Old is Bold!

Keep the mind and body going after retirement

Stories by Revathi Murugappan

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Retirement doesn’t have to be a time to let your mind and body go idle. Did you know there are actually people who move on to a second career after or near retirement and find it even more fulfilling?

You’ve reached a major milestone in life — retirement. That’s when reality hits. What are you going to do in your “golden years” now that you are no longer employed and no longer draw an income?

Yes, you have tons of reading material to plough through, friends to catch up with, hobbies to start, places to explore, but what else? Retirement might sound like a great idea when you’re in the 40s, but once people approach 55, they usually find they aren’t ready to call it quits yet.

While there is growing awareness about the need to plan, less than 5% of Malaysians are prepared for retirement and fail to take into consideration inflation rates and rising medical costs. Moreover, according to a study in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology published by the American Psychological Association, older people who continue to hold a job after retirement enjoy better health than their non-working peers.

The retirees who continue to work in temporary or part-time jobs, called bridge employment, suffer 17% fewer major diseases than those who stopped working completely. People whose post-retirement jobs are related to their previous careers also reported better mental health than those who retired completely.
However, people who worked in jobs outside their field after retirement did not show the same mental health benefits, the study reported.

“If you are doing something that is similar to what you were doing in your career, it’s easier for you to adjust. If you’re working on something you are totally not familiar with, or if you’re working on something just for the money, then you have to readjust to the job, and for older adults, it’s usually pretty challenging,” says the study’s co-author Mo Wang, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland.

The most popular retiree jobs include being a consultant, cashier, caterer, security officer, usher, baker, floral assistant, tour guide, temp worker, retail worker and store greeter. Yep, these may seem a little stereotypical, but they are popular with retirees. Not only is greeting a low-stress way to earn some extra income, it’s also the perfect prescription for bored retirees who want to get out and socialise.

Plus, store greeter positions aren’t just limited to hypermarkets and supermarkets anymore. These days, businesses from car dealerships to electronics stores in the United States are hiring happy, smiley greeters to welcome customers.

While most seniors might be content with part-time jobs, there are others who embark on a new career or switch jobs just before retirement so that they can stay in the workforce longer. Usually, they set up their own business and dictate their own hours. Often, the second career proves to be more rewarding.

The following are three people who made a new beginning near retirement.

Well, I’ll be farmed!

Another person who made a career switch rather late in life is Low Yeng Teck, 52. Low had put in 28 years in his job when he started getting restless. He was in a sales and marketing job at a multinational company and desperately wanted a change — something fun, more challenging and which did not involve technology.

“Most of us in the corporate sector have this nagging feeling that we won’t be here working forever and wonder what will happen beyond that. An ordinary person has three to five job changes in his life but I did different things in the same organisation,” he shares.

The opportunity to embark on a different career came up five years earlier for Low, then 44, when an acquaintance asked if he would like to dabble in agriculture.

Low Yeng Teck quit his job at 49 and purchased an oil palm estate. Its success allows him to pursue his hobbies like hiking and fishing. — LOW YENG TECK

 

“I thought about it but I didn’t have the expertise, although my family was supportive of the idea. I was interested in nature but didn’t know anything about planting crops,” he says.

With three teenage sons to raise, Low took time to think things through carefully. Then at 49, he decided to take the plunge. He quit his job and bought a neglected oil palm estate in east Malaysia with a few friends. Since he had access to professional help, he hoped he would be able to develop the land.

However, it was tough-going initially. Low had to sleep on wooden floors, learn how to harvest the fruit, apply fertiliser, drive a tractor, handle equipment breakdowns and deal with lack of workers. For his trouble, he got thorns in his fingers, crashed his tractor, rolled down a hill and sustained injuries.

“It was a surreal feeling. Many times, I wondered what the heck I was doing leaving my cushy job behind. Maybe I was going through a mid-life crisis!” he chuckles.

But, Low persevered and the estate is now up and running with 15 workers on his payroll. These days, Low only heads there when there is an emergency.

With the oil palm business in full swing and time on his hands, Low is now helping a friend in the security business dealing with CCTVs and video surveillance.

“It gives me a reason to wake up every morning. I go to the office daily but the surprising fact is that I’m back to dabbling with technology. When I left the industry, it was a strange feeling. I felt something was missing because I had been conditioned to ‘do battle’. Now I set my own agenda and work at my own pace,” says Low.

He admits that had he continued working with the multinational firm, he would be more comfortable financially.

“Looking back, I have no regrets. If I had a chance to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have changed anything. Money is always important but it is not a determining factor for me.”

With more time on his hands, Low often goes fishing and golfing, and is hoping to compete in a 10km run soon. The missus and him also go hiking whenever possible.

“Retirement? What’s that?” he asks. “You don’t really retire in the private sector. You work till you die! Today, we keep ourselves fit and the concept of retirement doesn’t exist. I still feel as if I’m in my 30s. I don’t feel old. I’m plugged into what’s happening in the world,” he says.

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The Western Machiavellian Economics?

 by Harold James

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PRINCETON – When is it legitimate to lie? Can lying ever be virtuous? In the Machiavellian tradition, lying is sometimes justified by reference to the higher needs of political statecraft, and sometimes by the claim that the state, as an embodiment of the public good, represents a higher level of morality. That tradition is once again in the spotlight, as the question of political untruth has recently resurfaced in many bitter disputes.



Did German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg have to tell the truth about the massive plagiarism that pervaded his doctoral thesis, or could a lie be justified because he was performing an important government job? Was the 2003 United States-led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq illegitimate because it was predicated on a falsehood about the existence of weapons of mass destruction? Or were conservative US anti-abortionists justified in sending actors with a false story into the offices of Planned Parenthood in order to discredit their opponents?

The economic variant of Machiavellianism is as powerful as the claim that political untruth can be virtuous. Lying or hiding the truth in some circumstances can, it appears, make people better off. Deception might be a source of comfort. We might find ourselves warm and contented in a cocoon of untruth.

One of the most famous examples concerns the Great Depression – an epoch that policymakers frequently drew upon in trying to come to terms with the post-2007 financial crisis. Many countries in the early 1930’s had terrible bank runs, which inflicted immense and immediate damage, decimating employment by bringing down businesses that were fundamentally creditworthy.

There was one exception to the general story of Depression-era bank runs: Italy, where Mussolini’s fascist government controlled the press, including the financial press. Although the major Italian banks were constructed on the same model as the German and Austrian banks whose collapse had ignited the global conflagration, and although the Italian banks were just as insolvent, the press never discussed these unpleasant problems. Financial journalism was soothing. There were no bank panics, and the depression was milder.

Since confidence plays a large part in financial crises, Mussolini’s example immediately took hold. States could apparently almost magically create security and trust simply by imposing it. Adolf Hitler liked to say that the ultimate cause of the Reichsmark’s stability was the concentration camp.

Deception is instantly appealing to many individual businesses. Would it not be desirable just to hide losses until uncertainty passed and confidence returned? In that case, new profits could quickly be used to plug the gaps, and no one would ever know about an apparently successful deception.

Massaging the truth is eternally appealing to modern governments as well. They anticipate revenue in order to appear creditworthy. They reclassify foreign borrowing as domestic debt in order to look better in the International Monetary Fund’s statistics.]

For individual businesses, financial misrepresentation is illegal. Most people can easily see why. The legal enforcement of honesty in keeping and reporting financial records is an indispensable feature of a well-functioning market economy. Without some degree of certainty that financial statements are meaningful, there would be a complete loss of confidence.

But government dishonesty is not that different. Deceptions, when they are revealed and the untruths unravel, are deeply disturbing. Indeed, misrepresentation by governments – driven by the belief that political ingenuity can stabilize expectations – is actually at the root of many financial crises.

In 1994, Mexico shook the global economy when the extent of its domestic (but dollar-denominated) debt in the so-called tessobonos became apparent. The Greek government’s misstatement of its fiscal position, coupled with the realization that the European Commission had overlooked or tolerated the Greeks’ accounting legerdemain, triggered the euro crisis in 2010.

The revelation of deception makes it impossible to believe that governments are really enforcing rules adequately and fairly.

But misrepresentation is not just at the heart of financial and economic crises; it is also the stuff that drives revolutions. The immediate cause of the protests against President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia was WikiLeaks’ revelations of US diplomatic cables detailing the regime’s corruption. The domino effect from the Tunisian revolution has produced further vivid accounts of corruption and deception, from Egypt and Libya to the Gulf, in each case stoking even greater anger and making more regimes vulnerable.

There is a powerful pragmatic argument against Machiavellianism, as well as a principled one. Given modern communications, a cover-up of the kind engineered by Mussolini in 1931 would most likely be unsustainable today. Moreover, any attempt to misrepresent requires further and more complex misrepresentations, which have serious consequences as subsequent decisions come to be based on erroneous assumptions.

To revert to the example of Depression-era Italy: the state holding-company edifice created to save the banks and maintain confidence proved to be an increasingly bureaucratic and costly burden on the Italian economy. A nearly indestructible behemoth outlasted Mussolini’s regime and survived for 50 years.

Markets work by a process of continuous discovery of information. Choking off the flow of information leads to distortion, not confidence. And, as we are now witnessing in the Middle East, the same is true of political systems. Still, no economic crisis or political revolution is likely to change governments’ inherent proclivity to think that they can know better.

Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.

Social capital and the Middle East

THINK ASIAN  by ANDREW SHENG

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WHAT has the problems in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt in common with the Oscars? The answer is Facebook and the Social Network. The latter is the name of the film about the founders of Facebook that won three Oscars. The Egyptian protestors learnt how to socially connect through Facebook, having learnt the techniques of social organisation and use of mobile communication technology from a bunch of Serbs who succeeded in overturning Milosevic in the late-1990s. Foreign Policy magazine calls this Revolution U.

What the problems in the Middle East show is really the breakdown of social capital, as against economic capital and cultural capital. In his 1995 book, Bowling Alone, Harvard Professor Robert Putnam first identified the decline of social capital in the United States which he defined as “connections among individuals social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trust-worthiness that arise from them.”

Modern urban living, when many of us spend time watching TV and doing things alone, reduce the time for social connectivity. Throughout Asia, rural folk lament the loneliness of cities, where there is little friendship and all human transactions are commercial.

An anti-government demonstration in Benghazi, Libya. The problems in the Middle East show a breakdown in social capital. — Reuters

 

The mobile phone, Facebook, Twitter and the like have transformed the mode of communication between friends, family and even business acquaintances, especially among the young. The Web, as marketing and media people discovered quickly, is the new wonder of social communication, but as people in Egypt and the Middle East also discovered, a power for social mobilisation.

What Putnam lamented was the breakdown of local neighbourhood clubs and societies, where people met to share common hobbies and interests and learn to generate trust and reciprocity with other people. These would include religious societies, bridge clubs or even weekend BBQs. These social capital were mostly voluntary organisations for mutual welfare and support.

As modern life made demands for higher consumption, families had to have dual-incomes in order to afford a higher standard of living, there was less and less time for voluntary social work and more and more time devoted to full-time employment.

Similarly, as government got bigger, the state took care of the functions that civil society used to do, like supervision of hospitals, schools and even cultural affairs. The result was alienation and distance between the individual and others, eroding social capital and trust within society and between individuals and government. This void is not filled by political activity alone.

In Hong Kong, there is emerging a growing sense of resentment against the rich that was not obvious before. Hong Kong has always been a city of contrasting incomes and wealth, but until recently, few envied the rich, because there was a sense that everyone had the same opportunities to become rich. The Hong Kong government has always provided for the basic needs of the poor, with large doses of public housing and one of the finest public health systems in the world.

But as the population ages, even as modern life speeds up, many urban poor feel increasingly alienated and a sense of loss of control over their own lives. This explains the willingness to express their protests either through marches or through anger in the blogs.

In the Middle East, the breakdown of social capital exploded as the connectivity between the masses and the ruling elite has been broken. The three most basic issues are rising population, youth unemployment and corruption of the ruling elite.

In 1990, the population of Egypt was only 58 million and by 2009, the population had risen to 83 million, more than a million a year. Not surprising that youth unemployment was quoted as high as 40%. In Tunisia, the unemployment rate is 14%, but youth unemployment probably double that. With the elites concentrated on building their own nests, it was not surprising that the masses rose up in protest when food prices rose. All these add to social frustration.

There are important lessons for Asia as we embark on faster and faster urbanisation. In the next 30 years, the proportion of Asians in cities will rise from the current 40% to an estimated 53% by 2030 and 65% by 2050.
The urban drift will stress social capital even more, as large populations are moving into cities with infrastructure already creaking at the seams.

But what consolidates social trust and stability is less physical capital (hardware) and more social capital (the software) of how to make cities more liveable and where jobs and job satisfaction are attainable and sustainable. It has become urgent for Asian planners to look into not just hard infrastructure, but also social engineering on a scale never attempted in history.

So far, the faster growth through in East Asia has meant that unemployment levels have been kept at reasonable levels. Most business people see the rising urbanisation as opportunities from investments in real estate and infrastructure, higher middle-class spending and more growing sophisticated cities.

But in reality, the harder stuff is all in creating what Putnam calls bonding social capital and bridging social capital that mutually reinforce each other. Bonding social capital is uniting people who are alike, either on a religious, ethnic or cultural basis.

Bridging social capital is about linking people who are not alike, such as rural-urban differences, religious and ethnic differences. In this global, multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural environment, it is vital that bridging social capital is constantly fostered, nurtured and strengthened.

It is not surprising that Indonesia has been offered as example to North Africa and Egypt as a model of how to deal with such complex social capital. Although Indonesia has had its share of problems in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, the vigour of social narrative between the different ethnic races and different religions, in a country where 88% are Muslims, is very impressive indeed.

Time for civil society to wake up and for greater efforts to rebuild social capital.

Andrew Sheng is author of the book “From Asian to Global Financial Crisis” and adjunct professor at the Tsinghua University and University of Malaya.