Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.
I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.
You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.
Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.
But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.
Benefits from «stuff» caps off ar a certain level. After that you want to work less so you have more time to, among other things, actually enjoy your stuff. The exception to this are wealth chasers with multiple yachts etc., but that isn’t «we», that’s a tiny tiny sliver of the elite.
1) Unions say it when they always demand increased salary (= focus on private spending) rather than reduced working hours
2) Voters say it when the right and far right is polling high. Lower taxes = wish for higher private spending, if people are going to work less then tax rate must up for society to function as public expenditure will increase, not decrease, with lots of elderly needing care and fewer workers available.
3) Lots of people have the ability to reduce working hours by working fewer hours (in Norway, if you have kids you can always get 20% unpaid leave by law). And most could do so economically if they reduced their consumption and spending. But people do not seem to consider reducing their salary as an option. The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
PS: You talk about getting more stuff, but to meet the future labor problems we are talking about reductions being needed to peoples consumption, not staying at the 2025 level.
They're not taking it because living costs are up across the board. The laws allows you to work part time, but your expenses don't so you have to work 40h week to keep up in the rat race with everyone else.
1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.
2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.
3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.
Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".
I was a bit clumsy -- I just meant that if people wanted to prioritize time over luxuries then SOME people, who are in a position to, not all, could have sent that signal. Because luxuries (vacations, cabins, boats) are still getting prioritized in the scandinavian middle class, and those specifically could have sent the signal they wanted more free time instead.
I agree with your points outside of that context and I should have specified it.
People who believe that consumerism was something that the general population opted into willingly rather than a result of a torrent of post WW2 psyops campaigns designed to deal with the "problem" of industrial overproduction.
That aside, plenty of places offer a 4x10, or are fine with it when asked, and I think that's a more productive way to put in 40 hours each week while also being more convenient for yourself (before even getting into wanting to lower total hours).
You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.
We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.
A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.
That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.
Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.
I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.
These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.
The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).
Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.
I should add that's it's a start-up so some weeks I work more and others less. But I still have the day my kids that I wanted.
Perhaps try quietly asking your current company? They might surprise you and start a trend.
The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.
Hold on. That's what tech is for right?
certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?
Again, that's a different story for poor people.
Companies are not thrilled to hire people with long gaps in their resume, in my experience. (I have 2, 1, 1, years each gaps in mine.)
You risk making yourself unhirable. And, if not now, at some point you will need money.
Are you unhirable now or do you simply feel you are less valuable ?
Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?
Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.
With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.
A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.
Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
I have seen it go one of several ways.
- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)
- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.
- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.
There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"
On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.
From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
Okay. It seems that the cited numbers are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... which in turn is derived from OECD data, which also allows you to view employees by bands of hours worked per week:
https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateF...
In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
Denmark has (had) very strong labour movement and left-ish governments, though that has been changing over the last decade or so...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
That is strange, by this chart the Italy have 1694 and Germany 1340. In Poland it is still 1814 in 2024 hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Sorry for not catching this.
When at look at OECD, they give other numbers:
Italy: 1723
France: 1501
Germany: 1347
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oe...
Denmark in particular is seeing some great decreases in annual working hours for working people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)
Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.
Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.
Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.
It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."
I don’t like it either but can well imagine I’ll be working until 70, if I last that long.
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.
As someone who frequents personal finance sub-reddits, this does not work. The number of people who would save for their long-term needs is generally small.
And for some folks it is a 'personality problem' in that they are short-sited, in numerous cases it's a matter of not having any available funds. Forced savings are an absolute necessity.
Further it is also necessary for the funds to be away from people's hands so they don't fiddle with the money.
Canada went through this debate in the 1990s when it reformed its government pension system, and between fees and behaviour issues, the general consensus was that have a pool of money separate from private retirement accounts (RRSPs in Canada) was absolutely essential. A history of the reforms:
What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them. But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.
Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.
The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom. The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.
It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...
So it seems it doesn't matter if it's public or private, the benefits of improved productivity is not trickling down to workers, a lot more is produced, generating a lot more wealth, and even with private funds we still get shafted because the capital class wants more and more of the pie.
Then why is it based on earnings? And why can't I opt out of this death pledge?
> Your health is probably not going to be as good
Ah, the old, "your life will suck anyways" play.
> you should have known for most of your adult life
That you are a slave to the state, until you cannot work anymore, and then you will be discarded brutally.
Hard to figure out why the younger generation doesn't want to buy into this.
So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.
But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire.
At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.
It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.
And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.
When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.
The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...
As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart.
> Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops.
In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).
As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.
Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
> Nordic model
> with limited ambitions outside their borders
Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).
The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian.
So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.
By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.
I can imagine the workers joking about making it to retirement... Coal miners probably had little chance, we can't imagine today how hard that work was. They were usually "worn out" around age 50.
This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.
Those that came before you negotiated on their own behalf, how badly to loot your future.
Now you must do the same..
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.
It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.
What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.
A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.
Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.
But you pay for it all your life, so it's unfair.
It would be better to manage your own retirement funds, invest it and retire when you want, free from the government.
If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...
In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement" in the first place.
We all wish that we could spend our best years doing whatever we want. That doesn't mathematically work out, though. European social safety nets are pretty damn generous all things considered. Plenty of vacation days, especially compared to the US. It's not like it's impossible to use those well during your "best years".
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/be...
As for how much we "need", sure we can technically survive on very little. Most people choose aim to higher. Reducing inequality through a more progressive tax system is generally a good idea but taken too far that cuts overall economic growth and hurts everyone. At some point the most productive people just emigrate to countries with lower taxes; we've already seen that happen with numerous high profile entrepreneurs and companies moving from Europe to the USA.
Edit: Amusement is cheap. But it's also a serious issue, if "people wanting nice things" are damaging the environment in the process. I don't think that the world can cope with a lot more people flying around in private jets.
Cities are expensive because people want to move there. They do it because of quality of life or because of work opportunities.
In the long run the issue might indeed disappear as the population shrinks. But it will probably just leave behind lots of unoccupied houses in the countryside that nobody buys. This is already happening in Japan.
Let's see how rich can get richer without transferring their money.
Or they might just rent everything they need from a local branch of a company and pay a branch in another country, and the two interact via crypto. Or indirectly via remittances as there will be a market for asking low-income people to transfer money on behalf of rich people, as transactions of low-income people would probably not be taxed.
also .. what's bad about the rich moving out? you can always print more money to balance out the money they've taken away
and companies and properties that they used to owned are gonna be sold to some new people who are not that rich yet
It completely depends on what standard of living you want. People who would be considered wealthy by 1920's standards are considered poor today.
> People who would be considered wealthy by 1920's standards are considered poor today.
Let's say you live to 80, half your life is 40 years. You only start working a decent job around ~22 years (4 year college degree).
22+40 = 62, pretty close to 70 already. Assuming some people die early, so others have to pick up the slack, some people work part time, etc. and you end up pretty damn close to 70.
It’s not that your (implied, guessed-at-by-me) idea is wrong on its face. It’s that you choose to (1) imply it, (2) in a snarky way that is insulting (even if true), and then when someone claimed a counter-example, you immediately fell back on made-up numbers for why you wouldn’t have to display the slightest curiosity as to how this supposed impossibility came to be.
You assume they’re lying? Why should anyone think better of you? Anyone can lie on the internet.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-13/lopez-co...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/100-year-old-surgeon-wwii-vet...
https://www.rferl.org/a/my-hands-don-t-shake-says-world-s-ol...
https://www.boredpanda.com/89-year-old-surgeon-alla-ilyinich...
I am wondering why aren’t you on this list… Look at all these billionaires, since we have some I assume you are on as well?
Seriously, there's 800,000,000 people over 65 on the planet[1], and you're judging all of their abilities based on a two digit number, instead of individually on their actual health and abilities. That's ageism. That's a yesteryear worldview that people have been fighting against for a long time.
And that "I thought I could say horrible things and nobody would object" is common red flag behaviour mentioned on all the "what's a red flag about X" threads that appear on Reddit constantly; "my boss said something rude about <group> and nobody said anything". That you didn't expect an uproar about judging people you don't know as incompetent or incapable based only on their age - and got an uproar - should be a reason for you to reflect.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXBPLl7gXc
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-by-age-group
“lets get them all to a construction site” - this is not my position.
Also, in countries with high wages, expenses like rent are also much higher. Except for goods that are roughly the same everywhere.
I live in a low wage country in Europe but I don't have nor need a car (I hate driving). That helps a lot as it's a huge money sink for fuel, parking, maintenance and insurance. I have unlimited public transport for 20€ per month.
But yeah we have US employees too
Oh and healthcare is also free here.
Cost of living in Barcelona is nowhere near that of say Amsterdam. But I don't live in Spain for the money. I live here for quality of life.
There's other big coastal cities like Valencia but they lack the international employers.
My friends on an hourly wage don’t get as much but oddly they have way more freedom to take unpaid leave. Their employers would rather let them run off at random for a month than lose them, since they would be immediately employable somewhere else when they came back. This partly reflects the persistently low unemployment rate in the US for vaguely competent people that want a job.
Some studies suggest (sorry am mobile right now, don’t have links) in the US automation has been able produce the average persons essentials entirely since the 1950s.
But we still were taught growing up to put on the show of going to work. At great resource cost and ecological destruction now threatening everyone in deference to memes of long dead laborers and rich who would often be able to shoot anyone that didn’t work hard enough without repercussion.
We do not live in the 1900s or even 1800s.
And how much stuff? New 80” TVs and iPhones every year?
We’ve been conditioned by salesmen who also probably didn’t produce anything but emotional demand. Sure let’s keep living in the Newspeak of the rich media class, and ossified politicians; we’ve always been at war with line go down.
Your same old copy paste “don’t rock the boat” euphemism is thought ending nonsense. It’s capitulation not discovery of options.
So what you are asking for is already happening.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/health-expenditure-and-fi...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Healthcare-spending-as-a...
definition "generous":
• (of a person) showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected: she was generous with her money.
• showing kindness toward others: it was generous of them to ask her along.
• (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary: a generous sprinkle of pepper.
You can't retire if you don't have savings or children to support you.
Even if you have savings and/or children to support you, you can't retire if your society didn't make enough children so that your savings can have some value.
Social security was always a ponzi scheme that doesn't work in the long run as fertility rates _necessarily_ drop to or below (really, always below) replacement rate.
Even without social security, if you want to retire, and to have along retirement, then you need your society to have near replacement rate fertility. Or insanely high productivity. I guess you can look forward to AI rendering most jobs obsolete, and hope that humans can -as always before- create new jobs that can't be easily automated.
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...
I think GDP is somewhat disconnected from that rate though.
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/oekonomi/nationalregns...
In theory your children are your pension deposit. People who don't have children should get a significantly reduced pension or they must provably support the children of a family that has more than two children per woman.
The problem with modern society is that you need children at the end of your life. Agricultural subsistence requires children very early. It's a scheduling mismatch that causes people to delay having children all the way until they are no longer fertile.
None of them considers that "the system" gives them food, water and energy, and that procurement of these in the absence of system means literally toiling from birth until death.
It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).
So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.
And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).
A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.
Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.
But life expectancy at birth is not the same as life expectancy after hitting working age.
In 1900, if you made it to 10, on average you’d die at 63, meaning plenty lived well into their 70’s.
Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not a problem that has easy and/or fast solutions. Yet, actions have consequences...
You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.
As Bill and Ted would say: Bogus!
Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)
This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.
The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.
"An adult" didn't provide. All adults did.
And you left them for places with a stronger social safety net. Interesting.
It's all incredibly short sighted and selfish.
You've condemned a sixth of the world's population through no fault of their own.
Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.
Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.
Frida Kahlo painted some art.
Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.
Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.
Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.
Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.
All infertile due to no fault of their own.
Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.
The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?
> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.
"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.
Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.
The 1/6 number is made up. Here's an example source: https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globa...
The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".
If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/i-keystat.htm
Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.
It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.
> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"
The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.
What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?
As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.
I understand you feel that way. Perhaps you are just a person who is experiencing dissatisfaction.
The research seems clear and sensible to me. And wholly relevant to OP. You may want to mail your criticism to the authors.
Inuits would leave their old out in the snow, and walk away. Just saying.
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?
I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.
Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.
Wild that I should have to say so.
It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)
> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.
Humans took care of THEIR elderly. The system was made to take care of THE elderly. Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)
Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.
> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.
Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.
> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)
I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring. This is why it is happening in slow motion. There are still people having kids but not enough for sustaining the current population levels.
> We're all related.
We are also related to bugs. Humans generally care for their very close relatives (kids -> parents -> cousins...) and emotionally care for the rest of humans.
All of humanity has never decided to do the same thing ever. Society follows a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution , and there will always be folks who decide to do other than everyone else. Oppositional defiant disorder is a thing. You're living in imaginary land.
> We are also related to bugs.
Yes. And many very intelligent people besides myself think that we should be taking better care of the environment and all the other creatures in it besides ourselves as well.
In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model, but you can still transfer the same conclusions - in this example, that pension requires making babies and that without a good negative feedback mechanism, the system eventually collapses.
1: Correct.
> but you can still transfer the same conclusions
2: Incorrect, see 1.
If the periods were of equal length, I think the Ponzi scheme thing would be true.
As is its sort of a modified fractionated ponzi.
What do you think money is?
> you want somebody doing work
This is one reason why the robotics work going on right now is so exciting. Without the demand for elder care, it wouldn't attract as much investment or development.
Money is basically a coupon for labor. If there are no vending machines (read young workers) for labor coupons, then you won't get labor, no matter how many coupons you accumulate.
Holding money does not teleport people into the future. (= the store of value myth)
0-25 education, 25-67 work, 67-82 pension, it's almost equivalent (42 working, 40 not working)
So, lack of young workers is not an inherent problem – you can invest your superannuation overseas (most funds invest a certain percentage of the money overseas, but if you want to take the risk of putting 100% of your superannuation into international investments, that's allowed), so even if the Australian economy were struggling with lack of young workers, you could still live off the investment returns from other global economies which lack that problem. And the reality is that Australia is unlikely to run out of young workers, because even though we have similar problems with low fertility as many other Western countries (although significantly higher than most of Western Europe), we've also always had a relatively high immigration rate, so younger workers immigrating makes up for the insufficient births.
I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:
The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...
Yes, but that’s because the current superannuation system was only introduced in 1992, and when it was first introduced the mandatory contribution rate was only 3% (as opposed to 12% starting this year)-so a lot of current retirees had limited super because it didn’t exist for a big chunk of their working life, and then even when it did the contribution rates were arguably insufficient. Younger workers (20s/30s/40s) generally have had much more money put into their super, so it is expected that by the time they reach retirement age, the pension:super balance will have shifted more in the super direction.
> Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.
That period saw significant economic and social disruption due to COVID-19, so I doubt that change is representative of long-term trends. If an economic shock causes a rise in unemployment, that can push people near retirement age into unplanned early retirement-and the people most likely to be impacted by that are likely to be the least well-off, who inevitably are more likely to rely on the government pension than their own retirement funds
It's most appropriately a shared investment scheme. Your pension money should not sit idle while you are building it. That money can earn a percentage in many ways and dividend reinvestment makes the fund grow massively.
> Retirement depends on having young workers.
Profits do. Retirement is going to happen regardless of how many young workers there are.
Except we're using it and it works. It's demonstrably better than the previous scheme wherein when a business failed it could take the entire pension with it leaving thousands of people high and dry.
> mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment
It puts me directly in control of the investment whereas before I had zero control and had to accept whatever the company administrator decided.
> which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.
Do you want to solve the retirement problem or ethics in investing problem? If you insist they both be solved by the same action then I think you're going to end up with a system that has _negative_ advantages and _everyone_ will hate.
The first advantage is they're generally a mix between tontines and annuities, which helps to mitigate longevity risk.
They just need to be calibrated that the years of pay-in and years of pay-out are balanced as to the ratio of the people in the age cohorts. If you have 10 people paying in for 40 years and only 2 people receiving pay out for 10 years then the system is cheap.
Except if you take a portion of the contributions and investment in incoming-producing assets.
Kind of like what the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security) does.
Not all pensions are the same or created equal.
I don't think ponzi scheme is justified, it is too negative, it just makes no sense to actually accumulate all that wealth for so long.
It allows you to do that. In most cases there are various life index funds that operate the way a traditional pension scheme would and is likely the default option in any employer plan.
You can additionally add your own money outside of your paycheck and you can use the money inside of the fund to make your own investments. You are also allowed to take personal loans against your own 401k. Which is a generally overlooked benefit of the system. You pay interest on the loan but it just goes back into your 401k itself. You pay interest to yourself.
The great thing with a 401k is it's not industry dependent. If your employer or industry goes out of business you still have a lot of options to move your retirement to a new employer or use some of the funds to bridge yourself to a new line of work.
I used to hate it but now that I've used it I quite like it.
Unfortunately Holland has become very neoliberal and everything collective or social is frowned upon. That's really why they changed it.
You are not required to. You can set your portfolio to be 100% mutual funds. Several exist. They have names like "Fidelity Freedom Blend 2045" or the "Blackrock Lifepath 2045." Your provider almost certainly has a default in this category they will pick for you if you signal no other intent.
> Because it's a group scheme
A 401k can be group or individual. It's your money in a special status that's allowed to be used for certain purposes before taxes. The proceeds are tax free under certain circumstances. It's entirely up to you what you do with that money including just stashing it into a fund and forgetting about it.
> and everything collective or social is frowned upon
There are advantages and disadvantages. Populations and circumstances change over time. With the world working to phase out petroleum it should be no surprise that Holland needs to adjust.
It doesn't run out? What's this magic infinite money? It doesn't run out because when it runs out other people are working for you. It's a great system that exploits the young to benefit the old that didn't save enough. The new system removes the magic and you have what you saved.
The people that live longer benefit from the ones that don't, but it's about reassurance, it's not an investment. If they had lived longer they'd have had that reassurance too.
> In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing.
EDIT: (added below)
> US-style "every man for himself"
> You are insured for the state pension if you live in the Netherlands and for each year you are a resident you accrue 2% of the state pension. If you have been in the Netherlands for the full 50 years prior to your state pension age, you will receive the full 100%.
Personally, I am OK to privitise/personalise some of your retirement pension risk, but not all of it. Large parts should still be guaranteed by the state. The real problem with privitisation/personalisation of retirement pension risk, most people are much worse than professional investors. Also, a huge portion of your retirement savings are earned in the last 10 years when your invested capital is almost peak. If there is an economic crisis during that decade, you are screwed. Can you imagine being 5-10 years away from retiring in 2007... then 2008 Global Financial Crisis happened? You will definitely need to delay your retirement by 5-10 (more) years. Awful.
Are you sure about that? The statistic I always heard is that we have seen a 1 year rise in life expectancy every 4 years for the past 80 years.
I don't necessarily agree with the Ponzi scheme. If the ratio of old people to young people is constant then the system can be made to work with setting the retirement age without changing the burden on the young. The issue is that this ratio was reduced because the population isn't growing anymore. We need to find a new retirement age to balance this (or start a transition to a saving scheme, which might take at least 100 years).
Do that today. Tomorrow isn’t promised, let alone 10, 30, 50, 70 years. Don’t be one of those “When I retire”-people, do it now. _If_ you make it to retirement you may not be physically able or willing to do things you’ve been dreaming of for so long.
If you are waiting for retirement, then you are not living.
Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.
On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.
2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.
3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...
Empirical studies have found the opposite: if you don't have kids you tend to spend more on yourself, which means you have (on average) a higher life-style during working years which you take in retirement. A higher / more lavish lifestyle means you need higher income and more savings… which many folks with a lavish lifestyle generally don't do.
People with kids spend less on themselves and so are in the habit of a less lavish life-style and so need less savings in retirement because their spending habits are lower.
As a general rule if you have kids you need 40-50% of your working-age income in retirement, but you do not have kids you need 50-60%.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/retirement/re...
As for having kids and saving for retirement, there's ways to balance both:
* https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/retired-money/the-rule-of-...
Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.
It did not. I'm just pointing out reality. Kids are expensive, and it's probably easier to save for retirement if you don't have any. Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything, and I have no problem working more and harder for them, but we don't live in the age where retirement depends on having kids anymore.
Maybe you meant to propose to change that, so only people with kids have a right to a government pension, which is certainly an interesting idea, but also doubly painful for people who wanted kids but were unable to have any.
Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.
Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.
It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.
The same argument could be made for children, but a counterpoint could be made that given family history outcome is more stable than with unknown immigrant.
On the other hand, there is VERY interesting idea: personal immigration responsibility. Just as „mail bride” look for immigrants you’d be willing to sponsor in exchange for retirement.
Probably there are 5 million problems but would put personal stake for sponsor. Limit to 2 per person and people would do a lot of research as their retirement would depend on it. The country might also gain because I’d expect that people would look for high-value individuals that would maximize their chance for well being.
Finally, this could be used to revive drying out regions: bind this to a country/state/administrative region and that could help shaping it in the future.
And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ironically undermining the whole point of immigration: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...
The tremendous contribution that Danes can make to the world is to have and raise more Danish children!
As an immigrant myself, I find the second article silly. You import people according to your own criteria, and they arrive pre-raised and pre-educated. A larger proportion of them will leave the country before retirement age. It's a hell of a deal for a country, and that's why it's everyone's solution.
Immigrants are a much bigger drain on the country they are leaving.
It’s not a “hell of a deal”—no European country is in the black from its investment in immigration. It’s a Dutch Tulip bubble. The Scandinavian countries, the most well-governed in Europe, have already done the math and started switching course.
Seems pretty hypocritical to me.
As to Bangladeshi Americans generally, they’re probably a net negative economic contributor. Their median household income is 15% lower than for white americans, and the real gap is probably even larger because they’re concentrated in high-income states (New York, California).
Though the situation in the U.S. likely isn’t as bad as the one in Denmark or the UK. The anchor population of Bangladeshis in the U.S. are people like my family who came over on H1, which is a very small (only 65,000 annually), unusual population (e.g., my grandfather studied medicine in London).[1] Family reunification dilutes the pool a lot in the U.S. But the pool is far more skilled and employable than the Bangladeshi immigrant pool in say the U.K. In the UK, only 58% of working age Bangladeshis are employed, and the poverty rate is 46%. Bangladeshi immigration to the UK isn’t a “great deal”—it’s reparations for colonialism.
[1] In the U.S., our priors about immigration from the subcontinent are based on immigrants from the 1970s-1990s, i.e. a small number of highly educated people who were already somewhat assimilated into Anglo culture from British colonial influence. Pre-H1B, they also tended to move to random places around the U.S. rather than concentrating in ethnic enclaves, which forced a greater degree of assimilation. So you think about guys like Ro Khanna, who grew up as like the only Indian kid in Newton, PA. That doesn’t reflect the kids growing up in Little Bangladesh in Queens today.
They'll be as Danish and any other Danes, just choosing to live life as they see fit.
>"And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ", how does someone with a different religion, or choice for music make them less economically productive? Are you suggesting they don't know white collar skills? Or are less intelligent due to were they were born?
The immigration fix is analogous to quantitative easing. The problems are systemic, and turning a blind eye to them won’t make them disappear.
Honestly, we need to rethink capitalism. By promoting shareholder returns over the wellbeing of employees, companies are destroying the social fabric necessary for a healthy civilization.
Of course, the rise in costs and the widening wealth gap are equally to blame. This situation compels both parents to work, sometimes even holding multiple jobs, leaving them with insufficient time to raise children. This cycle continues until the next generation has no chance of affording their own home (or even a rental). How on earth are they supposed to raise a family?
Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.
> Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes.
Details: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/japan/individual/other-taxes
Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.
The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it
> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.
You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.
Charitably, you seem to be implying that any actions which would disturb the current situation would be detrimental because current allocation is the best that can be done.
That seems highly suspicious to me because I don't think anyone is happy with the current fiscal policies. People disagree about what should be done but I think everyone agrees we are not at an optimum.
Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another.
If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.
What do you think you get if you don't hold up your side of the bargain? It's not like the state of nature was an early retirement.
Based.
Sure such thoughts are not probably concerning for the majority of people, but it only takes a small percentage of people losing faith in society combined with a bit of public apathy about people living criminal lives or doing criminal things for them to bring the entire thing to its knees.
So, I completely agree with most things you say. The core here is: Just don't work 40+ years for a retirement.
Take sabbaticals along the way.
Change your career when it is stale.
The counter for this: Don't buy into the hype. You cannot afford sabbaticals if you need two new cars every 4 years and a house that stretches your finances.
> This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself
I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.
This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.
If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.
Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.
It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.
It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.
[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.
[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.
There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
> There are finite resources to allocate.
I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.
The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).
This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.
The same is true about the economy in general.
You're right!
> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.
With the high salary, even if the cost of living around you is high, you can still make choices to save and invest money to eventually become financially independent and retire when you want, where as if you have a low salary, you don’t have that flexibility, you are at the mercy of the systems around you.
Think where you are going to invest and how that investment is going to provide returns. Stocks? Those companies actually need to produce and hence need workers. There also needs to be a broad consumer class to purchase those products. Without younger generations, you have no workers and no consumers which means your stocks have no value. Same with bonds. Same with real estate.
You can fill a gap before that pension starts with part time work etc. It’s much harder to make up a shortfall when you’re 85.
The benefits of a pension start before retirement. I can avoid setting aside a huge pile of money for the potential of an extremely long lifespan and then worry as minor changes to that pile become really critical near and in retirement.
Suppose you’re 50 with 2 million USD in savings. How soon do you retire and what kind of lifestyle do you live in retirement? That’s heavily dependent on what kind of pension is waiting.
Assuming it’s a defined benefit pension it can include guarantees like inflation adjustments. That’s the fundamental advantage which largely offsets the disadvantage of lower average returns.
I’m not saying putting all your money into a defined benefit plan is ideal, but due to the diminishing marginal utility of money a guaranteed minimum lifestyle is extraordinarily valuable.
However if all of the above also applies to savings accounts in the place you reside in, you can call it "a savings account" all right.
b) We have tax breaks for retirement savings accounts
c) Laws names are just a PR exercise, I’m sure you can think of several that don’t do what they imply.
But there’s little point in arguing over definitions when it’s clear what’s actually going on.
Not sure why their opinion matters.
Or look at ancient egyptions, they very clearly didn't need to work 90% of the time if they got time to build massive pyramids, and there is considerable evidence that pyramid workers were not forced to work, but simply offered extra booze and food for doing so. If you didn't work on those projects you weren't starved to death, you just didn't get to drink as much alcohol with your buddies or brag about how you helped build a wonder that will stand for hundreds or thousands of years.
This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.
Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.
Can I suggest that if you want to support the claim, you offer some actual reasoning and evidence - there should be some diaries of native Americans and how they ran so many hours a day they coverd several marathons every day, and about how many mountains of knives they amassed working 15 hours a day knife making, and so on.
Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.
Maybe we need to start thinking about these things differently. I would love to have more time off but still have a job and not need to make this so binary.
Here in Australia, and I imagine elsewhere, there are strong systems (e.g., superannuation) to encourage personal savings towards retirement.
The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?
Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another 35+ years.
Barring some revolutionary technological breakthrough, we aren't going to be living, on average, into our 90s.
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html
My impression so far is that we've done a lot of work at the lifespan, less at the healthspan. What's the point of living until 90 if the last 15 years isn't that fun at all.
Contrast this with Denmark's lifespan growth over the same period, of 76.8 to 81.4 (+4.6 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=2000...
So from the data, prior to covid-19 Danes had gained about 3 and a half years of healthy life, and an additional year of unhealthy life.
It makes sense that Healthspan and lifespan are well-correlated, as most of the ways we have of extending lifespan do so in a way that makes you clearly healthier (such as preventing chronic diseases).
That said, it is true there is a bit of an increasing gap. This isn't just in Denmark, it's global - lifespan rose by 6.4 years from 2000-2019 while healthspan only increased 5.3 years. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...
The metric I've come across is Quality Adjusted Life Years:
Avoiding debt was a good idea when interest rates were high. In the modern age where money is not constrained by scarcity, interest rates have been low. Banks have been loaning out the people's money at near 0% interest rates; often towards the goal of helping corporations to monopolize industries; if it was YOUR money, would you loan it out at near 0% interest rate? It doesn't even cover inflation, let alone the risk of default... Yet the government has been doing exactly that with the people's money; YOUR money. The situation has never been so generous towards borrowers and so bad for taxpayers.
Going to college used to be a good idea as it would allow you to stand out among your peers and guarantee you some sort of management/coordinating role. Nowadays, everyone has a bachelor degree and those who have a PhD are over-educated to the point that they've lost their sense of pragmatism. It doesn't allow anyone to stand out. Education feels like some scheme, disconnected from value-creation.
debt is note as bad as it used to be, but most people are not using it for things that grow in value. You talk about 0% interest - but a car loan has much worse payback rates.
Speaking as a parent, there are plenty of options, some are really expesnive, and some cheap. You can choose which to pay for.
note that the things I listed above are fun, but won't get yoru children into a great college and thus won't ensure a better life for them and yoru grandkids. Choose wisely where to spend your money.
College is free in Denmark (in fact you get paid to study).
Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive.
Not that it's an easy problem to solve, what with the demographics being what they are. I think we'll have to get used to the thought - and reality - of sinking living standards in the west.
I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc.
But overall reduction of cost with reduction of salaries will ultimately lead to worse healthcare.
A friend was in Germany skiing this past winter. The 10k population town he was staying didn't have a paediatrician and they had to drive 2h to get care for their kid. In Germany, in 2025. I wonder how this very town will be in 2030 or 2050 with that trend..
I don't think that in a 10k ski-town there aren't kids. They definitely got 'young' people living there having kids.
I was reading the Systemantics yesterday and they discuss how a 'system' does not 'solve' a problem, but it breaks it down to smaller (easier to hide) problems. The book uses as an example the "garbage collection in a town", and how this one-big-problem breaks down to 100-small-problems. So the "we need rebalance our fiscal blah-blah" eventually breaks down to "no extended leave for new mothers", "not every doc-specialization in towns below 50k", and so on.
16 hour shifts with no notice, 60 hour work weeks, and often disgusting work does not make for an attractive field, so I’m not surprised there’s a massive shortage issue.
This will probably only get significantly worse in the Certified Nursing Assistant field which mainly involves the most manual of labors - changing bed pans, cleaning patients, etc. with many of the same shortage problems. (And way less pay, of course)
This is a common thought. It is incorrect. I’m a doctor. I have gotten pharma money for talking for their drug once, which was absolutely game-changing and which I would speak for without money (sugammadex is the generic name, if you want to look it up). I get lunch twice a year. The age of free vacations is long gone.
This is not a complete discussion without the elephant in the room - diet and lifestyle are making us sick and much of that is a choice of how we design our world. most Americans and Britons are overweight or obese, and the Coca Cola company and Nestle and all the rest are doing everything they can to encourage their product sales, and society is not doing much to counter it. [smoking deaths halved in the UK between 1990 and 2021 [0]]
America and the UK are car-centric, the CDC says less than half of Americans meet the guidelines for physical exercise[1] and UK Gov says 1 in 3 men and 1 in 2 women are not active enough for good health[2]. People say that if the health benefits of exercise could be bottled up and sold, it would be one of the most potent drugs known, and we're designing places and lives which get rid of it as a regular part of life, and make it harder to add in. UK Gov link says "can help to prevent and manage over 20 chronic conditions and diseases, including some cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression". There's millions of people with type 2 diabetes, which is reversible for many people with low-carb eating and fasting and exercise. The Lancet[4] paper saying 4.5 million people were diagnosed with liver disease in the USA in 2021 and alcohol is responsible for almost 60% of cirrhosis cases.
Then there's cities which build car-dependent suburbs, so they can get money today from new build taxes, but set themselves up for large maintenance bills paying for the sprawling roads and water/sewer/electric infrastructure with such a sparse tax base. This is bankrupting cities in North America, which are having to allow more sprawling suburbs today to pay for yesterday's suburb's maintenance in a pyramid style.
Then there's big box stores[3] which sued state governments to stop taxing them as functioning businesses on the grounds that they build their buildings so shoddily they are completely worthless to sell to anyone else or use for anything else, and should be taxed like an empty valueless building. Walmart pays employees so little that many of them need food stamps (SNAP) and those get used at Walmart which then moves the money out of state. Big box stores make cities poorer.
When cities and states say there's no money for pensions, care homes, social services, health services, public transport, it's they're busy mismanaging it and spending it all on subsidising wealty car-dependent suburbanites and 'prestigious' big box store developments. Not to mention health insurance middlemen denying treatments and taking money from the sick and wasting the time of healthcare professionals tying them up in paperwork.
If things were better, with more long-term thinking, people would be healthier and need less support for that reason, things would be closer and easier for people to walk/use public transport to get there so they could remain independent longer in declining health, healthcare would be a lesser demand on society, and there would be more money available to fund it. Then add the 'missing-middle' of American housing so people who have aged and their kids have left could downsize to a smaller home in the same area with the same community, and they would have a more manageable home and more of their money for healthcare.
This is like writing a bubble sort and then declaring that sorting is too expensive so we just can't have sorting in the future.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/smoking
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/exercise.htm
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/physical-activity...
[3] https://thecounter.org/how-dark-stores-loophole-helps-retail...
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2468-1...
That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?
As an American, I can’t realistically retire until 65.
65 is when Medicare is available.
I’d prefer Medicare started from 21 paying out-of-pocket as an option; then the payment starts slowly phasing out at 65. Not this abrupt, all-or-nothing.
That point might be reached earlier for some people, e.g. those who have a hard physical job, than others and a general retirement age is an approximation for when that point is reached for the general population.
But my solution is to be an entrepreneur and also avoid working whenever possible.
So If I stay here and I need to work in my 70's, at least I will be happy I didn't work in my 30's like a slave.
You also have people who have not worked much throughout their lives.
But there are a lot of countries and types of pensions out there and some (such as for government workers) may work the way you say. Checks first before you resign (don't be like some UK women).
Don't you get a whole month of vacation every year while you are in your working years?
In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.
For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.
I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.
The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.
None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.
It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...
[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...
It’s absolutely insane that technology and productivity are increasing so rapidly, yet we’re talking about raising the retirement age and people being increasingly unable to afford children.
Something is incredibly wrong here.
Running a car at highway speeds into something or someone else has a much higher chance of injuring or killing multiple people besides the driver.
We simply don’t have those data for roofers.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...
Like motorcycles are orders of magnitude higher risk for (including fatal) accidents - but they aren't as dangerous for other traffic participants so they get licensed.
If motorcycles were killing orders of magnitude more pedestrians or other traffic participants than cars they would get banned immediately.
My point is whether it’s others who are dying is irrelevant. We have evidence of increased mortality with age for driving. I’m not seeing similar evidence for roofing. If geriatric roofers were constantly falling to their deaths, we’d see a movement to regulate them, even if they’re falling on flowers and not people.
Every single craftsman I know have abandoned their craft for something else because of body issues or injuries. Also, you’re nowhere as nimble at 50, 60 or 70 as you were when you were 20 or 30, so the risk of work related accidents increases, assuming you’re still doing the same tasks.
This is a good hypothesis. Whatever the reason, I see no evidence for old roofers causing death or injury to anyone, including themselves. There is zero hypocrisy in regulating old drivers while being laxer with old roofers.
Nice theory. Doesn’t work in practice. Most societies are not okay with people taking excessive risks, even if it only impacts them. It’s why we require seatbelts even for single-occupant vehicles.
I for one use seat belts, and I want them to be required to be manufactured in vehicles, but I believe it should be a personal choice whether or not you wear them.
If not, I think you may have missed the point that licensing is to protect others rather than the driver/roofer themselves.
My point is, if you're unfit to drive a vehicle due to cognitive or physical decline, you're probably also unfit for most jobs involving those skills, and yet you have to soldier on for 4 more years.
What happens when they're putting a new roof on a building next to a crowded street, and the 73 year old carpenter drops a bunch of tiles to the ground 6 floors below ? or he falls and slips off, taking another colleague with him ? Or he simply operates heavy machinery somewhere and gets caught in it.
Many craftsmen in Denmark are working contracts where they get paid more the faster they finish the job, and nobody wants a 70 year old dragging down their hourly wage just because they can't keep up, so the 70 year old will just have to "keep up", either making mistakes along the way, or wearing out their already worn out bodies some more.
There are options for "early" retirement at 70, provided you've spent 46 years employed. That means you started working at 24 at the very latest, and was not unemployed for longer periods.
Saving up for your own retirement is also hard with low to medium income wages in a country where you pay 40-50% income tax, 25% sales tax and retirement funds are taxed at deposit (meaning capital gains will be lower).
> South Korea; high elderly poverty
You are straining credulity.
Not saying this is a great trend, but it’s unavoidable due to the low fertility rate (already a problem everywhere in the developed world and soon to be a problem the world over, as by 2050–before I retire—the global average total fertility rate will have dropped below replacement.).
1. I've never had more than a max 2 year time horizon when thinking about a hire.
2. If anything, I've found younger people more likely to job hop than those 40+.
> People after 50 have a near zero chance of getting hired here as confirmed by the unemployment office.
You can have regulations all you want, but private companies are still profit driven and will discriminate and take dehumanizing measures to satisfy that profit incentive. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved manufacturing to Asia if they cared about labor so much.
Not that that stops managers, of course...
In addition - when i was a younger engineer i appreciated have a few older engineers around the office because they were always a wealth of knowledge.
My pet theory is that when the system becomes untenable, procreation slows down, which will in time trigger a kind of reset - not that it's going to be fun to live through or anything. Self-regulation.
Sorry but how is this different from hiring someone in their 20s and they are very likely to job hop to another company 1 / 2 years later ? I don't think anyone will believe this.
Cut all things that promote or enable public health.
In neo-feudalism, only lords and perhaps some of their most favored serfs, deserve private for profit health care, and the barrier to entry is cost. Why be wealthy if you can’t buy things other people can’t?
There’s always a surplus of peasants in this model.
Almost every single industrialized country has a birth rate below replacement, so there's fewer younger people to help carry the burdens. Medical care means the elderly live on and on and on, draining enormous costs as they age.
I'm not trying to be cruel, but from a pure numbers sense it makes perfect sense. Would you prefer taxes go up instead? Lessen spending on infrastructure and healthcare? Lessen child labor laws? There's no a lot of winning answers here.
And overall, the problem is just going to get worse in every country for the forseeable future. Expect to see more of this as time goes on. It's a bandaid solution though.
E.g. look at Ireland. Ireland has a de-facto wealth tax ("deemed disposal" - taxing the unrealized gains) on ETFs starting at the first euro, which makes investing basically pointless. Meanwhile it also has one of the lower tax levels on property in the EU.
Another thing could be multipliers on property tax. For example, you would pay 0.75× of the property tax on your primary residence, 1.5× the property tax of your secondary residence, and start going exponentially on third, fourth, ... residence. Of course, there would be loopholes (like owning properties through companies), and these loopholes would need to be closed.
You could also tax buy-backs and dividends. (If a company buy their own shares, they have to pay a 50% tax on it)
There are a lot of possible implementations that could add up to each other. It's a fallacy to just point at the bad ones and say "look it doesn't work!"
The main issue is that there has been a transfer of global share income from labour to capital in the last 50 years. However we expect to pay for pensions just by taxing labour. It doesn't matter if there are less young people, because (as shown by GDP growth) they are producing more overall, but misinformed politicians use this argument because they don't understand that these folks didn't profit from the increase in productivity. We need to fairly take a share from this productivity increase and distribute it as pensions. The goal is to pay for what we promised, while relieving burden on young people.
With power, comes the ability to change systems so those with wealth/power do not lose it.
There are exceptions, but that is the rule.
And you only get to do that once.
A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.
To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.
Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.
But yes, global co-operation to enable a large enough tax on wealth is not going to happen any time soon. A more likely scenario is that as automation develops and as the share of income that capital gets grows, the working class will end up in a position bad enough that capitalism will collapse and be replaced with something else. Hopefully with something better, but could also be worse.
> Tax wealth
But I don't think even all the nominally socialist parties in Europe are really socialist either.
The solution they are applying now is a dead end, literally. It doesn’t scale, the only place it leads to is people guaranteed to die “at work”.
And elephant in the room, people in their late 60s aren’t even close to productive compared to the younger employees and if you lose your job in your 50s or early 60s you’re condemned to a decade or 2 of being supported by the family if you’re lucky.
So a person in this position is a hidden “tax” on the tax payers in the family, or on the companies who still employ them, if any still have them at that age. Countries are better off just directly taxing the companies regardless of whether they hire 70 year olds. But that won’t happen.
2) Consume more
3) Have less kids
4) Live longer after the retirement age
Productivity increased a lot but expecting it cover all four is way too optimistic.
Getting terminated at old age is already a huge problem made worse by delaying pension. And it will get even worse as families have to subsidize their elderly even more, making it even less likely to have more (or any) kids.
The current crop of leaders put the entire burden on average Joe. Companies are insulated, always one restructuring away from solving their problem.
And then we wonder why populists win everywhere...
Yes.
He retired last year. He didn't have an easy life. Very few jobs would benefit from his work and continuing working would have a great toll on him.
If you want your parents to retire earlier than the population-averaged system can allow, you're free to do it a non-averaged way.
If he voluntarily chose not to raise kids, not even adopted ones, then he placed himself at the mercy of strangers. This may or may not end well, depending on how much spare resources they have.
Yes. Looking at my country, we've applied economic liberalism without any positive results at scale. I would prefer we go back to taxing companies more, go back to taxing the rich on their assets and crack down on fiscal fraud (20B€ estimate, about 6% of the national retirement cost).
Instead the government privatizes services that used to bring a steady income and defunds hospitals, education and public research.
Long term: incentivize to have more kids.
this will solve the problem in ~25 - 30 years.
but that's too late for most voters and politicians today...
there should be a term for that? how about democracies demographics dilemma?
There does not seem to be a strong correlation between countries which make it easier and more affordable to have children, and the replacement rate.
Those costs continue, and now you have fewer young people to pay for it - and more elderly that will need assistance. It is vicious.
Some countries like the US have skirted past this problem due to immigration. Others like Japan have not have much immigration and are beginning to suffer the effects.
But every country will face it in the long run.
The cold hard fact is that when people are educated and have access to healthcare, they simply stop having enough kids to meet replacement rate - even when wealthy and when having great support systems.
Humans do not act like most species. We do not form neat equilibrium with our environment based on available resources. That kind of logic didn't apply the moment agriculture was developed.
It's not an unfunded mandate running on deficit spending.
So probably it won't be wiped away by a global monetary crisis that forces us to cut deficit spending and reduce pensions.
The highest total tax rate in the world perhaps?
Denmark is like all the other Nordic countries culturally, except they have much easier direct geographic lines to Central Europe. So it’s basically what you get when you combine the Nordic model (tiny homogenous Lutheran population) with more advantageous geography. Finland is Denmark with extremely unfortunate geography.
The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.
And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.
Marxist-Leninist countries typically don't have high taxes. Which is kind of obvious as the state doesn't rely on taxes for income. North Korea claims to have eradicated taxes.
> And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.
Shared history sure: they were geographically very close to each other, or even under shared rulers (e.g. Finland under Sweden for half a millenium), Scandinavian languages are essentially dialects of each other, they were all part of the wider European socialist and labor movements etc. The religion and Lutheran churches opposed development if anything.
The Nordic system is not very radically different from the continental Europe in general, more a matter of degree.
Perhaps, with major conceptual gymnastics, state ownership can be seen as "taxing" potential private capital gains. But this is kind of the point of state socialism.
Societal coherence has been aided by the isolation, and here is the hot take: this cannot exist in "diverse" societies. Not because of bullshit genetic superiority justifications, but because no diverse society has so far demonstrated the capacity to have a shared purpose, coherence and high degrees of trust.
And yes, I do find monoculture societies (including denmark) very boring, and I believe diversity has other great benefits. But societal stability and long term prosperity in that sense? Doesn't look like it.
Before someone mentions the US as a counterexample, do not forget that all the prosperity of the US came from basically seizing an underutilised (in the industrial sense) resource rich continent, and now it is falling apart by internal divide.
And if you gave me a choice between a world divided in small Denmarks or between the contemporary re-armament of the west due to the election of a populist buffoon combined with decades of mismanagement of a unipolar world, I wouldn't think twice.
I don't know much about Denmark but somehow I doubt that this attitude extends to taxing rich pensioners more (since they didn't contribute enough).
I feel they could do better than that with all this wealth.
You buy something dirt cheap for less than 80k USD. It's not great, it's old run down. But if you do minimal repairs and don't live the high life, you can get by with very little.
But if you want a new car and nice comfy house in a decent location, with all the modern amenities, well, that's expensive.
brother rusted out farm houses 2 hours from any office building, let alone one that hires programmers are like 350k in rural states. Idk where you live, but it ain't Earth.
For those who don't want to click, a house in Des Moines for $125000 - this was the very first house that came up when I searched des moines real estate, I didn't bother to look farther.
https://www.boligsiden.dk/tilsalg/villa?sortBy=timeOnMarket&...
I'm not suggesting that this high life or secret to happiness. Just that of you want to work less, you can choose to spend less.
EDIT: reporting back from Steele, looks like there's an undeveloped acre next to a highway and a power junction for ~75K, it's under 80k so I guess you know where to find me pitching my tent.
With what money? The poor folk don't have any by definition, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, which leaves... who...?
What does '1925' mean? No more shein plastic semi-disposable clothes that fall within what 1920's would consider sci-fi dystopian, universal basic income disposable clothes? Or hormone/chemical saturated 'food' that they wouldn't recognize as such? Or huge McMansions made of literal urea board and plastic extruded chemical 'luxury vinyl' floors? Brand new technology such mass produced cars, affordably available to the average person?
Only half of US households had electricity. I imagine many of the ones that were electrified didn’t have washing machines.
Likewise, about half of US households had indoor plumbing. So we’re not talking about giving up multiple bathrooms, we’re potentially talking about giving up bathrooms, period. Do you enjoy outhouses? I don’t.
Only one spouse working? That’s a myth. Who do you think was making those tailored clothes, washing the dishes, washing clothes by hand, and all that? Maybe you mean only one spouse getting paid to work, which is quite different.
You’re looking at a life in a small, drafty house that’s very cold in the winter and excessively hot in the summer (my houses were like that in the 1980s, even), crapping in an outhouse, and washing clothes by hand. But you won’t be washing a lot of clothes, because you’ll probably only have one or two sets.
If this lifestyle sounds attractive to you, you can have it right now for quite cheap.
Organic fresh food you'll have no fridge to keep in.
I bet you'll not be able even start a 1925 car without proper training.
I, on the other hand, prefer 2020 standard of life so I’m going to keep working.
Making kids easier to have really only has two real options:
1. Go back down the development timeline of a nation and remove rights from women (bad).
2. Implement more social programs to incentivize children.
The reason we need to do 2 now and not in the past is we've developed. Women have rights now, and we need real reasons for them to have kids, not fake reasons like we had in the past.
Pretty much the only people holding up births in the US is young people who accidentally got banged up. That demographic has only been shrinking as access to contraceptives and education goes up.
We don’t want to remove privileges from people, we want to add on incentives. Currently, there’s a million and one incentives not to have kids.
In principle I think some kind of wealth tax on fortunes above a certain level would be a good idea. But there are a lot of practical implementation problems in terms of identifying and valuing illiquid assets. Like for example I have friends who own forestry land (for softwood timber harvesting) in a foreign country. Those assets have some value but trade infrequently so there's no reliable market price. And they probably hold the assets through a foreign corporation rather than directly in their own names. What is a "fair" amount for them to pay in taxes, and how would the government enforce that in a consistent and cost-effective manner?
1) I'm amazing, I can solve any problem, I'm enlightened by my own intelligence, I'm the mover and shaker who drives all worldly productivity, and I do it by wrangling the newest technologies in the most imaginative creative and intelligent ways, no problem is too great for my superior intelligence!
2) Pay taxes? Ah but, uhh, that's impossible; like ... who decides? There, there's a dealbreaker for you! Hah! And anyway how much? I.. I... there's complexity, don't you know how difficult and complex it is to ... own a forest? Nobody could make a decision, I can see already that the combined might of a nation's experts could not come up with a figure, forget AI, this is just ... give up already, come on, some problems are forever out of reach.
Retirement age in Australia is 67. A report from 2024 going on the 2022/23 FY said the average age at retirement (of all retirees) was 56.9 years. People typically plan for 65.
Couldn't find Danish data, but 43% in AU rely on a government pension. 27% on superannuation or similar (I assume this will grow a bit). Those reporting no personal income is down from 24% to 12% over the last 10 years.
Here, companies compulsorily pay 11.5% into super funds for staff.
All that said, I'd rather see more support for people living in their prime rather than being tied to a desk. I don't see the point in purely waiting until retirement.
the later you retire the less money you need. So if you are not personally ready why did you fund that much while if you sant to go sooner you need to save anyway.
What we should be doing is aggressively cutting the cost of living so that people who want to can afford to retire while still maintaining some reasonable quality of life. The number one thing that would help is to set policies that make it easier to build more housing because that's the largest expense for most people.
Denmark’s economic prosperity comes from investment in free higher education for all, generally healthy lifestyles and the flexicurity-model, which provides a flexible labour market and promotes risk-taking.
Their model obviously works well.
How does the US compare / contrast?
Canada is close in some respects.
e.g. some examples from this list (% immigrant population): - Qatar (76%) - Australia (30%) - Canada (23%) - Belgium (20%) - USA (15.2%) - Denmark (14.2%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...
What makes Canada's immigration policy sensible in your mind?
Extending the retirement age doesn’t really help the situation much, as you need younger and cheaper pilots to fulfill the roles of pilots who are retiring.
The problem is, becoming a pilot takes a fair amount of time, over $100k in training fees, low pay for a while until fully certified with hours in, a very mobile lifestyle, and now you are subjected to physical as well as mental demands of the job certification standards.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26132...
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-problem-with-u-s-health-care-isn...
Without NPs and PAs, I'm sure there would be a shortage of healthcare providers.
Well, guess what? I now also have rationed care. I have to wait six months just for a colonoscopy, plus I pay twice as much for the privilege!
Which obviously means we need 2-3x as many.
1 out of every 7 medical schools currently active in the US was founded in the year 2010 or after. That's a veritable bonanza in medical school creation, facilitated by the AMA.
The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)
It gets interesting when different demographics start imagining that their ideal union would protect them from other demographics: Commonly, older people like to think of unions that will protect them from losing their jobs to young people.
Then when I’m working with college students and they start discussing hypothetical unionization, they come up with ways to think the union will give them more jobs by protecting them from the old people “hoarding” the jobs. (Sorry, that’s the least likely outcome for a union)
What’s most interesting is that the people I know who are in unions (non-tech industries) don’t hide the fact that decreasing labor supply to increase their own demand is exactly what they expect from a union. The first time you hear someone complain that a non-union worker is “taking food off their table” by simply doing their job you realize that it’s not as simple as Unions versus Corporations like we’ve been led to believe. The Unions are advocating for the people in the union, not workers everywhere.
Bear in mind it's completely normalised for companies to charge higher prices in one market than another, and put barriers in place to make sure customers in the more expensive market can't just pay the lower price. So all the union is doing here is bringing it closer to a level playing field.
Even the cost of PPL, the lowest license on the path, is around $10,000 while the ultralight (European)/sport pilot (US) is over $6,000. From that you need CPL (commercial), multi-engine, complex aircrafts, instrument rating (bad weather or night) etc., that takes time and money most people cannot afford.
It can have its place, i.e. a way to balance bargaining power with the employer. It’s inherently anti meritocratic though.
In some cases it’s not about merit or about limiting supply however. In some cases it’s impractical to test someones work continuously, so instead it becomes honor based. That is, you are expected to go through an elite track and succeed in an exam once and then you are good for life unless you commit fraud or show gross incompetency.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-professional-licensing-a...
(it has something to do with profit)
It's easy to have really good health outcomes at really low cost if you just fabricate the data. It's easy to export lots of doctors if you force them to work abroad, force them to pay most of their salary to the government and hold their families hostage to ensure compliance.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/23/cuba-repressive-rules-do...
Much less so to the doctors themselves, which frequently have to work in what amounts to conditions of indentured servitude. And they have no other option, as working as a domestic doctor in Cuba typically pays less than being a taxi driver.
To be honest, I'm not convinced of your explanation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medic...
A recent form of profit seems to be offering cheap treatment/medical tourism
https://www.cubamundomedico.com/en/university-of-medical-sci...
Seems impractical for USians, though.
When you try to build a society around human needs instead of capital needs, you end up with different priorities. It's that simple.
If anyone thinks they're making the big bucks and accumulating "soft power" by training a bunch of doctors then selling treatments to Americans for cheap, I'm not sure they can be helped.
I wondered about why there were almost always cuban medics, doctors, nurses etc. in action, when there has been some larger catastropic event in the world, and you could see them in the media.
Why is that, I thought? That doesn't fit being sanctioned by the US(and vassals), being poor in general, and so on.
That's how I became aware of ELAM.
And made up my mind the way I described. Can't help it :-)
I think the word for that is capitalist realism. You cannot imagine a motive beyond calitalist logic, but that doesn't mean nobody else can.
I'd feel offended if the YOU in "You cannot imagine a motive beyond calitalist logic, but that doesn't mean nobody else can." was addressed to me, personally.
Or was it just meant as a general description of the concept?
I think the system has failed at this point, when you are expected to work that long.
The Japanese faced this earlier and harder than Europe, with about 30% of their population being past the retirement age. They increased their productivity very significantly, but it's still not enough, and a lot of older folks in Japan keep working well past the retirement age, sometimes even re-hired by the companies from which they had retired.
Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.
What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/
How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.
Or people in big cities have plenty of opportunities and interests than just to have children.
People often want to live in big cities due to social reasons, not just due to employment opportunities.
This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.
The thing is, there is not much you can change in peoples' behavior. So your only option is to stimulate the behaviors that you want.
The other way around is more difficult to quantify, and a lot of demographic studies look at immigrants from poor countries.
They don’t speak English and I’m not sure if they will assimilate well. I already see street vendors, trash everywhere, and other 3rd world behavior in some parts of SF.
I’m an immigrant from 3rd world. It’s pretty sad to see here.
The unaffordable housing cost is entirely an artifact of urbanism gone wrong.
If you go outside of big cities, land price is not an issue. At all.
Barrie is still in the general Toronto area, so it's expensive. Sudbury further north that is definitely not a part of Toronto anymore, has very reasonable houses for ~$400k, or 5 years of average household income in Ontario. This is well within the normal "affordable" range, so a 20-years mortgage will be around 30% of income.
The problem is, people _can't_ live in Sudbury because there are no jobs there!
Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries. It was only when the postwar regime of making new housing illegal took hold, and housing prices inevitably spiralled out of control, that they stopped.
> Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.
Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.
> Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.
Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.
The causes of the population decline are a) women marrying later, or not marrying at all, because they have the option of a career and prefer that b) families that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education. Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.
How practical is raising kids in a 20m2 studio? Especially if you've got multiple. I'd bet not nearly as practical as in a house. Plus the recent trend of building lots of smaller apartments instead of a bit bigger and way more practical ones.
London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.
> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.
Oh, I agree. However, for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.
> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.
Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!
> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.
It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.
> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.
Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.
> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.
Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
And its population in the 1930s, with a healthy fertility rate, was 11 million.
> for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.
Maybe - bear in mind that building costs are much higher out in the country. But assuming you build a big house, what would you do with it? I guess all the cleaning will help make life less boring.
> It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.
The pandemic did a lot of economic damage, and many jobs stayed in the cities or are rushing to return there now.
> Europe has free (or cheap) education.
But much stronger womens' rights and correspondingly low marriage rates.
> Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
In Japan? Maybe because of all the cash subsidies for moving out with children.
But the current drop below the replacement rate is all due to increased density. If you look at the stats, the urbanization percent stayed flat. However, more and more people are moving into a smaller and smaller set of large cities.
I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.
The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.
Setting aside the issues of declining birth rate for a minute, this seems like a reasonable adjustment to the other factors?
There's the flip side if the coin though: old people are healthier in Denmark (vs US for example [1]) due to the social welfare system. Well, that system needs to be funded. With the aging population, the costs are rising but contributions are (relatively) declining. That's why there's a push for higher retirement age. It's either this, or defunding the social welfare programs, or immigration. That last one isn't a viable political option in Denmark at the moment.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/02/05/older-people-are-...
My dad just turned 78 and has really slowed the last 5 years. Longer life says little about quality of life.
The policy for retirement age is related to when society sees fit to sustain someone that does not work. I think it has more to do with how the society sees the elders and what it can afford than to the goals of specific individuals.
I've been traveling for holidays every year since I was 25 for at least 3 weeks every year, loving it so much. First it was backpacking, now it transitioned into a bit more luxury as I got older.
You don't know if you'll be hit by a bus next year, retirement is a silly milestone to focus on.
Retirement age has not gone up since it was created in 1940s. Not crazy to raise it a little.
Quickly looking at Denmark articles, it seems they’re raising the age to adjust to life expectancy increases as well.
I don’t see this a sign of the system failing.
Since 2010, the retirement age for women has raised from 60 to 65. Bringing it in line with the male retirement age.
See https://www.thetimes.com/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/st...
The age (for both) is gradually rising to 68.
Source https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-...
The raise to 68 will happen, but it has not happened yet. So, I think to frame my comment as “simply untrue” is disingenuous at best.
There was a steady rise in life expectancy at retirement age in the UK until 2020, then something happened and it's fallen significantly. My guess is that it will rise rapidly over the next 15 years and this will be regarded as some sort of triumph for the public health system (unless there is another pandemic of course).
Commercialize GLP1s.
Spend it on wars.
This system was working back in 1860, but it is a Ponzi scheme in decline for the past 50 years. And there is no way out, most people rely on state pensions to live after retirement; it is the perfect trap.
If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic.
But the pension system in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now. This can only work with a steadily growing economy which continually generates more revenue when more people retire. In some sense it is a literal Pyramid scheme, in which the obligations are continually pushed to younger generations, which have to contribute based on how many pensioners there are.
Especially now as EU economies become weaker this issue becomes bigger and bigger.
Their retirement savings can be in public company stocks instead of government guarantees but that only works if there are people willing to buy those stocks (ex: younger people saving for retirement).
In a world with forever imploding consumer aggregate demand, there is no safe asset.
Productivity gains will also be swimming against the stream because scale advantage will deteriorate in all sectors.
And that's fine because it means consumption is lower too.
Whatever you accumulate for retirement (cash, stocks, gold, state pension points) it only represents coupons for your share of the economy of the future. Details may differ but fundamentals are the same: it a promise that the future generation will share some of their yield with you.
You're talking about a system of pension by capitalization, like in US, which comes with its own problems.
Namely that if you reach retirement age during a crash like in 2008, you're screwed. You have to work 5 more years hoping the market recovers in the meantime, or retire anyway and get way less than you put in.
Denmark has private pensions like the 401k system in the US.
People can start tapping into these up to 5 years before they are 70.
In reality most people will go down in time and partially tap into private pensions and saving long before they turn 70.
This is opposed to other European countries, like Germany, that does not have these private pensions, but only retirement insurance.
Just as in Germany Denmark funds it's pensions through taxes, Germany additionally funds them through employee contributions.
In Denmark you have ratepension, which truly is an investment account and not an insurance product.
Hopefully US people realize that this is also how US public pensions (social security) actually works.
And this is the case in all western countries.
It is just being realized in different ways.
Fundamentalle there are 3 ways to cope
1. reduce pensions
2. Raise taxes
3. Decrease amount of benefit receivers.
Denmark choose number 3
[0] Figure 2.7 of the Danish Government report "Økonomisk Analyse: Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser i 2018" - https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-ind...
Also the Chinese immigrants in question, like many others, usually immigrate seeking a better life, it's a strong self-selection filter. Middle Eastern immigrants of last 10-15 years in Europe are refugees, displaced by wars; they did not choose Denmark (or other Western European countries) because they planned to integrate and to prosper there, they ran there to merely stay alive. They need a lot of help adapting. Even if they are very willing to work, they may lack the knowledge required for gainful employment, and there are only so many dish-washing and trash-disposal jobs.
Those who adapt can make it big; consider people like Freddie Mercury or Nassim Taleb.
It is about race, and here is a commenter saying it explicitly, while you know others resort to dog whistles and other workarounds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44091194
The problem with immigration isn't immigrants, it's racists. Immigration has never caused me any problem at all - it's added a lot to my life and my communities, in fact - and I've lived around many immigrants.
> Chinese immigrants are usually an economic boost
Chinese immigrants were hated and discriminated against for much of US history, going back over a century. You could hardly pick a worse example for your claim.
The US is built by uneducated immigrants - including from China - who came to the land of freedom and opportunity. China was a land of extreme poverty and illiteracy for much of US history (something Western countries had a hand in causing, and I'm very glad for people there that they have so much more prosperity now).
(However, the most prosperous Chinese people are in the democratic areas, Taiwan and, until recently, Hong Kong. It's freedom and democracy, not culture and language that matter. Give people freedom and they prosper.)
It's all just stuff fabricated by racists to rationalize their prejudices. Look at the horrors Europe has inflicted on itself and the world due to these prejudices and rationalizations - the most destructive events in human history. Enough.
Racism is the problem.
Immigrants everywhere come with a language barrier. If you live in the US, very probably your ancestors did. It's the same with every first generation from everywhere.
And then their children turn out to be some of the most productive and contributory to a nation (in my experience), even despite some of the headwinds.
Sorry, I don't buy that argument re: second generation. I've lived and seen it. Perhaps my lived experience isn't representative but I don't see second generation citizens turning to crime or radicalisation in huge numbers. I see them at work, and looking after their families. I fear the brush you are using is so broad as to, sorry, be useless.
"The study has faced criticism over its methodology, as it only studied rape convictions in Sweden. Experts point to the fact that just a small proportion of rapes in the country are reported to the authorities. Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminologist at Stockholm University, dismissed the study as “meaningless” as it only examined figures for convicted rape. “They’ve only looked at convicted people, and they make up a fraction of all rapists,” he told Swedish broadcaster SVT."
Even ignoring the above, I can think of many reasons, statistical and otherwise for the apparent difference. Perhaps you should try using your brain matter to do the same rather than just posting random links.
I repeat: I don't see second generation citizens turning to crime or radicalisation in huge numbers.
They actually go lots of places. How are there so many refugees in the US (a good thing)? Canada and Mexico aren't places producing a lot of them.
It's a major issue of international law, as people who are anti-immigrants try to insist refugees stay in nearby countries.
Basically the state spends to much money on humans in general. A young qualified immigrant might have a less negative impact than a slightly older German person, but both of them will be money sinks in the long run.
Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.
The only valid solution is to reduce the spending per person, both birthrate and immigration will only delay the problem.
Denmark should be in a slightly better position than Germany since their health system is cheaper.
I need to see some data backing this. Also regardless of stats, many war refugees(the net negatives as told by media) are actually highly qualified but the asylum process and qualification recognition process is eternal. On top of the trauma and uncertainty, they also need to learn a new language, find a new community, patiently go through all the dystopian meetings, cope with their loss of loved ones.
In reality, it is possible for them to be net positive because if things were faster, they would often out qualify the average locals and this also has some effects on wage and market(over supply, constant demand and all the economics).
Regarding your other point: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/publications/oec...
The liked pdf there gives a good overview.
> they would often out qualify the average locals
That's definitely not true, which is why they want to immigrate to those countries in the first place.
I think, if you are concerned with the cultural shift, you can give immigrants temporary term VISAs and make it clear their stay is going to be strictly temporary. That was supposed to be how the Gastarbeiter system works. Thing is, when you have already on boarded a foreign worker and have had them working for you for 2 years already, you don't want to let them go and replace them with a fresh foreign worker who you have to retrain.
My girlfriend asked me once in a Restaurant (Cafe Norden in Kopenhagen) why I was ordering in English. Then, I spent the complete evening ordering everything in Danish, to always receive answers in English. And this nearly everywhere (not my bakery, the girls there could not speak a word of English, this was an exception). This was in the early 2000's. This never happened to me in all the other countries I have been living in. A Danish colleague simply told me that he does not like to listen to broken Danish, better switch to English.
Still have a lot of friends in Denmark, integration there is not easy, even for highly qualified people from the EU.
In the US, Italians, Irish, and Germans, as just a few examples, all were treated as unassmilated aliens. People say the same things, generation after generation about newcomers. If you moved to a country with a different language and culture, you might make an effort to learn the language but you would still think, read, etc. in your native language. Your kids would know both languages; their kids would of course speak the language of their surroundings.
What solves these problems is a fundamental belief in freedom for all. People don't need to speak your language to be your equal and be just as human, with the same rights as you.
Here's Benjamin Franklin (Palatine refers to the Holy Roman Empire or Germanic regions, depending on the source):
"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy...
[1] https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/35314239/sre...
You can look at any country in western europe to see how it's not.
In practice that rarely goes as intended. The first political party to say, "We changed our minds, you can all have citizenship," gets to secure power with an influx of loyal voters.
Before: 5 million illegals or immigrants.
Party A passes law making them all citizens.
After: Party A always wins because large portion of the new 5 million vote for Party A
Conversely, if this hypothetical party had a secret agenda to pass the law when they get elected, but they kept this a secret until then... first of all they will probably lose of voters in the next election. Also, they might find out that former immigrants do not automatically reward this behaviour in terms of votes.
I do not find this scenario particularly realistic.
In America, we discovered basically by accident[0] how to bring in large groups of people and have them be economically and socially productive. Specifically, we had very generous family reunification programs, which outsourced the question of "what immigrants do we admit" to immigrants who had already successfully integrated. Effectively America became an invite system. The end result is that, for basically any background, every American city has a large and established immigrant population from that country for new immigrants to fall back on.
Other Western countries (e.g. western Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, and Japan) didn't do this. Instead, they treated immigration as a transaction: you can't come in unless you have some immediately beneficial purpose, and permanent residency is going to be an even higher bar still. What this gives you is immigration systems that select entirely for disaffected, college-educated workaholic youths with no connections to the local city. To put it in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney:
"America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic. In the United States, they don't recognize differences[1]. They don't recognize First Nations. And there will never be the right to the French language."
These words are telling, in ways Carney probably didn't intend. He is proudly admitting that the thing that sets Canada apart from America - the thing that they should fight with military force against a wannabe dictator with annexation dreams - is the fact that they can't integrate people worth a damn.
[0] Family reunification visas were originally intended to deliberately preserve racist prejudices in the US immigration system. This backfired comically.
[1] ...has this guy never heard the phrase 'African-American' before?
So you can reduce pensions, improve the situation for the youth, take efforts to get an improved birth rate, making use of the resources lost to pensioners, and then maybe you can raise the pension later on once you realize things are stable.
I’m an immigrant, and I think at least where I live in USA we need to stop immigration from any random place or of people who refuse to assimilate.
The more old people there is the more taxes you need.
More taxes - economy must grow. And it can’t grow if working population is shrinking
The centre right often argue for less taxation ‘to grow businesses’. The argument being that the economy grows and that’s how the money is recouped. At least that’s what’s happened here in New Zealand.
Looking past ones next pay day does seem universally difficult.
Birthrates seem very hard to change and even if change would happen it is much too slow.
Germany did the experiment on immigration and has not seen GDP growth for half a decade. There the system is failing far worse in some ways, but in Germany employees are paying directly for the pension plans, so the state just raises the employee contributions.
Also, the beaurcracy is the real culprit for growth.
I suggest instead altering the male/female ratio, so a stable or growing population can be maintained at lower TFR. Technically, filter sperm to remove those with Y chromosomes before artificial insemination.
Also, that's a wild solution. You'd have to do away with monogamy which would cause some pretty insane societal shifts. However, as a straight guy I can see the appeal lol.
I'm imagining it becoming a social norm for single women to have (at least) a single child. Perhaps they'd team up to make raising them easier, forming loose family-like units. Romantic attachments would be optional.
One consequence of such a situation would be an incentive toward private positive eugenics. Women would prefer semen from top quality donors.
People simply can't afford to send a kid to pre-school childcare because it's 2 or 3 thousand GBP per month. So you have to stay at home to look after them, but then you can't afford the rent/mortgage and/or food because you're not working. Woe betide you if you earn over 1 penny over 100K GBP because then you get zero help with costs.
They need to provide more government funded (i.e. universally free non-means-tested) pre-schooling like they do for 5-18 year olds.
If someone tried to implement it- aside from the obvious problem of authoritarianism- the resulting male minority would live life in romantic "easy mode" so people who want the best for their kids would want male children and rebel against a system more likely to give them female children who would find romantic prospects difficult.
I suppose if someone invented a way to alter sexuality to allow straight women to opt into becoming gay the romance problem could be mitigated, but I'm guessing that this is impossible given the human brain is only so neuroplastic in adult years.
Also sexual selection is a thing and I think we were really never meant to have this many men. Men seem good for being really successful or otherwise dying, not much in the middle.
But also, all this talk is purely from a reproductive standpoint. Human societies also need to consider fairness and rights.
No one wants to implement it.
And it makes complete sense. The reality is having a child kind of sucks for a woman, and I, nor anyone else, can blame a large portion of women for just saying "eh... no". I would probably say no, too, although it's hard to tell, because I'm not a woman.
Having children was once a boon, because conditions were shit. Now it's a burden. So, people will treat it as a burden.
Either make it less burdensome or revert women. Nobody wants to do the latter, so we must do the former. We have to invest in children, because children are a Nation's investment.
The elephant in the room that is getting some attention is demographic collapse. It’s been politicized, unfortunately, and seized on by strange people, but the fact remains that we’ve stuck our heads in the sand here. The seriousness of demographic collapse cannot be overstated. Social and economic collapse are inevitable unless something (morally licit, of course) is done to boost birth rates to above replacement rates, or kept at replacement levels. Once we reach a point of no return, it will be impossible to reverse course.
There’s a lot working against healthy demographics. We have decades of alarmist, misanthropic, Malthusian propaganda from types like Paul Ehrlich. We have now a hyperindividualistic culture - politically, socially, and economically - that is hostile both functionally as well as in sentiment toward the healthy function of family, and secondarily the community life it produces, as well as mental health). The logic of consumerism does not sit well with family life, because family life is not something that can be monetized. Consumerism relies on maximizing spending of the atomized individual, and in order for that to work, one must maximize the work done by that individual. Family life interferes with the regime of constant spending and the reign of total work. (Ironically, this makes the celebrated careerism of feminism an expression of this all consuming capitalist drive. It stigmatizes motherhood with demeaning labels like “stay-at-home mom” and celebrates the very office jobs that are the stuff of comedies.) Today, we understand everything with reference to the individual, even anachronistically reinterpreting history according to its alienating categories. Some governments have enacted pro-natalist policies, but they’re typically weak, superficial, and ineffective. We’re addicted to patterns of life formed over the last 70 years that we don’t want to let go of. Governments need to take much more serious measures that drastically favor, prioritize, and protect the family, through and through. Good luck doing that in our democratic societies. Addicts typically change only after they’ve experienced a crisis and hit rock bottom, and by then, it may be too late.
Immigration, of course, is no solution. The belief that immigration can fix the problem is itself rooted in the logic of hyperindividualism, where atomized individuals can be replaced by other atomized individuals to achieve net conservation or even gain according to the numbers. Cultural realities are totally ignored. The rate of immigration that a country can successfully absorb is not enough to outpace demographic decline. Exceeding that rate undermines the whole point of using immigration to compensate for demographic decline in the first place, since mass migrations are always harmful to host populations. You’re basically talking the collapse of the host populace and the formation of new ones in its place. Furthermore, immigration drains the populations of other countries, ones that are likely also facing demographic issues, which basically makes richer countries parasitic and callous about the continuity and futures of other peoples, until there are no more populations to drain of people anymore.
For an interesting case study, compare Japan (who refuses to allow mass immigration and is at risk of going extinct) and the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority). It'll be interesting to see in 50 years which one has had better outcomes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom
> Between 2001 and 2009, the Muslim population increased almost 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_Kingdom?wp...
Granted 2009 was a while ago but they're still the fastest growing population in the UK by a lot.
* well, not even current. 15+ year old
Stepping back a bit, Pew expects Islam to overtake Christianity as the dominant world religion in a few decades: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
If it grew 10x between 2001 and 2009 (starting from a very small base), then between 2009 and 2023 it grew by only 0.3x (see graph below).
So rate of growth went from 10x to 0.3x in around a decade, this is a hugely significant deceleration. It actually implies muslim community as portion of population is heading lower.
https://new.islamchannel.tv/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/63860...
However - if we're including atheist then clearly that'll be the majority position.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
The most recent birth rate stats I can find is 2005-2010 where Muslims have a birth rate of 3.0 while the rest of the country is at 1.8. Estimates say it's more like 2.5 now, but the current overall UK birth rate is only 1.57 from a quick Google.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2...
The same article also states that the average age for Muslims is much lower than non-Muslims as of 2016, 28 vs 41 for the UK.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/...
Maybe not in one generation, but in 2-3 generations, the UK will definitely turn Islamic, especially given the exodus of other communities. The irony is that the well-off British are settling in the UAE en masse, a distinctly Islamic country, and driving property prices up there. It's not that much of a concern since local housing is distinctly separated from expat housing.
I don't have a horse in this game - I'm Muslim after all. But I've experienced London pre-immigration boom and post-immigration boom and I definitely prefer the former, like some of my Muslim peers. The fabric of London has already been destroyed, especially when given the fact that London natives have been priced out of their own homes. Given what I've seen firsthand, and what's preached in the mosques of the UK by unleashed and unhinged Imams, the UK is on track to become a Muslim country in 2 or 3 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom
> the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority)
.. Seems like we've found a fix for ;) I wonder what's the difference between Muslims in the UK vs Japanese folks.
The scale of the problem is absolutely mind-blowing.
Not saying that the math would work out without problems then.
Whether nationalizing the entire US market would be worth it is left to the reader.
- increase productivity more than how much the workforce/receivers grow.
And if AI/robots eventually deliver, we're soon going to need a discussion about lowering the retirement age to 55 or even 50 if we don't want 30% unemployment anyway.
- indifferent to how much automation you have, people still need to pay for it, for money they don't earn.
A part of necessities are access to assets.
In the model you propose, inequality in itself will make those more expensive.
And as such, it feels like labelling that “raise taxes” is disingenuous.
Indeed the normal Understanding is not only about increasing rates - look at Switzerland eg.
But again, there's no basis to chose just your three items in particular.
True, but economic growth is very real.
And established elsewhere is this post, people apparently don't want to live like we did 50 years ago, so economic growth has merely been translated into inflated expectations.
It's been translated into far better services too.
* In some European countries. Many countries, however, have no meaningful avenues whatsoever for tax efficient pension saving. My own "pension fund" is just a regular broker account where I invest after income taxes, and where I have to pay capital gains as usual.
People with good private pensions can decide to retire 5 years before they officially retire.
Most don't want to so they have to compensate via taxes and higher pension age.
1. A state provided welfare benefit Or 2. A privately held long term savings/investment account
Would not be very motivational if you work hard your whole life and then you are considered a useless burden once you retire.
I don't know how this works in other countries. In Finland, it was established decades ago that pensions based on past contributions are constitutionally protected private property. Because people made explicit pension contributions and because the government promised that the future pension would be based on the individual contributions, the government can't alter the deal substantially without a constitutional amendment. If the contributions had been general taxes, or if the promised pension had been independent of the actual contributions, ordinary legislative process would have been enough.
The way it usually works is taxation from the current working generation pays for the current retirees. You are not paying into your own account for later (that is a private pension)
FWIW in the UK there are more children in poverty (so their parents too) than retirees who are in poverty. Kids don't vote though...
What's annoying about these debates is that the people who'd e.g. like to see pension cuts are either young and will change their mind later, or they are so rich that none of this matters to them anyway and the latter shouldn't even have a voice in this debate.
The issue is the "triple lock" (state pension rises by whichever is higher of either rate of inflation, average earnings increases, or 2.5%).
While laudable in intent, recently this has led to situations where pensioners are getting bumper increases linked to high inflation, while the younger working age people are getting stagnant wages while inflation shoots up.
This is is why pensioners are on average getting wealthier than the working population. Let that settle in for a moment: year after year pensioners are getting more wealthy than the working population that is financing the pensioner's increase in wealth.
This is universally accepted as unsustainable and deeply unfair on an intergenerational basis as the pensioners - who generally tend to own their own homes and also get various benefits like free transport and extra money for heating costs etc as well as benefiting from more generous policies/working conditions of the past like free university education and final-salary private pensions or purchasing government-built social housing at steeply-discounted rates, lower tax burden - continue to get more and more well-off while the people financing their retirement are struggling with soaring costs, expensive childcare, high education costs, zero-hour contracts, stagnant wages and all the rest.
Yet pensioners complain that they paid their taxes "all their lives" so they deserve to continue getting a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that they deserve to get wealthier and wealthier than the working population, all at the cost of pushing more children below the poverty line and financially crippling the current workers who have also paid their taxes all their lives (so far).
Eventually with policies like these, you run out of other people's money.
Trouble is that it is a political landmine since pensioners are a big part of the vote so no one has the balls to abolish (or at least reform) the triple lock.
It's mysterious why they haven't done that despite the fact that the demographic problems were known to occur up to 40 years ago. But you see the same thing with housing prices and rents, forthcoming problems were already obvious 20 years ago in every country, yet only few have tried to deal with them in time. Maybe someone else can explain where this inertia comes from, I always found it strange.
Because it goes against their personal interests.
They talk abiut the squeeze, if Birthrates increase too suddenly - workers would both have to pay for the elderly and the kids.
If one generation has a fertility rate of 1 child per woman, the next must have 4 children per woman to undo the demographic change.
The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.
The country and the individual has the same problem. But it also goes a generation further.
There was a link on HN recently which I can’t find. It discussed how we are in an unusual time, where kids can often meet their great grandparents. Previously people died younger, so couldn’t. Now people are having kids at an age where it will be unlikely for them to meet their great grandchildren.
I'm not sure that's true - people died younger, sure, but they also had kids much earlier. Even assuming 18 for first child(and it often was earlier than 18), you'd be a great grandparent at the age of 54 - and people have commonly lived that long even in antiquity.
The average lifespans was only 40-something until the 1850-1950 range.
I’m sure plenty lived longer, but the average was terrible.
"While the most common age of death in adulthood among modern hunter-gatherers (often taken as a guide to the likely most favourable Paleolithic demographic experience) is estimated to average 72 years,[169] the number dying at that age is dwarfed by those (over a fifth of all infants) dying in the first year of life, and only around a quarter usually survive to the higher age."
Etc.
The US since then only provides Israel with military aid (most of which is only allowed to be spent buying US-made goods). It’s more of a subsidy for the US military-industrial complex.
Also despite the military aid Israel still spends a much greater share of GDP on its military than most or all other developed countries (so the US isn't subsidising Israel’s unusually high birth rate).
That's a funny way to twist it. US is providing aid to Israel. Billions a year.
US also provides indirect aid, through protection or aid to neighbouring countries (e.g Jordan and Egypt) as bribes so they play nice with Israel.
And who knows, with the way the Iran thing is panning out, you might be paying a lot more if US decides to bomb Iran on Israel's request
If the US starts sending proportional military aid to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.75 vs Israel's 2.83) it will not "fix it".
The US provides and provided a ton of assistance to Israel but there’s a tendency online for people (probably mostly Americans?) to assign credit to literally everything that happens in Israel to US aid.
Israel exists outside of US-Israel politics and not everything (like birthrates) that happens there is because of the US. The US also supported/aided a lot of other countries that didn’t experience the same economic/industrial/technological development that Israel has in the last 30-40 years - some of it really is because of Israelis’ efforts and not just because of Americans’.
That’s one hell of a disclaimer on the statement.
Increase the number of (young female) immigrants
To me it seems rather obvious: you need both the will and the means to raise 3+ children.
The catch-22 is that the people you presumably want to be having more children— educated working professionals— have some of the highest social standards for child rearing.
In fact, they may majority be of subsistence in which case the entire dollar value of all of their stuff is simply the land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
In the places with high fertility rate, you will almost surely observe joint families. I'm from India where we have such demographic variety that you can see adjacent areas with completely different fertility rates. In one, you will see old-style large houses with courtyards and 15+ people in them living as a joint family. Invariably these people have more kids. But in the next town with more nuclear families and modernish apartments, you will be lucky to see 2 kids per family. [1]
This is what births the secondary economic incentives which are mentioned a lot in popular discourse. For example, if you're already living in a house with 15 people your financial realities will require a similar number of people in the next generation to continue the same lifestyle.
[1] Wealth is not a confounding factor here. The specific two areas I have in mind are both more or less equally wealthy, one has folks running a coconut business primarily and the other is a small town with the usual assortment of office jobs.
So … probably most straightforward solution is to update local zoning laws to encourage a more communal style of living. Not communes but more along the lines of suburbs-as-village.
Having a child has a significant impact on your professional career (women in particular). Even in countries with great parental leave, like Denmark, the absence still reduces the years of experience you would otherwise get. Once they are "ready" for a child, they are in their late 30's and barely have time to birth one or two babies and would probably not have the stamina required to take on more.
The social pressure of raising the perfect kid with multiple activities in their "spare" time is much higher today and require more from the parent.
Ideally, people should get children in their early 20's, when they are physically more fit to handle the pressure. Unfortunately the current education system does not combine well with young parents. The government would need to integrate child care in colleges so that the parents have somewhere to place the children while studying.
A truthful ad for working in an old folks home in the US would be, "slightly over median wages, but with inflexible and unreliable schedules, rampant industry wide exploitation of workers and their rights, likely multiple ownership changes of your place of business, caring for potentially deranged and violent individuals, high non-refundable monetary investment up-front, no guarantee of residency availability"
I really don't mean to get into the nitty gritty details - I'm not an economist and I'm not providing solutions, just stating what I see as the problem. I believe that we have enough resources, and there are issues getting those resources to where they need to go.
Example: Assume we do have a shortage of elderly care workers. Why is this the case? Could this be fixed by increasing their wages? Then that implores the question of who is paying for these increased wages, which is the question I'm not answering and I don't know enough to answer.
I just don't really believe that keeping the birth rates high is the answer to this economic problem. It might be a solution, but it's more of a band-aid than truly facing the issue. If you have a inefficient engine you can either figure out how to produce more gasoline (babies), or you can figure out how to produce a more efficient engine.
Well yeah, because it's difficult, taxing, often traumatic work that pays the same as any other nursing job with a higher QoL and social status. And even then they're pushing out all the actual nursing staff that pays well in favor of MAs/CNAs who get paid like shit.
I personally don’t think wages always correspond to how essential a job is, but for the sake of the argument let’s pretend that wages match the necessity of a job, its difficulty, educational requirements, etc.. In this case, I’d expect that we would see people move to jobs that are more essential than their prior job. I think this is more complex that just “poaching”.
Of course, those last two sentences are tongue in cheek.
The real problem is that certain segments of society are not compensated for their labor at a rate that would allow them to retire early, and may even have to work beyond retirement age in order to supplement their stipend. Worse yet, these people often work in sectors that offer few affordances for them to maintain their health into old age and may even push them into living conditions that are detrimental to their health (assuming their job isn't detrimental to their health in the first place).
Ideally, people would be able to retire when they want (within reason). The reality is that some people can retire at a relatively young age while others don't really have that option.
Ha. Total pipedream. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of our current economic system.
That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.
Sustainable population and economic growth at that rate can't happen indefinitely.
Some people have been vocally saying this system in unsustainable long term, just that Europeans governments never wanted to publicly admit this due to fears of loosing elections, so they kept kicking the can down the road.
It’s not really a Ponzi scheme, it is completely possible for the system to be balanced, it’s just very very hard to get people to vote for you if you say they’ll have less tomorrow
Definition of a Ponzi scheme: A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investor. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves.
https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...
That's exactly how pensions work in Europe. Replace "Ponzi scheme organizers" by "legally elected governments" and here you have it - you have a whole continent of people believing that their pension is a given. Not everybody may like it, but that's the hard truth.
In the US, people contribute towards a 401K, and choose how to invest, but typically pick up just the S&P 500 - anyway and at least that money is somehow what they have saved for themselves.
But I agree with your statement "it is completely possible for the system to be balanced" - yes a Ponzi scheme can be absolutely balanced, you just need enough participants ...
pensions on the other hand don't have the quality of deception and the value is straightforward - it redistributes wealth from the younger population to the older ones. this reduces the need for individuals to plan their retirements as the state takes care of it. as pointed by another post, you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side.
wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme? unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?
but i do agree that one should not think of pensions as a given. its worth pointing out that there are two types of pensions - defined benefits and defined contributions.
Writing this in an article about how a country rug-pulled it's young citizens is quite amusing.
If that's not deception, I don't know what is.
> you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side
Which hasn't been the case in how many years already?
No, not exactly, that's different.
> unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?
That's certainly contributions I don't like either, because of how this system is abused. But to be fair, unemployment benefits or healthcare aren't a pyramid scheme, because you aren't paying for the previous "investors" - you might get back what you contributed (with a lots of caveats). In the case of the pension system, you clearly pay the previous "investors".
Calling it something else than it is, only to taint the system and its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith, if not worse.
> the first pensioners didn't invest in the system
I agree with you .. I suppose you're making my point here?
> It's also not a pyramid scheme, since the structure is upside down
The structure would be upside down if the demography was growing as expected - and that's the core of the issue, why governments have to extend the age of the retirement: the burden of the pensions is becoming unbearable relative to the amount of active people.
> there is no recruitment.
No indeed, though if you decide to live in Denmark, you are not recruited, you're forcefully enrolled in this scheme.
> ... to taint ... its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith
There is no "criminal undertaking" here, the system is simply broken and you're saying things I didn't - I certainly don't blame the current pensioners, nor the active generation working for these pensioners - they are all victims of this system.
This is exactly what happens in Denmark - a balancing of the pension system.
Also,rgis has been planned since 2006 - so it is nothing new.
Hence only doing this for future pensioners will give equal time as reitred.
(at least, this is the core reasoning)
They could have easily worked 10 years longer instead of doing nothing but drinking wine all day and/or going out to restaurants in retirement. That is in between traveling to go out to restaurants and/or drink wine.
The boomers scammed us all and aren't done yet. They are going to make sure to bankrupt the entire system with healthcare cost before they go.
In some rich countries people spend now more years of their life out of work than in work because of much longer education and much longer lifespans. If you want to keep the same social standards, all other things being equal, you need to raise the retirement age.
Or some may say it got outdated.
It was started at times when the life expentancy was low. And it was given at age above the life expentancy. And in the beginning not to everyone. The retirement age got lower and given to broader set of population gradually. These moves made governments popular, so it was no brainer to introduce, on the expense of future generations.
Birth rates that can maintain the economics of relatively low retirement age could not be sustained without destroying the planet. Actually has to be reversed still as it went too far already and deteriorating as we speak, especialy with the ongoing large increase in the overall life quality - causing decreasing birth rate alone - and healt. The system was destined to fail. But how to take away rights? It is much harder than giving, especiallly when the adverse effects are for current voters, not future generations?
So the necessary steps are postponed, postponed, postponed yet again, for many decades, taking about necessity in many forms, meanwhile filling bigger and bigger holes in the budgets, through borrowing, making the problem worse, again for future generations. Very few countries do tiny adjustments, and even those are met with huge protests mostly.
I wonder what the future holds. Painful adjustments or more painful collapse later in some form.
I suppose increased life expectancy and fewer young people both contribute to worse dependency ratios.
Living longer doesn’t necessarily mean having more productive years than in the past. We simply have the medical tools to keep people alive even if they can’t much get out of bed.
Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.
Now people live way longer, but the retirement age never got adjusted properly to the new reality. So 15-20 years of retirement is the new normal.
In addition, way fewer young payers for the now old.
I think it is possible, but we need to raise (corporate) taxes a lot, and this needs to happen globally, as companies move.
As a star I would love to see global minimum corporate taxes, and then take it from there.
Isn't that something for the individual to decide, not the collective? Many derive from work a lot of meaning in life. If working is what makes some people happy, it would be nice to not punish people for working until they die.
> I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.
Absolutely!
Spend less, save more. Vote for governments that do likewise.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pensioners-incomes-...
They'll go directly from factory line to care home.
I knew a guy who worked full time at a bank at 85. He said all the time he didn't have to work but what else was he going to do all day? A big reason he was able bodied at 85 was from working and not sitting home all day.
I think we have confused retirement fund/planning marketing with reality.
The retired people I know are physical mess from retirement. Alcohol and restaurant food all the time, will be needing long term care much sooner than if they had worked longer.
Only if they are poor. If they're rich, they can continue "producing wealth" from interest and investments even after they're dead.
It's a silly thing to say, of course, but it's built into most people's assumptions who are discussing it.
I might be misunderstanding your point, but I think they might be? E.g. in the UK:
> By 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 34.1 million people
But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real problem is not about how the pie is split across generations, but about the realities of lifespans, economic production, and expenses. If you're responsible for funding the entirety of your retirement, all of this is abundantly clear. When you nationalize retirement, all sorts of budgeting tricks start happening, like "borrowing" to fund other programs, papering shortfalls via population growth, etc. Then you start getting age warfare when the govt has to eventually cut back.
You could dissolve the national retirement plan, but that seems like a bad idea for similar reasons as entirely dissolving national welfare and insurance programs. It will always be the case that some people, need some help, some of the time. I guess in my ideal world, it's reduced to a much smaller safety net, because the government is managing the economy well enough that the populace has the wherewithal to save appropriately, and they are educated enough to do so.
Having people fund their own retirement would be ideal from a economic standpoint, but given the histories and complexities of existing systems, it is probably not acceptable politically, or morally, in any country. Honestly it's a distraction.
At the end of the day, a country cannot tolerate too many freeloaders. It doesn't matter if they're pensioners or retired at 50, living to 100 hedge fund managers. Productivity is really the only thing that matters for a countrie's economic destiny.
Or a population that can produce the same amount of stuff and services with fewer and fewer workers. Fortunately that's what capitalism excels at.
Is it better that retirements are funded by this surplus from the increased productivity, or by direct taxation on the income of young workers? Income growth doesn't keep pace with productivity so it's an easy answer.
Taxing the income of current workers to directly fund current retirees is the real "snatching away what you produced". If more national pension plans invested in broad-based stock indexes instead they wouldn't need to take more and more money out of young people's pockets.
Capital ownership entitles you to its returns. Young workers typically don't own a lot of capital. So it comes down to either retirement plans owning it, which means young workers also get its returns when they retire. Or a small wealthy elite could own it all, and everyone else gets left out, reduced to moving a dollar from an youngsters pocket to a retiree.
This doesn't require any investment or technological development; it just requires making rational-but-politically-nuclear policy changes reducing the infinite tap of publicly-funded extremely-low-ROI medical expenditures on old people.
An absurd fraction of medical spending goes to protracting the suffering of old people just a bit longer. We can simply stop doing that, given the political will to do so.
Extending people's lifespans won't do much to alleviate these expenditures, except perhaps to slightly dilute the amortization schedule.
How these tax cuts are distributed over the population is... not very evenly. There was even an article yesterday in the NYT (iirc) that warned about wealth accumulation patterns in Sweden.
It is the same neoiberal experiment that the US has had since Reagan, just with some more social democracy.
I think it is a balance.
Auctioning this work to private companies should theoretically make it more cost efficient - and I think it is.
At least I hear that workers a much more stressed than they were historically, so I don't hope this comes with no benefit...
I personally find it hard to reconcile the concept of socialized healthcare with UnitedHealth Group being apparently the 7th company by revenue in the world, at least I don't think that's what Europeans would mean by "socialized".
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/denmark/usa?sc=...
So this raising of the retirement age will affect a huge portion of workers and 70 is OLD to be working full time for all but the most relaxed jobs. Most older folks I know have know being dealing with multiple chronic age related illnesses well before 70.
It's a financial goal that is literally based on how long you plan to live, aka, your age.
Let's say I have €100.000 in the bank and that's two years of expenses based on my budget. Can I retire tomorrow? Well, what's my age? and what X do I plan to add to my age to determine if that amount of money is sufficient to retire?
People are living and staying healthy for longer than they used to, while the overall population is aging disproportionally due to low birth rates. If they hadn't raised the retirement age, they would have to raise taxes very significantly.
People should remember that retirement is about making sure the people who are too old to work can still live respectably. It's not an end-of-life vacation.
Of course, it's still going to be massively unpopular. But the alternative is fiscal armageddon.
Or possibly making a trade off on any number of other areas the government spends money on, or raising taxes.
No wait I forgot, either pushing the burden onto labor or Armageddon, no alternatives
A lot of heavy lifting was done here.
With retirement at 70, manual labours can already stop dreaming of taking a rest before dying.
- force your women to work 9-5 (sell it under "liberation" label)
- force young people into crammed cities with $4k rent
- be relaxed on crime, don't prosecute or enforce anything where victim is another person
- observe that people don't replicate anymore
- import people from other (primarily 3rd world) countries
- become a 3rd world country
What happens to the West is insane to me, it's literally a case of social suicide in slow motion.
Sure you can climb a mountain, or cram in life experiences at 60+ if you’re in good health, but I think it’s better to do it as you go and enjoy your entire life.
In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future.
And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing?
Graeber's thesis of bullshit jobs becomes increasingly more convincing: work isn't about production, it's about social control².
If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well.
That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.
Debt servicing.
I have no specific figures to back this up, but my assumption is that as we become more productive, more credit is made available, which leads to bigger debts and asset price inflation. Because of the asset price inflation, the debt is not necessarily used for productive purchases but, for example, to pay more for existing things - the obvious one being a home. The productivity gains are therefore claimed by creditors.
It would be interesting to see how well productivity increases and debt growth (esp. private) correlate.
I wonder what a good answer would be here. Intuitively we are increasing productivity in activities that does not increase social welfare. Take corporate lawyering, marketing as an example.
https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/
Etc etc
It seems that significant amount of productivity gains are lost because of activities that profit from deception and counter activities that accounts for them.
Those who own the capital. The top 10%-1%. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
Reinvested to increase future productivity
To the top 1%. Technology advances rapidly, but work hours don't decrease.
Its an intrinsically anti-human system thats starting to need less and less people. How these surplus people are dealt with isn't going to be pretty... Hopefully it results in the actors, being human and all, having a social revolution and pivoting away from it.
That said I agree we should be further ahead in paving a way to paradise.
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes -- those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs -- a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or proles being able to afford intercontinental flights more than once in a lifetime?
Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.
> Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.
But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.
This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage. However, nobody wants to live at a 1930s living standard. It turns out that in aggregate people prefer to spend productivity gains on conveniences and higher standards of living than on working fewer hours.
Maybe not if you want to own a home. Asset price inflation is real. If you already own a home, sure.
- The productivity growth really has had incredibly strong deflationary effects. So much more, more diverse, tastier and healthier food for example, for so much less money.
- The growing affluence has really created incredible opportunities for scavenging from the waste stream. A practical example. About half of the food I eat is leftovers from a nearby school. I'm proud to be saving good food from going to waste _and_ it lowers our expenses quite significantly.
Keynes was almost right. He underestimated the ability of future generations to consume conspicuously. Also, the need for many to fit in by working, but I digress.
Many don't _have_ to work more and longer. I'm speaking of a large class, very much overrepresented on HN, of smart, healthy westerners with no dependents to care for. We have only one major problem. We live in this bubble nudging us towards conspicuous consumption - gently or less so.
My job closely resembles Keynes' 1930's prediction. Sometimes I work (much) more. Not because I need money, but because the job is interesting. Interesting as in, me learning, contributing something positive to other people's lives, growing my family's financial resilience and robustness, or just enjoying the flow.
If you think about it, there are fewer and fewer jobs that are genuinely useful.
I know it's a difficult topic, but I can't shake the feeling that we need some sort of government intervention in order to reorient the economy towards activities that actually benefit us.
Couldn't they, having the same standard of living as in 1930?
Whatever people save for retirement, cash or stocks or points, it only facilitates the said exchange, it doesn't somehow replace or alleviate it. It only works if the next generation exists and is prosperous enough to share their income.
Productivity gains are kept by the owners of the institutions as profits that made that productivity possible. Do you think YOU will work less once LLM tech is deployed at scale? Of course not, your company will pay you the same and expect the same work. Every company out there will do the same. They will reap the productivity gains.
Personally I think we should revert to the earlier system, where you are free to retire as soon as you want on your own money, but if you want the state (=other regular people) to fund your lifestyle, you need to be no longer fit for work
I also wonder what it would look like for the government to encourage (or even facilitate) "jobs for seniors" that only become available to you after you turn 60. They could be jobs that are, by design, low-risk, low-physicality, but medium-high mental stimulation.
Denmark’s population was 2.4m-3.5m in that period (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark)
Wikipedia cites Danmarks Statistik for the population numbers, the official government statistics.
The 2.4m is in 1900, 3.5m in 1930.
But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.
If this budget hits the PAYGO limits, which is basically guaranteed, that will trigger automatic cuts to Medicare, so they can backdoor cut the program without anybody voting for that.
Voters over 62 make up >25% of the midterm vote.
By 2030 - that number could easily be >30%.
What ended up happening is we rebalanced the program based on a lot of positive changes and used a huge ‘surplus’ to subsidize government borrowing, and nobody wants to adjust for any negatives ever.
Income Tax
$10k 6.2%
$50k 6.2%
$100k 6.2%
$150k 6.2%
$200k 5.4%
$300k 3.6%
$700k 1.6%
$1000k 1.1%
$5000k 0.22%
$10000k 0.11%
Bracket Marginal Rate
$0 - $176100 6.2%
$176101 - ∞ 0%
Once Boomers pass through the system and start dying off in significant numbers over the next 10-30 years there won't be any size differences between successive generations nearly as large. Gen X is smaller than Millennials, then Gen Z is between Gen X and Millennials in size, and the current generation is projected to be around the same size is Gen Z. This should make it considerably easier to keep the system working.
Polls show [1][2] that this approach (flat rate + 1% gradual rate increase) is the solution voters prefer by a large majority regardless of party affiliation when presented with all the solutions that have been proposed by politicians and experts.
Generally whenever Democrats in Congress introduce bills to address the problem this is the approach they go for, although sometimes they talk about keeping a lower marginal rate for people making between $176100 and $400000, like this:
Bracket Marginal Rate
$0 - $176100 6.2%
$176101 - $400000 0%
$400001 - ∞ 6.2%
According to them there are only three ways to fix Social Security: some combination of (1) raise the money it takes in, (2) reduce the amount it pays out, and (3) make up for any shortfall by paying some benefits out of the general budget.
They also say that #1 and #3 are off the table. Their proposals generally go for #2 via raising the retirement age. That does buy some time but not much, and runs into the problem that the Republican Party Platform says (caps in original) "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE", and Trump also keeps saying that which doesn't leave them any options.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/
[2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...
Look at all these people around you in their forties who are still renting. They are basically too late to buy. They will be "forever renters". This means they will have to work until death, as their rents continue to rise when their peers who owned homes took their downsizing premium and lived off of it for a few years.
What's crazy is the number of grown adults who think their 401ks will magically grow to fill the gap.
You just have to give up on the Santa Monicas, San Franciscos, and Manhattans of the nation. There's plenty of affordable housing outside the top tier cities, and modern tech has made it easier than ever to work from practically anywhere on the planet.
The only people in their 40s I know of who are still renting that I would consider "forever renters" are being extraordinarily undisciplined with their finances and spend what they could be saving towards a down payment on credit card debt they self-inflicted.
You may argue that the the value of the house will appreciate well in a good market, but there is nothing stopping you from taking the money you saved by renting and putting it in an appreciating asset.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/calculator/rent-vs-buy-calculator
a homeowner in that scenario can sell their home; a renter is in trouble
With a growing population of pensioners and a declining population of taxpayers many EU countries are walking towards a future where it is abundantly clear that the state can not finance pensions. Especially when at the same time their companies loose their economic competitiveness.
I do not believe that raising the retirement age in 15 years will be of any major help here. And it seems especially outrageous for the younger generation.
People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?
I am no economist but it is my understanding that all this extra money goes to the rich because they've entrenched themselves in positions where they can extract a portion of a person's income with no recourse.
It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.
I recall danluu blogging about how multiple times he made code fixes that saved the company more than his salary just in electricity. What I see is an incredible technical achievement but also I see how he's being exploited - the money saved is value he directly provided to society, yet he sees none of it. Where does it go? To people who are already rich.
People have far better lives considering all the things available to them compared to 50 years ago. Most people would not want to live life like how people lived it 50 years ago.
> It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.
This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.
Over the past decade life expectancy in developed countries first plateaued, then declined.
Yes, largely due to the pandemic, but that plateau was also the beginning of decline in some places.
Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.
Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.
Because it certainly does not go to the people doing actual work producing it.
It is not that it is hard because it is a controversial subject. It is hard because it is not one problem. To develop rejuvenation you would need to tackle hundreds of very difficult problems, both physiological and neurological, which individually, would represent solutions to critical conditions today (diabetes, dementia, ataxia, arthritis, many types of cancers etc etc).
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/adding-years-to-life-...
Is a lot easier than "rejuvenation", and a lot more attainable. And also something we do throw R&D money at.
I definitely don't think we have succeeded in "invented" this, but it surely has happened slowly over time. People in theirs 60s today are surely sharper than they used to be, with less chronic physical ailments.
But the end results is people living longer, and the solution still ends up being pushing back the retirement age.
Thus one is not able to collect retirement, because they are "young", while they keep trying to find a job, because "they are too old".
Meanwhile the politicians that decide these laws are enjoying their comfy life.
However, the state pension pay is so low that almost everyone gets a commercial pension. Usually, it's a salary deduction and employer match contribution scheme, so you can choose how much to save. At the moment, you can start drawing your commercial pension at age 57 (increased from 55).
See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/increasing-normal...
If my understanding is correct, Norway has a system based on investment in the country's economy, in particular oil production in the North Sea. And they are not needing the same austerity measures to retirement benefits.
The current system is just not broken but unfair. In many EU countries, people are not contributing for themselves, but for the previous generation being currently retired. In turn, it's supposed that babies born today will work for the pension of the currently active generation. This pension system is nothing else but a pyramide scheme and that scheme is now breaking due to a demographic issue - just like a traditional pyramide scheme would break because there are not enough participants to that scheme ...
The increased medical costs as we go, however, might actually make it worse, faster.
It's not so hard to save some money, do whatever you want in your 30s, then work until you're dead.
Australia doesn’t have enough money for that? No problem, just make everyone work longer.
As an individual if I don’t earn enough to cover my spending I have two choices.
1. work more
2. Spend less
In all these discussions we never see politicians do anything about spending less, they just throw us under the bus to work more, while of course exempting themselves.
People also focus on a fixed percentage being returned while ignoring the long term increase in productivity and people’s standards of living. In real terms people in 2025 get way more out of pension systems than people did in 1925, that’s as central to the problem as any changes in lifespan.
Historically payouts also benefited from rising productivity and populations but those assumptions are breaking down.
Let's see. If you pay 15000 euros per year for 40 years, and get 5% interest, that's 1,800,000 euros at retirement. Even if you held that in cash, a 30,000 euro/year withdrawal would last you to 130.
Assuming full employment every year is a mistake. Also, 5% interest above inflation is an unpredictability good return, especially if you’re assuming it’s a safe investment. The stock market has mostly done well over the last century but start in 1969 and the 40 year return on the S&P 500 was 4.2% after inflation. Things could be far worse over the next 40 years, the 20 year S&P returns have been as low as 0.6% over inflation.
Running the numbers assuming zero taxes and fees is a separate issue.
In US SS your spouse can collect benefits when you died at 22 if you had a kid together, you also can collect benefits if your disabled. There’s obviously not 1.8 million in your retirement account to fund such things at 22. Similarly the payout for a married couple is 1.5x if only one of them have ever worked because it’s not a requirement account it’s a social security program, and then 75% if the worker dies. No idea how your system works, but it’s common worldwide for pension programs to do such things.
I think the solution might be in taxes. No kid;you are taxed at 60% , one kid 50% two kids 40 % and three kids 30 % . 20 % for anyone with more than four kids.
VAT on people with kids 12.5 %
What would the age be to keep the same "ratio"?
It's the transition period that I am worried about, when large percentages of the population are jobless, but safety nets aren't yet in place.
Option A: Take your well-earned pension and enjoy traditional retirement.
Option B: Choose a dignified exit when life no longer feels fulfilling.
I've been thinking about this because retirement scares me. What's the point of reaching old age if your body and mind won't let you enjoy the freedom you've worked decades for? Between health problems, limited mobility, and sometimes poverty, many seniors seem to just... exist.
Not saying everyone feels this way! Plenty of people have amazing retirements. But shouldn't we have more control over our final chapter? Other countries already have compassionate end-of-life options.
What do you all think? Is having this choice reasonable, or am I missing something important about the value of those later years?
It’s hard not to feel like we’re all being shafted in comparison.
A bit of playing with chatgpt will dump the formulas required and even solve them for a given set of constraints. Basically one takes the average inflation adjusted of an investment vehicle, then solves for what percentage of income for a given timeframe, in order to return a portion of a persons income for another timeframe. Ex: given say the US stock market average return for the past 100 years, one wants to work for 30 years and retire for 30 years with a 70% of the final income, it works out to 8-9% of a persons income. Then shift the numbers to 40/20 years, cap the maximum payout at say the median income, and wow a pension system that grows faster than the rate of inflation, provides for a retirement age of ~60 and the percentage drops to ~5% or less.
People complaining about demographic trends are buying into the idea that the input dollars have to equal the output dollars, and its dumb, and isn't even the way the social security trust fund in the USA works. Which shows that its possible to ride out population bubbles, much less actually providing a long term savings vehicle that if it were run correctly would eventually be indefinitely solvent. But at least in the USA one party has consistently stood in the way for the past 40 years of solving some of these financial problems, and in fact seems to make them worse by flattening the progressive nature of the federal taxes through tax cuts which overwhelmingly target the groups most able to absorb higher tax rates. And the result are cases where single individuals single handily hold 2% of the wealth of their entire generation and the country looks like its falling apart and there is artificial scarcity everywhere.
PS: Now there are a number of ways this breaks, mostly around cases where inflation is eating up most of the compounding growth, but most sovereign governments are fully capable of solving these problems if they choose to.
Well, I guess you're not required to have a private pension scheme. But most jobs come with one, most unions enforce it.
I had one when I was sweeping the factory floor once a week at age 15 -- that was ridiculously because it all disappeared into administration fees.
But the answer is yes, of course you can. It's a free country -- assuming we're not annexed by the orange monkey.
How will this work realistically? How will you convince employers to keep workers employed till 70? Especially in fast changing fields like IT where a lot of old knowledge and experience gets considered obsolete by those screening resumes. Sure, people might survive longer, but that doesn't mean all workers will be equally mentally or physically fit to still perform well at some jobs at 70 as well as a 30 year old, especially if they're mentally or physically challenging jobs.
I'm not talking about government paper pushing jobs, but private industry jobs with international competition where you need to be agile and up to speed to survive as a business. This system worked for the boomer generation in slow moving highly regulated industries like steel, rail and automotive, where you'd spend all your life at one company who'd promote you and invest in your training till retirement, but this isn't as common anymore. International companies now want things done faster and cheaper and can't be competitive keeping 70-year-olds on the payroll idling around waiting for retirement.
For example, here in Austria, if you're laid off at the age of 50, the chances of getting another job at that age for many professions are already next to zero due to rampant ageism, so workers in some professions end up on long term unemployment till retirement, yet the government agencies are not talking about this major issue and just tell the 50 year olds on long term unemployment to "make a more colorful resume to stand out"(I shit you not). You're also not allowed to take your contributions out of that pot early or all at once to fuck off out of the system and be on your own if you want, proving it is Ponzi scheme in disguise.
Ok, so if you're near retirement now you're fine
But if you're younger, you can look forward to not retiring until 70, as if the younger generation hasn't been shit on enough
Amazing stuff. One last ladder for the older generation to pull up behind them before they die, I guess
the housing market in Denmark is approachable - you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.
Social security, you can go unemployed for years and still pay your bills.
Government provided education with stipend - having masters degrees are common.
And the economy is strong.
Most Danes understand that this is inevitable - the big issue is that the politicians have given themselves more favorable terms.
- housing for 80k USD is 525k DKK: no way you can find anything at that price anywhere close to cph. Not sure for other "major" cities, but in cph you can expect to pay 4mil DKK (600K USD) for a ~60 sqmt apartment, prices will fall outside the cities, but nowhere close to 80k USD. Where did you get that number?
- you pay for your unemployment benefit, thought an a-kasse. Its not forever and it might barely cover your bills depending on where you live/your mortgage. If you have family its probably not enough and you need to add an insurance on your salary on top of that.
Just wanted to give my 2 cents.
Look 20 minutes out of Odense, Aalborg, Randers, etc.
Don't let yourself believe that a country is nothing but its capital - it is correct, that if you decide to live in a 4mil DKK apartment in the Copenhagen area, then you have also opted out of public help, and you are on your own.
> but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services
The point is exactly the opposite. You can get a house at a reasonable cost, 20 minutes away from a city you can likely get a job in - Even well paid tech jobs (They exists in both Odense and Aalborg).
I fint it disingenuous to pick pick out a very specific situation like this instead of looking at the broader argument.
Can you share what well paid tech jobs exist in such cities? I mean jobs open to foreigners not just Danish citizens.
Copenhagen: ~1.4M people
Odense: ~190K people
Aalborg: ~120K people
Randers: ~64K people
Again - why this extreme focus on the specifics? I merely argued that the housing market in the broader Denmark is reasonable, and you can usually easily commute to jobs in a city while living cheaply - something that is strictly more difficult in the US.
Saying that there is cheap housing 20 minutes outside of a town with 64K people doesn't really make the point that it's inexpensive and accessible to live in / near major cities.
There are 53706 homes for sale today. 2784 of those are actual homes, not empty lots, costing less than 600K DKK.
I would not expect to live a healthy, comfortable life in most homes at that price range. Draft, mold, poor insulation and high energy bills.
Only for a short period were western population growing so fast relative to small number of retirees that transferring that responsibility to government was a no brainer.
With diminishing demographics anywhere except maybe Africa, we'll need to be more creative once again. Raising retirement age is just one of many hard but inevitable policies.
A new category of jobs will be created: retirement jobs. People unable to work till their retirement age, will be given simple low paid jobs to earn enough work hours to hit their retirement. Think of all the simple jobs currently outsourced: content moderation for social media websites, training data tweaking, LLM training, teaching assistants, street cleaning assistants, etc.
Just because you can hire a 68 year old to do content moderation or be an assistant teacher... does not mean that anybody actually wants him around at that age and that he will be a net gain to the environment. His speed and ability at work is inherently going to limit other people's speed in some way or form,not even just that. Even his vibe, his impact on the team. These things are all things that people consider during hiring. It's the concept of "the chain is only as strong as its weakest link" I suppose.
Sure, no will force to take up the jobs but when the choice is heating up your home in winter or working a couple of hours per day, the decision will be obvious
To do what?
>Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population.
Why would they do that when AI or foreign labor is cheaper? And this is happening right now, let alone in 2040 when there will be more automation and more offshoring. There no room for low-skill repetitive jobs in developed western economies unless you go full communism where the government employs everyone.
Who will create these job? Especially given the push towards more Automation in the west or at least outsourcing these easy repetitive jobs to countries in with lower wages as it is the case right now. When you call tech support, does an elderly US person answer or a person from India/Asia/LatAm? Do you think they'll hold back technological development just to give meaningless work to unemployed old people in the west?
But say such jobs are created, given how many youths are unemployed(in Europe at least), why would they hire people close to retirement instead?
The west has built itself into in a pickle with needing to work longer till retirement but has fewer easy jobs left due to automation, high labor costs, and outsourcing. What are you gonna do then, go back to uni and study another Masters' degree at the ripe age of 60 so you can retrain for another specialized job?
I've been paying into pension since I was 20, and I have health conditions where I might not even live to 50, let alone 60 or 65...
The arbitrary rules that prevent me from cashing in on the money I worked hard for is truly disgusting.
The most hilarious policies are the ones aiming to force people to have more kids, by paying them or by attacking feminism and lgbt. Making the society unfree will make people less willing to put more kids in it.
But no politician throughout the decades could keep their hands out of the coockie jar, so now al those accounts are empty.
Funny how when 'defence' creates fake emergencies there is no limit to how money can be found. But money for retirement? Oh no, we can't have that!
That probably eats up the available savings for most workers. This change locks that money away until age 70.
Contrast that with the US, where Social Security is designed to replace an average of only 30% of a worker's income (much more at the lowest income levels), and you can take it as early as age 62. The most common retirement plans are 401k, 403b, 457b, and IRA. You can pull from any of them without penalty at age 59.5, and from the retirement plan of the company you're working for if you retire at 55 or later.
As I understand it, those ages would all be 70 in Denmark, and yeah it would be terrible. Not many people in the US are still working at age 70. Almost nobody doing serious physical work is still working at age 70.
* My information about Denmark's system may be wrong.
On the other hand, people in Denmark work on average 410 fewer hours per year versus the US. In terms of total hours, working from 22 to 70 in Denmark is the equivalent of working from 22 to 59 in the US, or from 22 to 52 in Mexico.
Imagine 50 years down the road, and the life expectancy is 90+ years. If people retired at age 65, that would mean you'd spend almost one third of your life as a retiree, living off a system which you paid into for 40-45 years.
But with that said, you can't expect a plumber, roofer, kindergarten teacher, etc. to work until they're 70. Your body will likely be shot years before that.
Chill office work, though? A senior colleague of mine just recently retired. He's 68, and wanted to work even longer - but had promised his wife that he'd retire for the past 5 years.
"In 1881,[3][4] the conservative German chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, in a maneuver against Marxists who were burgeoning in power and popularity, announced that anyone over 70 years old would be forced to retire and that he would pay a pension to them.[1]"
Ah.
And yet, most people are having to work longer than ever. Why? Because all the productivity gains are being captured by the top ~10%.
And now we're continuing to pour billions into AI that is going to boost our productivity even more! Hurrah! Progress!!
Who do you think is going to capture those gains?
We can argues over some of the details, but there's no question that Piketty is being proven right.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.
Isn't 19th century covered by history classes anymore? :/
A two-retiree couple who contributed at the tax limit for long enough would get $122,592 in Social Security benefits in 2025. Not beachfront living in the Hamptons, perhaps, but not cat food eating money either.
The state then being kind enough to give you something back after 35-40 years of contributions is expected.
So, Denmark raising the retirement age is kind of a big deal. I imagine the Danish might be less than thrilled about that.