Reading the back and forth between Brad deLong and David Leonhardt over the structural versus cyclical nature of unemployment during the Great Recession, a question nagged at me, spurred by this quote from Leonhardt:

The data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Thursday gives me a chance to explain why I disagree. In short, the relative performance of more educated and less educated workers over the last few years has not been the typical pattern for a recession. Less educated workers, by many measures, are faring worse than they ever have.

The ratio of the typical four-year college graduate’s pay to a typical high-school graduate’s pay hit a record in 2010 — 1.56. Since 2007, the inflation-adjusted median weekly pay of college graduates has risen 1.6 percent. The inflation-adjusted pay of every other educational group — high school dropouts, high school graduates and people who attended college but did not get a four-year degree — has fallen since 2007. The same is true over the last decade; amazingly, only college graduates have received a raise.

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This idea first occurred to me while I was in France in September. I marveled that the debate they’re having (complete with effective social mobilization), is about raising the retirement age to 62. The current Social Security retirement age is 67, and the ‘serious’ proposal from Bowles-Simpson is to index it to life expectancy. This proposal sounds reasonable. But life expectancy, like income, is unevenly distributed. As Paul Krugman and Tom Tomorrow have both pointed out, life expectancy has been increasing much more rapidly for the well-off, not for the rest of the workforce.

My proposal is to implement a progressively higher retirement age for low, middle, and high-income workers. If chosen well, the tiered retirement ages by themselves could eliminate the relatively small projected shortfall twenty-five years from now. When I have time, I plan to run some numbers, but I think that such a system could lower the retirement age for low-income workers.

This proposal would allow more of those workers who do the back-breaking and health-damaging work of our society to retire while they still have some time to enjoy it. Of course, for most of the working poor, social security alone is unlikely to provide a comfortable retirement. But the point of this counter-proposal is simply to shift the burden of balancing the small imbalance in Social Security finance from those who can least afford to bear it, as the current proposal would do, to those who can.