Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors By the numbers Reading your editorial on philosopher Peter Singer's appointment to the chair of bioethics at Princeton ["Princeton's Gradgrind," September 24], I was...
...In 2030, at the height of the baby boomer retirement, it will drop only to 44 percent...
...That figure today is 46 percent...
...Are people having fewer babies than during the baby boom...
...Continued on page 30...
...Are people really "living up to 20 years longer than they used to after reaching 65...
...Neither I nor my classmates challenged the premise of the exercise...
...The only way to save Social Security is to persuade elected officials to leave it substantially as it is...
...Hardly...
...Enemies of Social Security exaggerate strains on the system by stressing "intermediate" projections rather than "low-cost projections," though the latter—which predict no difficulty, ever—are consistent with actual economic and demographic conditions...
...They may be reassured that the only danger to the system comes not from economics or demographics, but from special interests...
...Thank you for speaking up in this matter today...
...Yes, but the figures are not so dramatic as portrayed...
...True, there are fewer workers today for each elderly person than before, and the ratio will decline somewhat more...
...During a lecture on utilitarianism in a philosophy course, the graduate assistant invited my classmates and me to assign value points (maximum: ten) to human beings, and to speculate about how to maximize utility for society as a whole...
...Readers should be informed, however, that Matthew Wei-dinger of the Ways and Means Committee staff, rather than "stating the problem clearly," presented misleading information...
...Since 1940 (the year of the first benefit payments), life expectancy at 65 has increased by 3.6 years for men and 5.8 years for women—but the increase to 67 of the age for full retirement compensates for two of those years...
...This will still be considerably more favorable than the ratio thirty to forty years ago, when the work force contained only 37 percent of the population...
...The influx of women into the work force largely accounts for the difference...
...People of good will should applaud Ms...
...For whatever reason—I can still feel myself choking on the words that wouldn't come—I remained silent then...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors By the numbers Reading your editorial on philosopher Peter Singer's appointment to the chair of bioethics at Princeton ["Princeton's Gradgrind," September 24], I was reminded of an experience I had as an undergraduate at that same institution...
...McCarthy's recognition of the social in Social Security...
...The writer is University of Missouri Curators' Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City...
...TIMOTHY P. SCHILLINC Seattle, Wash Social Security: the numbers I appreciated Abigail McCarthy's notice [September 10] that my book, Social Security and Its Enemies, "makes a case for Social Security as America's most efficient insurance program and one function the government can perform more effectively than the private sector can...
...MAX J. SKIDMORE Kansas City, Mo...
...But this change has been anticipated from the beginning, and the system was designed to accommodate it...
...What is meaningful is the percentage of the population in the work force...
...In the past eighteen years, nearly as many live births occurred in the United States as during the eighteen years of the baby boom (72 million, as opposed to 76 million...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
