Jimmy Carter on the Virtues of Aging

Jimmy Carter on the Virtues of Aging

Emory University

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From an accredited US medical school

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President Jimmy Carter talks to students in an Emory sociology class (Social Gerontology) about topics related to aging and the political implications of an aging population in the U.S. (April 7, 2011). 

President Carter was appointed University Distinguished Professor at Emory in 1982 and is a frequent guest lecturer in undergraduate classes.

For more information about the course, contact Prof. Ellen Idler http://www.sociology.emory.edu/eidler/

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Introduction

this program is brought to you by Emory University I'm going to start with when

Life as a child

I was a child and my life at that time was a lot more like the

life of Jesus Christ than it is now literally not only I but all my

Neighborhood

neighbors uh and Friends most of almost all all of my neighbors were African-American families and our family

was was a little bit better off and and my daddy owned land but we lived in a

time when very few people had automobiles uh nobody had a radio my family had a radio but it was

Radio

we don't have electricity so we had to run it from a battery and my daddy was very stingy with it depleting the

battery so we only listened to special programs no television we had a a telephone uh which of course Jesus

didn't have but uh there were three people on our line and so whenever our

telephone rank which was a long a short we knew that four people were on the telephone listening to what we said uh

the three people whose phone rang I long with hours and also the operator in fles and so almost all the transportation

Transportation

then was by walking or riding horses or mules or riding on wagons so we didn't

have running water in our house either until much later in my life and and that was 85 years ago it was doing to Great

Depression and another thing that was similar was was that the average wage for a grown able-bodied man who had good

intelligence enough to take care of animals in in a in an adult mature way

uh their pay for 16 hours of work was $1 and for an able-bodied woman uh the

pay was 75 cents a day and for a teenager like some of you boys it would

be uh 50 cents a day but also at that time a loaf of bread

Average Wage

was 5 cents uh eggs were 1 cent each and uh you could buy a pair of shoes for a

dollar and a half uh you could be buy a pair of overalls for a dollar and a half so

Education

things were different and uh and then I at that time my only ambition in life

was to go to uh Annapolis nobody in my daddy's family ever finished high school

before me daddy my daddy had a good education which was 10 years 10th grade he went through the 10th grade at

Riverside Academy which was a military academy over near Augusta Georgia but my

daddy wanted me to be a uh wanted me to have a chance to go to college and the only two free colleges in the

nation back in the Depression years was um Anapolis in West Point and I had a

favorite uncle who was Navy uh ined man in the Pacific Ocean

and so I decided to go to Anapolis so when I was 6 years old if you asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up I

would say like a parrot I want to go to Anapolis and be a naal Offa I didn't know quite what it meant and then uh

Virtues

about 70 years later I wrote I wrote this book which I still think is the best book available I I don't think it's

on your reading list they did read it they did read it all portions okay well

so I think this book pretty well describes what I think about the virtues

which which I got a lot of criticism by using the word virtues of Aging what are the virtues of Aging why is aging filled

with u not only a more gratifying possibility in life but also a better

opportunity to do good things for other people those are the two basic definitions of Virtues of virtue in the

Bible or in in the dictionary uh to have a gratifying experience of

your own and also to be able to do something for other people and and I think still after writing this book that

uh that comes with retirement age what is retirement age well there was a poll

Retirement age

done which I describe in the book it said what do you think should be the

average age of retirement and that was on a nationwide

basis and and most people in America thought that the best age of reti would be about 52 or

53 and then the other question they asked on the same poll was when do you think a person is old and the answer to

that was about 73 so you see there's a 20year

difference between what Americans think should be retirement age compared to

when you get old I was involuntarily retired from the White House by the 1980 election and I

was 56 and so um I thought about that a lot and I

Life expectancy

noticed then that the average life expectancy for someone my age was was U

20 more years and so I had a a very basic question to ask which other

retired people have to ask themselves what am I going to do with 20

years and and and that's a question that not very many people ask themselves as a

matter of fact the average American in adult life spend about half of the adult

years after retirement and very seldom do we make

plans about how we going to spend those retirement years half of our adult

life about the only thing we plan for is how can I gather enough money and put it

in the bank so that I can support myself and may perhaps my spouse during those

retirement years but what are we going to do during those retirement years is a question that we don't ask very often

Retirement years

and um I've known a lot of people who were my age that worked really hard some

of them became quite wealthy as a matter of fact all their employment years were

spent trying to earn as much money as possible and they made zero plans you

might say for what am I going to do after I'm no longer employed and they retire at the age of 60 65 and a lot of

them die within a few months uh part of the reason for

their death is because they had nothing for which to live and uh Sigman Freud was asked what

is the key to uh a pleasant life in retirement years and he said two words work and

what do you think the other one was love work and love

that's been uh a very important thing for me I I've seen the government

involvement in in aging years dramatically changed since I was

born uh when I was born I looked up the statistics the government contributed an

average of $1 per year for healthc care

Government Involvement in Aging

which meant that the government spent practically nothing and it wasn't the federal government's responsibility to

take care of people in their old age it was entirely up to the families

themselves or sometimes to local governments and we had in every County in Georgia at least there was what we

called a poor house poor person's house and if you lived to an advanced age then

you could go and live in that house with a bunch of other poverty strict people and and you could sit on the

front porch or if you were more active you could work in the nearby large garden where vegetables were grown to

used to feed the people who lived in the pool house and there was not any money given to people for spending not even $5

a month and so that's all they did was just exist in a community in a in a

house with a lot of other people by 1950 the government was spending an

average of $100 a year for medical care for older people

and the latest statistics are $8,000 a year per person per person for an older

person just for medical care you see how how it's been an

exponential increase and this this is um

Medicare and Medicaid

just for medical care and that would include Medicaid Medicare and the Medicare for fund will

be broke if nothing changes uh in just uh six more

years and the other major and Medicaid of course as you know is for poorer

people and and Medicare is for a wider range of people older people and and

those who have physical dis disabilities and and our government at this point

you see that the government's about to close down tomorrow because the Republicans and Democrats can't get together but but one three items that

haven't been addressed At All by the president who's supposed to take the leadership is social security Medicaid

and Medicare because they are so profoundly important and by the year

2030 or so just the cost of of Medicare

itself will equal the entire federal budget and it's growing

Social Security

still exponentially from $1 a year to five to $100 a year and now $88,000 it

keeps on going up and uh nobody's restraining it Social Security was

devised during my lifetime I was just a child I was 8 years old I so in Roosevelt was elected and not long after

that Social Security was formed and the idea was for working people right to

take a small portion of our salary put it in a pot and and then later when you

got to be old you would have enough money to at least live on and at that

time when it first started there were about 20 working people for every

retired person going Social Security now it's three to

one there's a retired person for every three people and the Social Security

Social Security Fund

fund has been greatly changed to benefit people like

me I picked up when I wrote my book that my wife and I will receive about

$200,000 more in Social Security funds than we put into Social

Security and that's a typical figure for wealthy

people and that could increase by at then by that that was 15

years ago when I wrote the book so that shows what's happening in Social Security and uh Social Security hasn't

been modified now for uh decades and some profound changes

need to be made in Social Security but the problem is that that older people now control the

government why one is we're well organized when I

got to be 50 years old I was still in the White House in fact I hadn't even got to the white El and my wife and I I

got a notice that I was eligible for the AARP the American Association of retired

persons and I just threw it in the trash I I'm not I don't believe I'm that old and now of course AARP is uh

Voting

extraordinarily powerful one reason that not only are the older people

organized but we have become accustomed to special privileges particular those of us who

are financially independent and uh another thing is that we

vote roughly speaking this is roughly speaking people vote about the same

percentage as the years they've lived people your age about

20% vote when you get to be 40 years old

Members of Congress

roughly 40% of the people vote when you get to be 65 years old roughly 65% of

the people vote so you see that uh members of Congress and presidents

too to whom do they listen when they're getting ready to make changes in the law

they listen to the old people because we'll have a relative

cure compared to others I also found out when I wrote the book that that uh there there there 12

times as many dollars spent on the retired person as it is the

average person under 18 years old and that includes education and everything

Social Security and Medicare

else well is that fair no I don't think it's

fair but uh the things that that would suit me

fine uh or changes in the Social Security laws and

the Medicare laws and others that I doubt that the politicians are going to have enough courage to

address until it's an absolute crisis which is rapidly approaching I would be

glad to to reduce my Social Security payments I don't need it I can get along

without Social Security I I have a retirement income from having been

president uh equal to the salary of a member of

Retirement Income

Congress every former president that's the definition of our retirement fund so every time the the

congressman increase have salary kind of surreptitiously so anybody notices it 3%

or 4% I get a three or 4% increase in my retirement and I also have

U PID from emry for being a professor and I make the vast majority of my

income is from my books well Freud said work and

Work and Love

love I think that this is something that U should be addressed

by people even your age to start thinking what am I going to do after I

finish my career Steve and I were talking on the way over here the average person who goes to work say in New York

City or Atlanta Georgia on the police force or to or to be a fireman or maybe just finished College

we'll say they're what 22 years old and a lot of them retire at the end of 20

years of service they're not 53 years old which is the retirement age I mentioned the

first day or what 42 years old retired at 42 years old with half

Retirement

pay and if they want to work 10 more years and and reach the ancient age of 52 then they have 30 years

pay 30 years of service and their retirement is probably 75% or sometimes

100% of what they have been earning and if you have been a member of a local

union like you're a fireman in New York then you get the 100% of your highest

Year's pay which includes over time so I've seen statistic that show the last

year that a New York fireman or policeman works it it explodes with

overtime and that's the basis on which their retirement is

Ive Got a Young Son

predicated I've got a young my youngest son is named Jeffrey and ever since I was uh a governor he's always moaned

about the fact that he was getting cheated on Social Security and for a few years I argued

with him I don't argue with him anymore because he's been right all along because you are going to be faced at

your young age with a very increasingly heavy burden of taxes of all kinds just

to pay for your parents retirement and Medical Care in

old age that's unfortunate but that's what's

Ive Been Blessed

going to happen well I've been blessed in my life you know I've had u a good

education I've went to four different universities uh um have had success to

some degree in politics and and um and since then I've put into effect the

plans for retirement I really didn't know when I

left the White House without any immediate plans what I was going to do

Home

rose and I built our home back in 1961 it's a house in which we still live and

I had been a long years in the Navy and so forth so that was a 16th house that

my wife and I occupied after we got married and uh and we haven't changed the house at all we've modified the

house to some degree but we haven't changed homes and so we decided when we left the Navy when we left the

governor's mansion when we left the White House to go back to Plains so we have a very stable environment in which

to live both my ancestors and roosan ancestors who were born in the

1700s are buried in pl's area and the farm that we operate now uh

Stable Environment

We've owned ever since 1833 that's when the Indians were forced to leave West Georgia and it took them

five years to survey the land and our ancestors have owned the land ever since

so we have a stable life so I I'm when I use my life as an example I know that I I am representing a privileged class on

a way of stability and and happy marriage uh if we don't break up in the

next uh 3 months Rose and I will be married 65 years and so that brings up another

Living Together

question and I'm not going to talk very much longer but but what do you do when you have two um different

people both with minds of their own and I'm putting that mly uh who are forced to live together

after one of them or both of them is retired Rosen ran our house she she still takes care of all the bank

accounts she still takes care of all our investments she still takes care of the needs of our children and grandchildren and now some great

grandchildren and uh I've always kind of run the business with Rosen help me there and we run the cter center

together in fact so we've been Partners in almost everything but Rosen was quite different when I was um married her she

came from a family that was totally different from my own I won't go into details to describe it but her was a

very calm reticent uh i' say compatible group of

Family reunions

people who occupied her family mine were not calm they were not reticent and they

were not compatible Rosen family still has two family reunions in PLS every

year my family has never dreamed of having a family reunion except on my

grandfather's grandfather's 200th birthday year we had one family reunion

just just his descendants and we had 980 people show up because I was a former president

everybody wanted to come get a picture with me so so we got a picture with 980 people don't know why but but we have a

We have a different life

different life and so forth Rosa was very reticent when she was young but I had a lot of things to do I was a labal

officer I was had I was traveling all over the world I had different responsibilities I'd been to four different colleges and that sort of

thing so so we have had to uh enter our retirement years after I

left the White House with a great great deal of uh accommodation and we are not inherently

compatible Rosen has now written four books I've written 26 books and we write

completely differently one of the books that I wrote before this one here is called everything to gain making the

most of a refuge of life in our 65 years of marriage this was the

worst mistake we made because we decided write the book together by Jimmy and Rosen Carter that

Our worst mistake

was a horrible mistake it almost broke up our marriage uh I get up early in the

morning uh I write very rapidly uh rosan likes to get up later

than I do in stay she likes to stay up late at night and so forth she writes very slowly and carefully every sentence

has got to be perfect before she writes the next sentence and we both had computers early days about a computer

and so we decided that would write one chapter I would write the next chapter so I would write my chapter in in maybe

three or four days Rosa would labor over hers so when she got my chapter to to go

over she looked on it as a as a rough draft but when I got the chapter she had

written she considered it to be uh have descended from Mount Si like you know

Rosa was laboring

that God had given her this text and it was sacred and and it and if I changed

the word in a sentence it was painful for her so we we had an absolute breakdown in ability to communicate we

could only communicate with ugly notes back and forth on our computers I'm not exaggerating so we finally we had gotten

a fairly good Advance on the book and uh we decided to give the advance back and

tell the publisher forget about the book but the editor came down the plains and

he said look why don't you let me be the mediator he said he said you take all the paragraphs on which you and Rosen

have not been able to agree and that was maybe 2% we could agree on 98% the 98% was

insignificant the 2% was wrong I'd never dreamed my wife had such a faulty memory

I you know I would remember exactly what happened when we had our first date she was completely wrong about what happened

on our first date and so she's not here to correct me here so he finally said look you take all the paragraphs on

He finally said

which you cannot agree and I'll assign half of them to Jimmy and half of them to Rosen and and Jimmy

doesn't have anything to say about rosen's paragraph and vice versa so if you read our book everything to again

you'll see that some of the paragraphs have an R by them and some have a j by them so we survived our marriage but we

had a very different and Rosen has been uh I'd say quite accommodating in

accepting my uh Adventures uh she has become for

instance a tennis player and she's become uh an expert bird watcher and she's become an expert

U downhill skier I had never seen skis until I was 62 years old Rosen was 59 so

we ski together we watch Birds together we now we play tennis together we do things together and she's been putting

to accommodate those inter sequences so we've learned two things in our retirement life and that is one to give

each other plenty of space I don't tell her what to do with her life she doesn't tell me what to do with my life she has

our own program for promoting Mental Health on a global basis and I have some

of my own things to do so we we don't and and we try to to heal our differences before we go to sleep at

night sometimes we stay up quite late we so those are the two basic rules that

we have we don't go to sleep

angry and we give each other plenty of space so we developed our own

What do we do

independent lives but together and the last thing I'll mention is what do we do with our time you know we have full

almost full time and dealing with the cter center now even at our Advanced age we still are very active in the Affairs

of the cter center I teach still at M lecture every mon at Emy I try to go to

every one of the departments at Emery about every year and Steve helps me arrange those when I come to Emery I

always have a breakfast meeting hour and a half with the president and his wife and Ros and I attend that breakfast

that's tomorrow morning and every month uh when I come to emry I meet with three or four professors and Deans who are

doing exciting and interesting things at Emy and we have an hour and a half to discuss what the cter center is doing and what they do so I'm deeply involved

with emry but in addition I have become quite an accomplished uh Furniture

Furniture builder

Builder and I've studied and and I and I work Le this is not P of Rosen and I've become a fairly good painter I've taken

up art and um so with bird watching with

jobs at emry teaching Rosen is also lecture at emry uh when I get through up

and start writing a book and I it I get at 5 I read the New York Times and Washington Post I read the email and so

forth and then I start working on my book and I might stick with a computer for three or four or five hours a day

and the rest of the time I walk 20 steps out to my wood shop and I can design and build a bed or chair or table or cabinet

whatever I really enjoy that and and when I'm not building Furniture I I paint and Prim primarily oils now I used

to do use various media but now I use and if you go to the cter center there about 50 of my paintings hanging around

Painting

the wall I'm not bragging about the quality of them but at least you know it's it's an exciting thing to do to to plan a painting and to and to actually

finish it and and it's kind of a legacy to leave and since I am a former

president I give a furnit a piece of furniture or painting every year to the Carter Center and the Carter Center

auctions it off and our friends Financial friends bid on them and they bring a lot of money and so

that that's those are kind of things we do we want to hold our family together just this is the last thing I we we have

Family

a very diverse family our children are different as much as we are and our grandchildren are different and and now

we have six great-grandchildren we have 12 grandchildren and six

great-grandchildren and four children so when we had our Christmas picture made

this year there were 36 people in a picture uh and

we live in different places and so it's very important to me

and rosan to try to let our family members know each other so we travel all over the world for the quarter Center we

have a lot of frequent flower miles so every year on the 27th of uh December we all

meet somewhere and we spend a week together everybody comes because folks

are not in school Rose and I pay all the all the bills and we pay the the travel

expenses so everybody shows up and so that's what we do to keep our family together so you see we have a very good

pleas Pleasant like fill with work and I would say fill with

Volunteer

love and I didn't talk about volunteerism you know I think that's another thing that you can do when you reach retirement age you you can

volunteer to do things that you never did have a chance to do before to to benefit other people maybe in your own

Community just to just to have a uh be part of a telephone uh every morning

churches do this they they have a list of all the retired people who living by themselves

in a whole community and they get people like you that who have retired and you have a responsibility every morning of

calling maybe 10 of those people and if folks answer the phone and say I'm okay then you don't worry about it but if the

phone rings and and nobody answers then it's your duty to go to the house and say why didn't you answer the phone you

know those are the kind of things that you can do my wife and I have a very exciting uh occupation almost of dealing

with Habitat for Humanity every year she and I at our age we go and work a full

week in building a house side by side with a poor family and other

volunteers and we go overseas one year and we do that in the United States the next year we've done it now for 27 years

this year we're going to Haiti and we'll be building a 100 homes in Haiti very near the center of the earthquake uh in

5 days in in Philippines not too long ago we built 293 homes in 5 days we had

14,000 volunteers who came and joined us so there a lot of volunteer work that people can do as

Care about finances

well one of the main things that impressed itself on most of my generation was

care caution about how to handle finances when you grow up during the

Depression years when a full day salary is $1 you're very cautious about making

sure that you have something to to care for and not long ago I I taught a class

here in the in Social Security in this in the sociology Department um about a

county in in in Georgia Dodge County where the professor and her

students had studied that county for for 20 years and during the set a setback in

agricultural income they went in and analyzed how families faed that came

from my generation and and the generation that would be my children in my generation they still own their

Farms but the generation that was came after mine a major portion of them had

lost their Farms because they didn't save and they and they had borrowed more money than they could and now young

people the generation today save has zero savings the average person now in

the United States has saved nothing I I'm not exaggerating whereas if you go to China

somewhere they they save 10 or 15% of our total salary every year that's one of the problems with China they're

trying to get people to to spend more you know to buy more consumer goods to stimulate the economy but we don't we

don't save anything and and I don't know how many put percentage of families in America owe more now than they

own there's nothing there for the future so I don't think you'll find many

people that has more experience with aging than I do there's some around but

uh that many so I've enjoyed talking to you the preceding program is copyrighted

by Emory University

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