Alicia Munnell: Improving Retirement for Everyone
As the founder of a highly regarded research center, this 2025 Advocate for Aging measured and studied retirement savings, Social Security and how families can build wealth for future generations
Alicia Munnell enjoys telling self-deprecating stories about herself as a college student in the early 1960s. She will tell you she was far from being a devoted scholar and preferred parties to studying. Classes, she says, were a bore that infringed on her social life.
She married in her junior year, and while her husband was working toward an MBA at Harvard Business School, she took classes at Boston University — for the lack of anything better to do, she says. To her surprise, she asserts with a mischievous smile, "I did really well there and I don't know why."
Munnell was, in fact, a member of the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley College, and sitting in on classes at Boston University earned her a master's degree in economics. Next came a Ph.D. from Harvard — which she earned while raising two children — followed by work in a series of high-level research jobs at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the U.S. Treasury and the White House. Retirement economics became her area of expertise.
Munnell arrived at Boston College a year before Social Security began looking for academic institutions to conduct research on retirement issues. Boston College was one, and Munnell, then 55, became its first director.
A Retirement Expert Retires, Sort Of
With her at the helm, the Center for Retirement Research has over the past 27 years produced a catalog of respected analyses of topics central to the public discourse on the financial health of older adults. This includes Social Security's long-term financing shortfall, inadequate personal retirement savings and calls to delay retirement to keep people earning and saving.
At the end of December, Munnell, 82, stepped down as the CRR's director, though she has not yet retired. She is working part time in 2025 completing research whose funding stretched past December. Her deputy, Andrew Eschtruth, was chosen to be her successor.
He will have to deal with the Social Security Administration's decision in February to summarily terminate research grants awarded by the federal Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The consortium is the office within the Social Security Administration that supports research by CRR and other institutions into ways to make the retirement system fairer and more efficient.
Social Security's Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek said his decision to stop funding research — which will save $15 million, or 0.00001% of the agency's $1.5 trillion budget — "aligns with President Trump's priorities to end fraudulent and wasteful initiatives." There have been no allegations of fraud in the program.
Many research papers by Munnell and her co-authors were written for policy makers and published in academic journals. These reports were difficult for average retirees to understand, but many more of her publications are plain-English explanations of important retirement issues facing individuals and the nation.
Plain-English Policy Ideas
Chief among these issues is an imbalance between how much Social Security receives in payroll taxes and how much it pays out in benefits to retirees. The number of people eligible for benefits is growing faster than revenue from the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax that pays for those benefits. Social Security has made up the difference by tapping its reserves, but that cushion is expected to run out as soon as 2033. After then, benefits would have to be reduced by about 20% unless Congress finds more revenue for the popular program.
After studying the issue for decades, Munnell opposes a frequent suggestion to have affluent wage earners pay FICA tax on their entire income (it is now paid on the first $400,000 of earnings). Her idea: keep benefits roughly where they are ("I can see some areas to cut," she said) and raise FICA revenue broadly to make the program financially sound.
"It is not an intellectually complicated thing to do," she said. "It is difficult for people in Congress to say, 'I'm going to raise your tax rate now for something that is going to happen 10 years down the road.' "
"The Social Security Fix-It Book," which she wrote with Eschtruth and Steven A. Sass, is a citizen's guide to the options being proposed to restore solvency to the program, which is the sole source of income for 40% of older adults, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security.
"If you fix Social Security, you would also fix long-run deficits," she explained. That is because deficit forecasts by the Congressional Budget Office assume Social Security benefits stay the same after the trust fund is exhausted, with the difference added to the overall deficit.
Ideas to Benefit the Working Stiff
She also wrote the "Social Security Claiming Guide," which walks readers through the process of figuring out when to claim Social Security benefits and how much people will need to retire and maintain something close to their lifestyle when they were working.
Serious readers may want to tackle "Social Security and the Stock Market: How the Pursuit of Market Magic Shapes the System," an accessible academic article on the risks and rewards of adding corporate stocks to the investment mix of state retirement systems in Australia, Canada and the U.K. (The idea has been proposed for the United States, as well.)
"Our goal was to get the information out fast and do fresh things."
CRR research has focused on measuring and mitigating retirement risks facing individuals and the country as a whole, explaining the benefits of working past traditional retirement age and recommending ways to help more Americans save for retirement. CRR also has created the National Retirement Risk Index, which measures how many households are at risk of experiencing a significant decline in their standard of living in retirement.
The center under Munnell published papers on these topics and more for a variety of audiences rather than concentrating on academia because "our goal was to get the information out fast and do fresh things," she said.
"The sequence of events in academia," she added, "is that you write a draft and then you present it at conferences for about a year. Then revise it for about a year before you send it into a journal, where it is sent out for review. Another two years. So, probably five years from the original thought you might actually see something in an academic journal. And nobody reads academic journals!"
