ResearchersDavid Autor and Mark Duggan have hypothesized that the Social Securitybenefit formula using the average wage index, coupled with a wideningdistribution of income, has created an implicit rise in replacementrates for low-earner disability beneficiaries. This research attemptsto confirm and quantify the replacement rate creep identified by Autorand Duggan using actual earnings histories of disability-insuredworkers over the period 1979–2004. Theresearch finds that disability replacement rates are rising for manyinsured workers, although the effect may be somewhat smaller than thatsuggested by Autor and Duggan.

Thisarticle examines pension participation and nonpension net worth of twocohorts of near retirees. Particularly, the authors look at people bornin 1933 through 1939 who were ages 55–61 in1994, and the more recent cohort consisting of people of the same agein 2004 who were born in 1943 through 1949. Data are from the Healthand Retirement Study, a longitudinal, nationally representative surveyof older Americans.

Withthe death of Robert Myers Ball at age 93 on January 29, 2008, theSocial Security program lost one of its most committed supporters. In2001, Ball’s biographer, historian Edward D. Berkowitz, described Ballas “the major non-Congressional player in the history of SocialSecurity in the period between 1950 and the present.”

Ina federal government career that lasted more than four decades, MollieOrshansky worked for the Children’s Bureau, the Department ofAgriculture, the Social Security Administration, and other agencies.While working at the Social Security Administration during the 1960s,she developed the poverty thresholds that became the federalgovernment’s official statistical measure of poverty; her thresholdsremain a major feature of the architecture of American social policyand are widely known internationally.