The aging of the U.S. population creates serious challenges for Social Security, the nation's public retirement system. Under almost all projections, the number of workers supporting each retiree under Social Security should fall from roughly 3.3 today to just two workers by 2020. Some pundits use these projections to argue that the Social Security is headed towards bankruptcy. But there are large future uncertainties in the key factors that will determine the health of Social Security, and every long-term management policy is truly a gamble. The Tuljapurkar Group carries out and applies cutting-edge research on ways for policymakers to grapple with the uncertainties that cloud the long-term dynamics of Social Security.

Publications on Social Security

1. "Mortality Change and Forecasting: How Much and How Little Do We Know?"
2. "Demographic Uncertainty and the OASDI Fund."
3. Ronald Lee and Shripad Tuljapurkar (1997) "Death and Taxes: How Longer Life Will Affect Social Security," Demography 34:67-81, also in HTML format.