No. A typical wage-earner is both a producer of income and a consumer of income. Compensation supports the earner's employment period consumption. But across a lifetime, given the ever increasing medical advances, improvements in public health measures and better nutrition, the consumption function does not closely correlate with the production function.

"One of the most impressive achievements of mankind is the control of mortality and the extension of human life through improved public health measures and advances in modern medicine. Between 1900 and 1984, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased a full 28 years, from 47 to 75 years. [Since] the late 1960s, death rates for persons 65 and over have been reduced by 20%. [In] 1984, a typical 65-year-old could expect to live an additional 16.8 years, up from 13.9 extra years in 1950." Thomas Espenshade & Tracy Ann Goodis, Demographic Trends Shaping the American Family and Workforce, in America in Transition: Benefits for the Future 5, 17-18 (Employee Benefit Research Institute) (1987).

"The 45-year life expectancy that prevailed a century ago is a composite figure, greatly distorted by infant mortality. As late as 1907, '1 of 7 newborns died in their first year of life, whereas in 1977, 1 of 67 died then; between the ages of one and four, 1 in about 17 of those born in 1907 died, whereas 1 in about 360 died among those born in 1977 -- representing a 21-fold reduction.' [The authors who gathered this data remark]: 'It is small wonder that the image of the dying child was so prominent in Victorian literature and painting, and small wonder that it seems so mawkish [today].' [But] even after we correct for infant mortality, the diminished life expectancy of the last century was marked enough to explain why contemporaries so seldom had occasion to talk about what we call the retirement income problem. If you chanced to outlive your productive years, you did not in general do it for very long." John H. Langbein, The Twentieth-Century Revolution in Family Wealth Transmission and the Future of the Probate Bar, 14 Probate Lawyer 1, 28-29 (1988).

The goods news is that the individual will typically "outlive" the individual's employment period. The bad news is that the individual "outlives" the employment period and lives longer. Currently, an individual aged 70 is expected to live for 16 years, an individual aged 75 for 12 1/2 years, and an individual aged 80 for 9 1/2 years. Retirement is a remarkably recent social phenomenon -- only about a century old. Until the later part of the Nineteenth Century, life expectancies were low enough that most wage-earners died while employed full-time or shortly thereafter. The expectation of an extended period of superannuation is among the largest changes in social structure.