Retirements

Benjamin Kay writes:

I wonder if you saw Bruce Reed’s article The Year of Running Dangerously — In a tough economy, incumbency is the one job nobody wants. about the recent flurry of retirement announcements in the Senate but also less well publicized ones in the House. My understanding is that there is a known effect on retirement from census driven redistricting. We also happen to be in a census year but I haven’t read any journalists discussing that as as a factor. Do you have any insight into the relative explanatory decomposition of partisan politics, redistricting related concerns, and simple economy driven unpopularity in these retirement decision?

My reply: Retirement rates definitely go up in redistricting years (see, for example, figure 3 here), but that would be 2012, not 2010, I believe. The census is this year, but I don’t think they’re planning to redraw the district lines in time for the 2010 elections.

In any case, I imagine that somebody has studied retirement rates, to see if they tend to go up in marginal seats in bad economies. Overall, retirement rates are about the same in marginal seats as any other (at least, that’s what Gary and I found when we looked at it in the late 1980s), but I could imagine that things vary by year. The data are out there, so I imagine somebody has studied this.

P.S. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to retire from a comfortable white-collar job. But now, spending a year on sabbatical and relaxing most of the time, I can really understand the appeal of retirement.

4 thoughts on “Retirements

  1. Quick editorial note: you list 2010 four times in the first paragraph of your reply, but likely intended to twice compare 2010 and 2012.

  2. Nope, sorry, mister. I never comment on the blog unless you comment on public transit or something I research, but I follow and cite your work a lot, so no retirement for you, I'm sad to say. Too useful to the rest of us.

  3. In 2006 I took six months off work from my cushy white-collar job. Best six months of my working life, and I might even be serious about that. I did do some work — a couple of small consulting jobs, a couple of weeks working on a creek restoration project, etc. But I also went biking almost every day, and my wife and I did some traveling, and I caught up on a bunch of projects that I hadn't gotten around to (some of which had literally been lingering for a decade or more). And I still met co-workers for lunch every couple of weeks. I had always wondered what keeps retired people from getting bored, but now I get it!

    I think the ideal would be to routinely alternate between about three months of work and three months off. But I don't know any job that lets you do that.

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