Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

What Are New Retirees Most Concerned About?

health-costs

Health problems and the cost of health care are the biggest concerns for those entering retirement, according to a study released on Monday from Bank of America Corp's Merrill Lynch. The findings, part of a larger study focused on how people are feeling about and preparing for retirement, were based on a survey of more than 6,300 individuals aged 45 and older across the United States. Other concerns: outliving money, lack of personal savings, social security, and company pension. When asked what their biggest worry was about living a long life, 72 percent of retirees surveyed said serious ... Read More

The Physical Cost of Earning Less than Your Wife

(PHOTO: SEAN NEL/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ladies: Has your income risen to the point where you now make more money than your husband? He might insist he’s perfectly OK with that, but the medicine cabinet may tell another story. New research from Denmark finds that, compared to those who continue to outearn their wives, men in that ego-deflating situation are significantly more likely to use erectile dysfunction drugs. “Even small differences in relative income are associated with large changes in ED medication usage when they shift the marriage from a male to a female breadwinner,” a research team led by Lamar Pierce of ... Read More

China’s Growing Unhappiness Gap

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In 1974, a University of Pennsylvania economics professor named Richard Easterlin published the innocuously titled study, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” (The conventional wisdom at the time being, “Duh.”) In it, he examined 30 surveys conducted in 19 countries, and came up with an unexpected conclusion: while income correlated closely to happiness within countries—richer Nigerians were happier than poorer Nigerians—it wasn’t clear that, on balance, richer countries were any happier than poorer countries. Happiness was purely relative. The so-called Easterlin ... Read More

The Educational Gap for Infants

Family income and parental education begin to make a difference in a child’s mental achievement as early as infancy, according to new research in behavioral genetics that advances the ill effects of poverty to late infancy. In a study of 750 pairs of infant twins from a range of places, family incomes and ethnicities, a team of researchers led by Elliot Tucker-Drob of the University of Texas at Austin found that 2-year-olds from affluent families were scoring moderately higher than their lower-income peers on tests of mental capacity. The tests included pulling a string to ring a bell, ... Read More