For those staying in the workforce: better health (cognitive and physical) and finances, more social engagement and higher life satisfaction “Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s,” wrote Age Boom Academy speakers Susann Rohwedder, associate director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging and Robert J. Willis, a University of Michigan economics professor, in a 2010 academic article. And “complete retirement leads to a 23% to 29% increase in difficulties associated with mobility and daily activities,” according to a paper by Ursula Staudinger, founding director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center; Age Boom Academy director Ruth Finkelstein and other researchers.
For the U.S. government: more income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes and a stronger economy The longer people continue working, the more they provide tax revenues and the more they're likely to spend.
Only 5% of U.S. companies offered a formal phased retirement program, according to the 2016 Society for Human Resource Management survey. Phased retirement is one of the 10 “age smart policies and practices” on Finkelstein’s list of them. “Flexibility” is another.
Make workspaces more amenable to older workers, especially blue-collar ones. BMW famously spent just $50,000 to overhaul one of its assembly lines in 2007 and make it more older-worker friendly (adding chairs, enlarging computer screen typefaces, that sort of thing). Productivity rose 7% and absenteeism dropped from 7% to 2%.