4 minute read
A Schulich Professor Goes to Hollywood
FACULTY RESEARCH IMPACTS
A Schulich Professor Goes to Hollywood Moshe A. Milevsky
Schulich Professor Moshe A. Milevsky has made his Hollywood debut in “The Baby Boomer Dilemma: An Exposé of America’s Retirement Experiment.” The movie reveals the shocking risks around retirement savings in America and provides a troubling reality check for many of us who expect a safe retirement income in our future.
As part of his responsibilities, Moshe helped the governor and his cabinet design a menu of annuity products to substitute for the loss of insurance embedded inside the DB plan. In January 1999, the Republican Jeb Bush was elected governor of the State of Florida and one of his top priorities at the time was to effectively privatize the state’s Defined Benefit (DB) pension system, which is similar to the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP). The governor’s plan was to give all workers and employees of the state a choice of converting their accumulated benefit into an individual investment account — akin to a selfdirected RRSP in Canada — or they could remain in the existing DB plan and draw their irreversible lifetime pension at retirement. The governor wanted everyone to have a choice.
And so, over a period of 18 months, hundreds of thousands of state employees had to make this choice, a ‘baby boomer dilemma’ of sorts, on what to do with possibly thousands of retirement dollars, perhaps the largest sum of money many had seen in their entire life. Should they take the pension annuity for life or take the cash and invest themselves? This Florida dilemma is a microcosm of a global retirement challenge: how do you finance a life of unknown length? And, while this dilemma might not sound like a great script for a movie, this famous episode in Florida’s retirement history has now made it to the big screen under a PG-rated movie released in late 2021 called The Baby Boomer Dilemma, produced and directed by Doug Orchard.
At the time of this dilemma, the State of Florida hired Schulich Professor Moshe A. Milevsky to consult on retirement “engineering options” that should be made available to retirees in the individual investment account, including life annuities, for which he was a world-renowned expert. As part of his responsibilities, he helped the governor and his cabinet design a menu of annuity products to substitute for the loss of insurance embedded inside the DB plan.
It was only natural for the movie producer to ask Professor Milevsky to recount his role and narrate his involvement with Florida’s plan during the research and filming of the movie. The original intent was to have him consult with the production team ‘on set’, but he ended up being placed in front of the camera. He has a substantial role in the film together with other experts that had been hired
movie production is an added coup.”
MOSHE A. MILEVSKY
by the state, such as Stanford Professor William Sharpe, MIT Professor Robert Merton, as well as Wharton Professors Olivia Mitchel and David Babbel.
The movie is now screening in theatres across the US but is especially popular in Florida where this dilemma took place. The main message of the movie, which should be available in the next few months on various screening platforms, is that the decision of what to do with your accumulated money at retirement is fraught with challenges and should not be taken lightly. This is especially important in an era in which the other main source of personal wealth is locked up in housing, leaving very little wiggle room for financial mistakes.
When asked to comment on his role in the movie, Professor Milevsky noted that “it’s gratifying that my work and expertise in this area was recognized beyond the narrow confines of state legislatures or academia” and that “as a Canadian, appearing in a USbased movie production is an added coup.” Although he now has an official and single IMDB entry, he said that “like millions of other actors, it’s likely to be my only film credit and my agent hasn’t called with any other roles.”
The movie is now screening in theatres across the US but is especially popular in Florida where this dilemma took place.
ABOUT MOSHE A. MILEVSKY
Moshe A. Milevsky is a leading authority on the intersection of wealth management, finance, and insurance. He is an Associate Editor of the top scholarly journal Insurance: Mathematics and Economics and Journal of Pension Economics and Finance. He was recently named by Investment Advisor magazine as one of the 35 most influential people in the U.S. financial advisory business during the last 35 years. He is the recipient of the Kulp-Wright Book Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association for his 2017 book, King William’s Tontine: Why the Retirement Annuity of the Future Should Resemble its Past.
A prolific author and researcher, Milevsky has now published 17 books that have been translated into six languages and over 70 peer-reviewed scholarly papers as well as hundreds of popular articles and blog pieces. In addition to being an award-winning scholar, he is a fin-tech entrepreneur with a number of U.S. patents and computational innovations in the retirement income space.
