Teresa Ghilarducci presenting “Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy” in conversation with DR. LISA BERKMAN

Harvard Book Store welcomes TERESA GHILARDUCCI—professor of economics and policy analysis at the New School for Social Research—for a discussion of her new book Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy. She will be joined in conversation by DR. LISA BERKMAN—director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

About Work, Retire, Repeat

While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.

Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.

But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.