Book Review: Retiring in a New Age: Life after Paid Work . By Russell D. Lansbury and Marian Baird Retiring in a New Age: Life after Paid Work. By LansburyRussell D.BairdMarian. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2026. 116 pp. ISBN 9781041118329, $55.99 (hardcover); ISBN 9781003661795, $28.99 (e-book).

Retirement is undergoing change around the world.Retiring in a New Age documents shifts that are taking place in Australia and Sweden-two distinctive legal and social contexts.Motivating the book is the opportunity to look at retirement now, 20 years after the end of a compulsory retirement age in Australia.Concurrently, there has been an increase in the number of female retirees, a product of earlier decades of increased entry of women into the workforce.With these and other changes has come increased variation to the retirement experience.Russell Lansbury and Marian Baird propose a new typology of four retirement paths that are distinct, although one person could be on more than one path during the full length of their retirement years.The four types are stayers, leavers, blenders, and disengaged.These types emerged from surveys of more than 1,000 retirees in Australia, more than 4,000 retirees in Sweden, and 14 in-depth individual interviews in both countries.This classification is clearly the product of industrial relations scholars, with its focus on various degrees of engagement with work after concluding full-time paid employment.The heart of the book compares post-retirement orientations in Australia and Sweden.Both countries have various safety net programs, with more comprehensive programs in Sweden.They stand in contrast to the United States and other settings where there is a substantial fifth category that goes beyond disengaged when people fall outside of safety nets, encompassing those most severely disadvantaged who are living in severe poverty while aging.As the book documents, women are more likely to be in this category, which is one of the many gendered dimensions of retirement.The authors note the impact of increased life spans as a further motivation for the book.For many centuries, the average life span was well below today's retirement ages.Historically, people worked until they were no longer able to work and, on average, did not live much longer than that.In a very real sense, retirement was seen as a death sentence.That formulation may now seem harsh.Interestingly, the shift toward a more positive view of retirement is partly a result of a remarkably successful 1959 advertising campaign in the United States by the Del Webb Development Company (Marc Freedman, Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life, 2008).The ads for Sun City, Arizona, called retirement "the golden years."The aim was to shift people's thinking from seeing retirement as the beginning of a process of decline into the beginning of a time of leisure and opportunity.While Retiring in a New Age doesn't yet have an advertising campaign comparable to Sun City associated with it, its intent is to further shift our thinking about retirement beyond a simple divide between work and the golden years after work.The proposal for a new social contract around retirement is timely.While the main focus of the book is on Australia and Sweden, the authors go beyond these two countries and highlight a range of national policy choices of other EU nations and countries in Asia.The book nicely summarizes policy choices around the mix of taxes and public retirement pensions, which results in greater changes for private saving (due to lower taxes) versus reduced opportunities for saving, but higher annual replacement of wages.This approach is overlaid with variation in the flexibility to continue with part-time work (and reduced dependence on public pension systems as a result).The book documents how Japan, Korea, and China face 1419713I LRXXX10.