The Italian writer and journalist Lilli Gruber (Gruber Dietlinde) and her husband, French journalist and writer Jacques Charmelot run after a group of geese in the Aniene Rowing Club. Rome, January 7, 2011 (Photo by Massimo Sestini/Mondadori via Getty Images)
Mondadori via Getty Images
While traveling in Rome, my colleague and friend, Jeffrey Brown, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and one of the country’s most important retirement economists — reflected on LinkedIn that Italy’s pension system might be too expensive. An option in the Italian system offers a pension after meeting age and service combinations. If by age 63 you worked 40 years you could collect a reduced pension. Jeff called out the rule for encouraging what he termed “early” retirement. I would call it “earned” and am intriguing method for correcting the vast inequalities in work and longevity among Americans.
Jeff is a good representative of the mainstream economics case for pension benefit cuts and later retirement ages. I argued in my book, and with co-author Karthik Manickam, that retirement ages are social choices. When economists call age-62 retirement “early,” they are making a value statement, not stating a neutral fact.
Jeff Brown and I have something in common: we both earned PhDs and entered stable professional employment relatively late in life. Graduate school is demanding — it requires discipline and intellectual labor. But academics have substantial control over the pace, content, and organization of their work. Many professors don’t begin their careers until their late twenties or thirties. Start at 32, retire at 70: you’ve worked 38 years.
Compare the woman who ran my son’s daycare. She started full-time work at 19. By 60, she’s worked 41 years. The jackhammer operator started at age 20 and by 55 his knees decide. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the median age of university professors is about 51 and construction workers 42. The median age of Senators — the people who write Social Security laws—is about 65. Registered nurses retire at an average age of 58, seven years earlier than the national average, driven by burnout and physical wear.
Why is retirement at 60 after 41 years of work considered “early,” while retirement at 70 after 38 years is considered “normal”? The answer is social perspective — specifically, the perspective of people in power whose working lives look more like a professor’s than a janitor’s.
Italy’s pension system has three retirement paths running simultaneously. The standard door opens at 67 — that’s the baseline old-age pension, requiring at least 20 years of contributions and carrying the full benefit. A second path, rooted in Italy’s historical tradition of offering pensions after working a certain number of years. Men can retire at any age with 42 years and 10 months of contributions; women with 41 years and 10 months. A third path is the quota system: age plus contribution years. The current version, “Quota 103,” requires age 62 plus 41 contribution years and may end in 2026 if Parliament passes the proposed budget.
The quota door is temporary — renewed annually through the budget law and potentially expiring in 2026. Pensions are reduced if taken before age 67 – capped at roughly €2,450 per month. The “Rule of 103” is less a guarantee than the result of political fights, granted and clawed back with each budget cycle. The debate now is whether the standard age-67 retirement door should automatically rise by three months — to 67 years and 3 months — as average life expectancy ticks upward. A part of Prime Minister Meloni’s coalition, the League Party, wants to freeze that increase.
League Party leader Durigon called raising the retirement age 'a beastly policy towards the working man.’
More important opposition to cutting benefits comes from the Italian people.
A 2025 Eurobarometer survey found that 82% of Italians oppose raising the retirement age — third in the EU behind only Latvia (88%) and Greece (87%). Support for the increase fell from 20% in October 2024 to 17% by late 2025. The Italian people do not accept the ‘working longer’ solution.
The economists arguing for cuts argue Italy spends roughly 16% of GDP on pensions — second only to Greece in the OECD. Italy’s social security agency INPS projects pension spending will reach 15.7% of GDP by 2030 and peak at 17.1% in 2040. Italy’s Parliamentary Budget Office warns freezing the retirement age hike would add 0.4% of GDP annually to pension costs through 2040 and raise Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio by 7 percentage points. The OECD argues that Italy needs to contain pension-related pressures -- Italy has low fertility, a rapidly aging population, and a working-age population projected to fall by more than one-third by 2060.
Bocconi’s Professor Tito Boeri, former president of Italy’s INPS and member of the retirement economics mainstream warned: “This mechanism [cutting pensions by indexing for average life expectancy] is very precious and should not be altered… the consequences for Italian public debt are going to be quite dramatic.”
However, the fiscal case answers only one question: what does this cost the government? It does not answer the question of whether it is just to require a janitor to keep working until 68 because a senator lives longer.
A retirement economist myself is intrigued by the Quota system and wonder if it would be good for the U.S.. Some American union contracts allowed 'thirty and out’ — full retirement after 30 years of service regardless of age – similar to the Italian Quota Rule. Italy is now, at least, asking the right question: how many years of work is enough? The U.S. is not.
Age justice in pension rules is relevant in the U.S..
A JAMA study found the gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of men in the U.S. is 14.6 years. For women, it is 10.1 years. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy for men in the top 5% of incomes rose by 2.34 years; for men in the bottom 5%, it rose by 0.32 years. Higher-income Americans not only live longer they spend more years in good health. Any argument for cutting benefits because, on average, people are living longer disguises a growing socio-economic class divide.
Consider how other nations could fall into America’s example where older workers need charity to be able to retire. In my last book I wrote about Betty Glover, a 91-year-old grocery store clerk , retired only after a GoFundMe campaign raised $82,000. Likewise an 82-year-old Walmart cashier Butch Marion retired after his Go Fund Me campaign. These campaigns indict pension austerity.
In the U.S., about 41% of households with members aged 55–64 have no retirement savings at all. The median retirement account balance is about $100,000; most middle-class households need $600,000. And 31% of home health workers and 34% of janitors are over 55. Between 2010 and 2018, about 56% of workers aged 55 and up in the bottom half of the income distribution were forced out of work — by layoffs, plant closings, age discrimination, poor health, or family needs – not because they chose to retire.
Welcome to American-style retirement, where retirement is work.
An American Rule of 100-103 would move us toward retirement justice. Working until you drop is not a civilized plan for a civilized society.
Economists point to budgets, debt, and demographics. Workers point to knees, backs, shoulders, and forty years on the job. Every society must ask: should retirement be determined by years alive or years worked? Italy is asking that question right now — imperfectly, politically, with lots of budget fights. We should be too.
Show me a nation’s retirement system, and I’ll show you how a nation treats its workers.
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