensitivity.

Also, it has absolutely nothing to do with long-term effects! I was merely pointing out that the original study doesn’t allow for a meaningful explanation of the effects, even if they are not spurrious. Loss of sensitivity doesn’t mean the stimulus stops affecting you – it just means you stop noticing it! Sure, looking at the sun will blind you and living in high noise environment will do other damage, but that is beside the point. The question was not whether pain is good or bad :), but rather can we meaningfully measure these differences through a self-report study…

The strong association between self-reported disability status and pain is notable given concerns by economists and some policymakers that able-bodied individuals may seek benefits from the Disability Insurance system.

A strong association between self-reported disability status and self-reported pain? I certainly believe the general result that being poor results in having more pain, and that blue collar jobs are rougher, but surely this result isn’t all that surprising is it? Did you expect a large number of people to respond to the survey with “Sure, I’m on disability, but I feel great and am in no pain! By the way, don’t tell anybody.” I’m not saying that people are lying, but if they were lying about needing disability isn’t there a decent chance that they would lie about pain?

It seems to me that one of few things less likely than “all those people applying for disability [being] just a bunch of perfectly able-bodied fakers and whiners” would be “all those people applying for disability who are perfectly able-bodied fakers and whiners being willing to admit to such on a survey.”

So maybe, just maybe, all those people applying for disability aren’t just a bunch of perfectly able-bodied fakers and whiners after all?

No, but it certainly doesn’t explain why the rates of people applying for disability has increased (not just in the US, but in Western Europe) as the percentage of people in backbreaking blue collar and farm jobs has decreased.

You’ve demonstrated that being poor is painful, and that blue collar jobs are hard on one’s body. I’m not sure what that has to do with the general retirement age, though. Why does it make sense to have everyone’s retirement age stay the same even as a smaller percentage of people are doing blue collar work? It seems like an argument rather for the Social Security age being lower for blue collar workers, or for the poor getting a better deal from Social Security, or something along those lines.

Conversely my dad is one of the hardest working people I’ve ever known but he was a skilled but blue collar worker meaning he did physical labour all his working life. His body was shot by the time he was 60. Fortunately his employer moved him into a mentoring role until he turned 65, but he needed to retire.

I got early retirement as a result of a workplace trauma, and returned to school for that wonderful cure-all, retraining. Today, out of school and my savings mostly spent on the schooling, I can find no work either in my original career nor the new one, both sedentary, both things I am good at. After all, who wants to hire someone within shouting distance of 60?

Make me work till 65! C’mon you cowards, throw me in that briar patch!

Noni

Mikhail, this is simply not true; for example a quick search on google scholar for “adaptation to noise psychology” you can see a host of articles that show that people do not adapt to chronic noise, for example, and that it has long term effects on stress and health. So one of (many) mechanisms I can think of are that the living situations of the poor contribute to their increased experience of chronic pain.