Myth of the industrial scrap heap: A revisionist view of turn-of-the-century American retirement

Journal of Economic History

Volumn 56, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 5-38

  Carter, Susan B ^a   Sutch, Richard ^b,c,d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Department of Economics ^*

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^d NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC HISTORY; FAMILY ECONOMY; HISTORICAL STUDY; RETIREMENT AGE; RETIREMENT TREND; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

USA;

EID: 0029800043     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700016004     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Achenbaum, W. Andrew. Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
2. Alter, George, Claudia Goldin, and Elyce Rotella. "The Savings of Ordinary Americans: The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society in the Mid-Nineteenth Century." this JOURNAL 54, no. 4 (1994): 735-67.
3. Bogue, Allen G. From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
4. Bowen, William G., and T. Aldrich Finegan. The Economics of Labor Force Participation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
5. Carter, Susan B., Roger L. Ransom, and Richard Sutch. "Self-Employment in the Age of Big Business: Disguised Unemployment, Hidden Retirement, and The Decline of an American Labor Market Institution." Working Papers on the History of Retirement No. 7. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Business and Economic Research, June, 1994.
6. _. "Agricultura, ahorro y crecimiento: conjeturas sobre las experiencias mediterránea y californiana." In California y el Mediterráneo: Estudios de la historia de dos agriculturas competidoras, edited by José Morilla-Critz, 21-51. Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación, 1995.
7. Carter, Susan B., and Richard Sutch. "The Depression of the 1890s: New Suggestive Estimates of the Unemployment Rate, 1890-1905." Research in Economic History 14 (1992): 347-76.
8. _. "Economic Activity of Older Men: A Reconsideration of the 1900 and 1910 Data." Working Papers on the History of Retirement No. 5. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Business and Economic Research, May, 1994.
9. Chester, Ronald. Inheritance, Wealth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
10. Cogswell, Seddie, Jr. Tenure, Nativity and Age as Factors in Iowa Agriculture, 1850-1880. Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1975.
11. Costa, Dora L. "Agricultural Decline and The Secular Rise in Male Retirement Rates." Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995): 540-52.
12. _. "Pensions and Retirement: Evidence from Union Army Veterans." Quarterly Journal of Economics 110, no. 2 (1995): 297-319.
13. Crissey, Forest, and Donald Wilhelm. "The Human Scrap Heap." Technical World Magazine 20, no. 5 (1914): 759-64.
14. Darby, Michael R. The Effects of Social Security on Income and the Capital Stock. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1979.
15. Davis, Lance E., and Robert E. Gallman. "The Share of Savings and Investment in Gross National Product During the 19th Century in the U.S.A." Fourth International Conference of Economic History, Bloomington 1968: 437-66. Paris: Mouton La Haye for the International Economic History Association, 1973.
16. Dorfman, Robert. "The Labor Force Status of Persons Aged Sixty-Five and Over." American Economic Review 44, no. 2 (1954): 634-44.
17. Durand, John D. The Labor Force in the United States, 1890-1960. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1948.
18. Epstein, Abraham. Facing Old Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922.
19. Feenberg, Daniel. CPS Outgoing Rotation Groups: 1991 Complete, 1979-91 Extracts [computer file]. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1993.
20. Fischer, David Hackett. Growing Old in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
21. Gallman, Robert E. "Gross National Product in the United States, 1834-1909." In Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800. National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 30, 3-90. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
22. Goldenweiser, E. A., and L. E. Truesdell. "Farm Tenancy in the United States." U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census Monograph IV. Washington, DC: GPO, 1924.
23. Graebner, William. A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of An American Institution: 1885-1978. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
24. Graham, Stephen N. The 1900 Public Use Sample Users' Handbook. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1981.
25. Gratton, Brian. Urban Elders: Family, Work and Welfare among Boston's Aged, 1890-1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
26. Haber, Carole. Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
27. Haber, Carole, and Brian Gratton. Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
28. Haines, Michael R. "Industrial Work and the Family Life-Cycle, 1889-1890." Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356.
29. Hajnal, John. "Age at Marriage and Proportions Marrying." Population Studies 7, no. 2 (1953): 111-36.
30. Hamilton, C. Horace. "Rural-Urban Migration in the Tennessee Valley Between 1920 and 1930." Social Forces 13, no. 3 (1934): 57-64.
31. Hamilton, C. Horace, and F. M. Henderson. "Use of the Survival Rate Method in Measuring Net Migration." Journal of the American Statistical Association 39, no. 2 (1944): 197-206.
32. Hayward, Mark D., Eileen M. Crimmins, and Linda A. Wray. "The Relationship Between Retirement Life Cycle Changes and Older Men's Labor Force Participation Rates." Journal of Gerontology: SOCIAL SCIENCES 49, no. 4 (1994): S219-30.
33. Hurd, Michael D. "Research on the Elderly: Economic Status, Retirement, and Consumption and Saving." Journal of Economic Literature 28, no. 2 (1990): 565-638.
34. Kotlikoff, Laurence J., and Lawrence H. Summers. "The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Accumulation." Journal of Political Economy 89, no. 3 (1981): 706-32.
35. Kuznets, Simon. Capital in the American Economy: Its Formation and Financing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
36. Lazear, Edward P. "Retirement from the Labor Force." In Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 1, edited by Orley Ashenfelter and Richard Layard, 305-55. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1986.
37. Lebergott, Stanley. Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
38. Margo, Robert A. "The Labor Force Participation of Older Americans in 1900: Further Results." Explorations in Economic History 30, no. 3 (1993): 409-23.
39. Menchik, Paul L. "Is the Family Wealth Squandered? A Test of the Merry-Widow Model." this JOURNAL 44, no. 3 (1984): 835-38.
40. Menchik, Paul L., and Martin David. "Income Distribution, Lifetime Savings, and Bequests." American Economic Review 73, no. 3 (1983): 672-90.
41. Modigliani, Franco. The Collected Papers of Franco Modigliani. Vol. 2. The Life Cycle Hypothesis of Saving, edited by Andrew Abel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.
42. _. "The Role of Intergenerational Transfers and Life Cycle Saving in the Accumulation of Wealth." Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 2 (1988): 15-40.
43. Moen, Jon R. "The Labor of Older Americans: A Comment." this JOURNAL 47, no. 3 (1987): 761-67.
44. _. "The Unemployment and Retirement of Older Men: Further Evidence from the 1900 and 1910 Censuses." Historical Methods 27, no. 1 (1994): 40-46.
45. _. "Rural Nonfarm Households: Leaving the Farm and the Retirement of Older Men, 1860-1980." Social Science History 18, no. 1 (1994): 55-75.
46. Mushkin, S. J., and Alan Berman. "Factors Influencing Trends in Employment of the Aged." Social Security Bulletin 10 (1947): 18-23.
47. Parsons, Donald O. "The Decline in Male Labor Force Participation." Journal of Political Economy 88, no. 1 (1980): 117-34.
48. Peracchi, Franco, and Finis Welch. "Trends in Labor Force Transitions of Older Men and Women." Journal of Labor Economics 12, no. 2 (1994): 210-42.
49. Preston, Samuel H. Census of Population, 1910 [United States]: Public Use Sample [computer file]. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, 1989.
50. Price, Daniel O. "Examination of Two Sources of Error in the Estimation of Net Internal Migration." Journal of the American Statistical Association 50, no. 3 (1950): 691-93.
51. Quadagno, Jill. The Transformation of Old Age Security: Class and Politics in the American Welfare State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
52. Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. "The Labor of Older Americans: Retirement of Men On and Off the Job, 1870-1937." this JOURNAL 46, no. 1 (1986): 1-30.
53. _. "Unequalled Thrift: An Inquiry into the Saving Behavior of Americans at the Turn of the Century." Project on the History of Saving Working Paper. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Business and Economic Research, 1986.
54. _. "Tontine Insurance and the Armstrong Commission: A Case of Stifled Innovation in the American Life Insurance Industry." this JOURNAL 47, no. 2 (1987): 379-90.
55. _. "The Decline of Retirement in the Years Before Social Security: U.S. Retirement Patterns, 1870-1940." In Issues in Contemporary Retirement, edited by Rita Ricardo-Campbell and Edward P. Lazear, 3-26. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
56. _. "The Trend in the Rate of Labor Force Participation of Older Men, 1870-1930: A Reply to Moen." this JOURNAL 49, no. 1 (1989): 170-83.
57. _. "The Impact of Aging on the Employment of Men in Working Class Communities at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Cross-Section Analysis of Surveys from Maine, New Jersey, California, Michigan and Kansas." In Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age, edited by David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett, 303-27. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
58. Ransom, Roger L., Richard Sutch, and Samuel H. Williamson. "Retirement, Past and Present." In Retirement and Public Policy: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the National Academy of Social Insurance, edited by Alicia H. Munnell, 23-50. Washington, DC: National Academy of Social Insurance, 1991.
59. _. "Inventing Pensions: The Origins of the Company-Provided Pensions in the United States, 1900-1940." In Societal Impact on Aging: Historical Perspectives, edited by K. W. Schaie and W. A. Achenbaum, 1-38. New York: Springer Publishing, 1993.
60. _. "Protecting Soldiers and Republicans: Civil War Pensions, the Protective Tariff, and the Failure of the Social Insurance Movement in the Progressive Era." Working Papers on the History of Retirement No. 4. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Business and Economic Research, May, 1994.
61. Rodgers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
62. Romer, Christina D. "Spurious Volatility in Historical Unemployment Data." Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 1 (1986): 1-37.
63. Ruggles, Steven. "Sample Designs and Sampling Errors." Historical Methods 28, no. 1 (1995): 40-46.
64. Ruggles, Steven, et al. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Preliminary Version 1 [computer file]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Social History Research Lab, 1993.
65. _. 1880 Public Use Microdata Sample, U.S. Census of Population. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Social History Research Lab, 1993.
66. Salamon, Sonya. Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
67. Shammas, Carole, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin. Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
68. Shryock, Henry S., Jacob S. Siegel, and associates. The Methods and Materials of Demography. Condensed ed. by Edward G. Stockwell. New York: Academic Press, 1976.
69. Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.
70. Smith, Daniel Scott. "Life Course, Norms, and the Family System of Older Americans in 1900." Journal of Family History 4, no. 3 (1979): 285-98.
71. Sutch, Richard. "The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850-1860." In Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, 173-210. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
72. Taylor, Henry C., and Ann DeWees Taylor. The Story of Agricultural Economics in the United States, 1840-1932. Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1952.
73. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Twenty Censuses: Population and Housing Questions, 1790-1980. Washington, DC: GPO, 1979.
74. _. 1980 Census of Population: Characteristics of the Population, Number of Inhabitants. PC80-1-A1, United States Summary. Washington, DC: GPO, 1983.
75. _. 1990 Census of Population: General Population Characteristics United States. 1990 CP-1-1. Washington, DC: GPO, 1992.
76. _. 1990 Census of Population: The Foreign-Born Population in the United States. 1990 CP-3-1. Washington, DC: GPO, 1993.
77. Uselding, Paul. "In Dispraise of the Muckrakers: United States Occupational Mortality, 1890-1910." Research in Economic History 1 (1976): 334-71.
78. Weiler, N. Sue. "Industrial Scrap Heap: Employment Patterns and Change for the Aged in the 1920s." Social Science History 13, no. 1 (1989): 65-88.
79. Weir, David R. "A Century of U.S. Unemployment, 1890-1990: Revised Estimates and Evidence for Stabilization." Research in Economic History 14 (1992): 301-46.
80. Whaples, Robert. "The Shortening of the American Work Week: An Economic and Historical Analysis of Its Context, Causes, and Consequences." this JOURNAL 51, no. 2 (1991): 454-57.
81. Williamson, Jeffrey G., and Peter H. Lindert. American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History. New York: Academic Press, 1980.