Why don’t more politicians retire? A medical anthropologist explains how the US could benefit from a mandatory retirement age

Two-thirds of U.S. senators and nearly half of House lawmakers are eligible for full retirement benefits. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are hardly the only examples of politicians who work well into their golden years. Members of the baby-boom generation – Americans born between 1946 and 1964 – are the most numerous in the House, and in the Senate they outnumber lawmakers from all other generations combined. All told, two-thirds of U.S. senators and nearly half of House lawmakers are eligible for full retirement benefits through the Federal Employees’ Retirement System. And yet they keep working. So do the four Supreme Court justices who are over 65. They’re not alone. When given the choice, many Americans seem to prefer to work more rather than less. This is true in their weekly and annual work hours as well as the period of their life they spend working. About 1 in 5 Americans over 65 are working, even though they’ve passed the point where they are eligible for full retirement benefits and Social Security payments. The share of older adults in the workforce is rising, although it’s...