While Joe Biden is getting ready for his new job, his old buddies are hanging it up as the baby boom retirement wave is beginning to hit the United States in full force.
A record 3.2 million baby boomers retired in 2020, according to Pew Research, more than twice as many as retired in 2019. Even if that is a brief uptick caused by the coronavirus (boomers might hate Zoom meetings more than the rest of us), it still looks like a signal of the tsunami coming soon.
The median boomer, born in 1955, is turning 65 this year and will be eligible for Social Security two months after his or her birthday. The peak of the baby boom, with 4.3 million births, was 1957, and those folks will be eligible for full Social Security before July 2023.
The next few years will see the largest voluntary exodus from the labor force in U.S. history, and the repercussions will be large and unpredictable. Economists and policymakers are worried about the health of Social Security and Medicare, of course, as the ratio of workers to retirees drops. But our culture will be changed, too.
You can expect a run on retirement communities and early bird dinners. All sorts of businesses will reorient around the largest generation in history now being free even from 9 to 5. Maybe golf, on the wane in the U.S., will see a resurgence.
Church life will change, too. Maybe daily Mass will be a bit more crowded, and Bible studies a bit better attended — after all, nearly three-quarters of boomers already say they attend church at least monthly, with most of those attending at least weekly. Church leaders don’t know what it will mean to have a large new crop of church ladies who used to be flower children.
Heck, maybe we’ll start seeing Grateful Dead stickers on mobile homes touring the country.
