People, pensions and policy choices
Last week’s 90th anniversary of US President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law went by largely unnoticed. However, it was a landmark reform, providing a minimum level of state support for people in old age for the first time, part of a package of interventions to combat extreme poverty in the Great Depression. This was not the first state-backed pension system in the world but would grow to be the biggest and most well-known. Some 52 million retirees receive a monthly cheque from Social Security, and for two thirds of them, it forms at least half their retirement income. For 16 million Americans, it is their only source of income in old age.