Retirement Wealth Accumulation and Decumulation: New Developments and Outstanding Opportunities

Analysts have raised serious questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save enough for retirement. This is of obvious policy interest given the need to reform national retirement income programs. In the present paper we examine recent research developments regarding retirement wealth accumulation and decumulation. Our goal is to identify new developments and outstanding opportunities to encourage a more sensible process of growing and then drawing down retirement wealth.

Projected Retirement Wealth and Savings Adequacy in the Health and Retirement Study

Low saving rates raise questions about Americans' ability to maintain consumption levels in old age. Using the Health and Retirement Study, this paper explores asset holdings among a nationally representative sample of people on the verge of retirement. Making reasonable projections about asset growth, we assess how much more people would need to save in order to preserve consumption levels after retirement. We find that the median older household has current wealth of approximately $325,000 including pensions, social security, housing, and other financial wealth, an amount projected to grow to about$380,000 by retirement at age 62. Nevertheless, our model suggests that this median household will still need to save 16% of annual earnings to preserve pre-retirement consumption. For retirement at age 65, assets are expected to be about $420,000 and required additional saving totals 7% of earnings per year. These summary statistics conceal extraordinary heterogeneity in both assets and saving needs in the older population. Older high wealth households have 45 times more assets than the poorest decile and this disparity increases with age. There are also large differences in prescribed saving targets, ranging from 38% of annual earnings for those in the lowest wealth decile to negative rates for the wealthiest decile.

Retirement Wealth Accumulation and Decumulation: New Developments and Outstanding Opportunities

Analysts have raised questions about current workers' ability and inclination to save" enough for retirement. This issue is of obvious policy interest given the current debate over" reforming national retirement income programs. This paper explores the implications of recent" research regarding retirement wealth accumulation and decumulation for this debate. Our goal is" to identify problems and opportunities in the area of preparedness for retirement."

Black and White Together, We Shall Win : Southern White Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

During the Civil Rights Movement, Mississippi has often been characterized as a simple battle of white racists against black activists. Drawing heavily on oral histories, personal publications, and Mississippi Sovereignty Commission reports, this thesis examines the unconventional stories of white southerners who transcended the segregationist environments in which they were born. As southern white activism took many forms, this work offers biographical insights to three individuals who have received little scholarly attention: journalist P.D East, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) activist Buford Posey, and William Carey president Ralph Noonkester. While their contributions between 1950-1971 differed, being white and active in the Deep South connects all three lives. A closer examination of what spurred their involvement sheds light on how activism should be defined, how it developed, and how it was received in Mississippi

Open Space, Thin Blankets, and Snores: An Examination of Sleep in Young Adults Experiencing Homelessness

Sleep has been identified as a public health concern, especially among college students and young adults, which are defined here as adults ages 18-25 years old. Individuals who are homeless also face specific challenges to getting high quality, restful sleep. The purpose of this review is to investigate the potential health burden of impaired sleep quality in young adults experiencing homelessness. The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Ebscohost, Medline, Google Scholar, and PsychInfo databases were searched using the following terms independently and in combination: sleep, sleep quality, young adults, college students, emerging adults, sleep hygiene, homeless, subjective sleep inadequacy, impaired sleep, health, and self-rated health. Twenty-three articles from a variety of disciplines concerning sleep health in college students, young adults, and homeless adults were included. Of these 23 studies, 18 studies were conducted among college students and young adults and almost all were descriptive, aside from one experimental design to evaluate sleep and related parameters. The other 5 studies were conducted in homeless adult populations with one study being experimental and the others descriptive in design. Findings from these studies indicate that poor sleep quality and inadequate sleep quantity are problems in both college students and adults experiencing homelessness. This review also identified a gap in the literature—there has not been any sleep research conducted among young adults experiencing homelessness. But, the data that does exist among their domiciled counterparts and in older homeless adults reveals that sleep is likely a significant health issue which should be investigated and addressed in the target population. Additionally, though there is a large body of validated tools to assess sleep in college students, these assessment measures may be inappropriate in the evaluation of young adults experiencing homelessness

Towards Improving Interface Modularity in Legacy Java Software through Automated Refactoring

The skeletal implementation pattern is a software design pattern consisting of defining an abstract class that provides a partial interface implementation. However, since Java allows only single class inheritance, if implementers decide to extend a skeletal implementation, they will not be allowed to extend any other class. Also, discovering the skeletal implementation may require a global analysis. Java 8 enhanced interfaces alleviate these problems by allowing interfaces to contain (default) method implementations, which implementers inherit. Java classes are then free to extend a different class, and a separate abstract class is no longer needed; developers considering implementing an interface need only examine the interface itself. We argue that both these benefits improve software modularity, and discuss our ongoing work in developing an automated refactoring tool that would assist developers in taking advantage of the enhanced interface feature for their legacy Java software

Ecuador’s Amazon, Rights of Nature, and the Dilemma of the 2008 Constitution

In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its Constitution. Ecuador is also a country whose economy depends on the extraction of natural resources. Ecuador thus faces a dilemma, as the two goals of environmental preservation and environmental exploitation conflict with each other. This paper seeks to highlight these conflicting goals, and emphasize the role of Indigenous peoples in Ecuador\u27s Amazon region in fighting for both their rights and the rights of nature