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\"Nearly everyone now recognizes that inequality has transformed American life. What has largely escaped notice is that the hard-core inequality that has divided America is also undermining the Social Security retirement system. Thanks to unprecedented changes in lifespan, health, work options, and family structure, the experience of old age has become increasingly unequal. For the well-off, age 65 now represents late middle age. It isn't until age 80 or so that the average better-off American feels old or faces serious impediments to work and healthy leisure. By contrast, many low earners struggle to stay in the workforce to age 65, facing early disability, limited job options, and long-term unemployment. Social Security is badly out of step with these new realities. This book looks past competing slogans and stereotypes to consider the serious moral questions at stake in retirement policy. The author argues that justice between and within generations requires principled reforms that would maintain Social Security's universal promise while mitigating the new inequality of old age. Specifics include a progressive retirement age, a new phased retirement option, and a fairer replacement for the outdated spousal benefit.\"--Provided by publisher.

Having a child, it has been said, is the greatest risk one can take. Marriages may come and go but parenthood endures. There is simply no escape--no exit--from the emotional and practical responsibilities of parenting. Nor should there be. While certain questions swirling around children--What constitutes a “good” parent? What is the role of the state in ensuring the welfare of the child?--are endlessly debated, consistency and continuity of care incontrovertibly play a foundational role in the developmental years of a child’s life. Children, everyone agrees, need strong, reliable parenting. Parenting today, however, also involves something else: unprecedented economic peril. Over time, our society’s demands on parents have skyrocketed, while the economic rewards of child-rearing have diminished. Once, children provided financial benefit, as workers on the farm and as security in old age. For today’s parents, however, having a child is a one-way obligation, one which narrows paths and saps resources. Much of the economic burden falls on mothers, who work less, earn less, and achieve less than their childless peers. Low-income parents often struggle day-to-day to care for their children, hold down a job, and somehow find decent but affordable child care. Parents with severely ill or disabled children may find the course especially precarious. In order to create a more secure world for children and their parents, Anne Alstott argues, we must fundamentally change the way we think about parents’ obligations to children--and about society’s obligations to parents. Drawing on the same innovative thinking that propelled her and Bruce Ackerman’s influential work The Stakeholder Society, Alstott proposes a solution both pragmatic and controversial. She outlines two unsentimental proposals intended to improve parents’ economic options while respecting every individual’s own choices about how best to combine paid work and child-rearing. Rejecting both state paternalism and easy libertarianism, Alstott’s proposals are bold and unapologetic in their implications. At the heart of No Exit lie two basic beliefs: For the good of all, there should be no opt-out clause from parenting. And yet child-rearing should be a life stage, not a life sentence. Take care of your child, Alstott demands, and we-the societal we-will in turn take care of you. In this fearless, compassionate book, she shows us how.