Description: This article is a summary of responses to a questionnaire from Benjamin I. Gottlieb in Washington that had been sent to a random sample of 500 Society Fellows in the U.S. The questionnaire dealt with the anticipated long-term economic and demographic assumptions for social security.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Vancouver Meeting addresses the critical issues of the financing for the Social Security systems in the U.S. and Canada. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 21, No. 3b.

Description: Recent testimony on Social Security was given to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging by David Langer, who defended the current system and strongly opposed recent moves to privatize. This article summarizes Mr. Langer's testimony.

Description: Feature article about the different types of retirement systems throughout the world and how watching what they do could help the U.S. retirement system.

Description: This is a panel discussion session on social insurance topics focusing on the short and long term financing issues of Social Security, the issue of general revenue financing, and proposals to revise benefit structures. Both U.S. and Canadian systems are discussed.

Description: Concomitant with the industrial revolution, the function of providing old age income shifted from families and local institutions to government social security and private pension plans. The history of this change in the U.K. and U.S. is reviewed. A simple mathematical model provides insights into the role played by three rates [the rate of increase of the working population, the time preference rate, and the rate of real wage growth] in determining optimum funding policy. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1994, Vol. 2.

Description: During the SOA’s recent Living to 100 Symposium, one of the sessions that got me thinking much more deeply about the financing of public retirement plans was titled “Mortality Age Patterns: Trends and Projections.”

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Vancouver Meeting shows a comprehensive look inside government debt problems in the U.S. and Canada, Generational Accounts and the implications on government debt of the generational accounts. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 3b.

Description: This article is a summary of “Reports of Consultants on Actuarial and Definitional Aspects of Social Security Disability Insurance,” U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. These reports are concerned with the disability portion of the Social Security Act and more specifically, with certain aspects of the definition of disability and the increases in benefit utilization that are taking place under this disability program.

Description: Discusses the projected costs of social insurance programs in the U.S. and Canada, the experience of the British National Health Service on controlling costs versus providing quality service, the economic consequences of the projected high costs of social insurance and of the projected build-up and spend-down of the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance [OASDI] Trust Funds, and possible solutions to the financing of these programs. From the 1988 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 14, No. 1.