Live for Your Brain and Work Longer
June 29, 2026
Your hope for retirement is delayed with this paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence From Labor Market Shocks.” The study shows that the longer adults work into their golden years the less likely they are to develop and show cognitive decline. Here’s the abstract:
“With large gains in life expectancy, the population share of disability due to cognitive decline and dementia has substantially increased. Many older adults in the United States leave the workforce well before age 65. Correlational evidence suggests that leaving the workforce before retirement age could accelerate the pace of cognitive decline. We offer causal evidence, using HRS data for the United States, exploiting plausibly exogenous shifts in labor demand in local labor markets as a Bartik instrument for employment variation across these markets. We find substantial declines over time in cognitive scores stemming from negative labor demand shocks. These findings are concentrated among men aged 51 to 64, whose employment decisions and outcomes may be more sensitive to local labor market conditions than are these decisions or outcomes for women or for older men. Our evidence extends past work focusing narrowly on the retirement age window and provides further support to the notion that working to older ages may delay age-related cognitive decline.”
This is horrible news for people wanting to retire early and enjoy their latter years. From another standpoint it sounds like the NBER is trying to rationalize not hiring younger people because of the proven incompetencies related to attention spans, cognitive development, and casual adulting. Is this a way to prevent social security payouts and people going on Medicare?
Or maybe it’s a genuine concern about human cognitive decline and is encouraging people to do what’s best for themselves to keep their brains healthy.
The idea seems to mesh nicely with the mantras of the tech bros. Humanoids must work longer and harder. Only the Top 10 percent will succeed. The top of the Top 10 percent will be able to fix up the problems of the humanoids who are not sufficiently intelligent to run modern social constructs. Citizen, obey.
Whitney Grace, June 29, 2026
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