Older Americans rely heavily on Social Security benefits (SSBs) to support independent lifestyles, and many have few or no additional sources of income. We establish the extent to which SSBs adequately support economic security, benchmarked by the Elder Economic Security Standard Index. We document variability across U.S. counties in the adequacy levels of SSBs among older adults. We find that the average SSBs fall short of what is required for economic security in every county in the United States, but the level of shortfall varies considerably by location. Policy implications relating to strengthening Social Security and other forms of retirement income are discussed.
Following the outbreak of a disease, panic often spreads on online forums, which seriously affects normal economic operations as well as epidemic prevention procedures. Online panic is often manifested earlier than in the real world, leading to an aggravated social response from citizens. This paper conducts sentiment analysis on more than 80,000 comments about COVID-19 obtained from the Chinese Internet and identifies patterns within them. Based on this analysis, we propose an agent-based model consisting of two parts—a revised SEIR model to simulate an offline epidemic and a scale-free network to simulate the Internet community. This model is then used to analyze the effects of the social distancing policy. Assuming the existence of such a policy, online panic is simulated corresponding to different informatization levels. The results indicate that increased social informatization levels lead to substantial online panic during disease outbreaks. To reduce the economic impact of epidemics, we discuss different strategies for releasing information on the epidemic. Our conclusions indicate that announcing the number of daily new cases or the number of asymptomatic people following the peak of symptomatic infections could help to reduce the intensity of online panic and delay the peak of panic. In turn, this can be expected to keep social production more orderly and reduce the impact of social responses on the economy.
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