Live longer, work longer
economist.com
economist.com
I intend to do everything in my power to retire early, and something about the discussion of keeping the elderly working longer strikes me as perverse and crass. I think we, as a society, should be trying to figure out how to let the elderly enjoy their twilight years with some dignity, not how to wring every last cent of tax money and GDP out of them that we can.
If anything, with the advancement of technology, we should be lowering the retirement age. The Earth just doesn't need sexagenarians to be working, but it doesn't need them to exit the workforce, either.
When you raise the state pension age, you aren't affecting those with enough personal savings to retire earlier. You are only affecting those who could not stop working at that age without additional financial support of the state. So poor people with lower-paying jobs get to face down the possibility that they may eventually be fired after their first day of not being alive enough to come in to work. Great for morale, I'm sure.~
People with enough money will still be retiring at 50 or 60, or whenever they think they have enough to count down their death clock to zero and still have a little left over.
It seems a lot like micromanager Lumbergh from Office Space saying, "Yeah, we're running a little behind on the ol' pension plan here, so I'm gonna need you to come in when you're 65... and 66 too. So if you could go ahead and do that, it would be great. Mmmkay?" And then he retires at 55, while you're stuck filling out TPS report cover sheets.
If I make it to 65, and still can't afford to retire, I'm going to burn the seniors village down. You bastards shouldn't have taken my stapler.~
Then, if/once you reached retirement age, men would expect to live 12.7 and women 14.7 years in retirement.
All of those numbers have increased since the program was implemented and continue to increase as we make medical and other advances that prolong life.
If you state the social security benefit in terms of "years of life expected to be drawing social security", Silents and Boomers haven't been pulling the ladder up behind them at all. If anything, they need to pull it up a little bit farther, IMO.
Of course, I don't think is "silents and boomers" who is pushing for this, but I'm going to leave the class war debate for other day.
The Earth doesn't, but the math to make Social Security work sure does.
I'd very much like the math to work out such that I don't end up spending my whole working life supporting retirees in a socially responsible way, only to get the shaft right before becoming one of them.
It doesn't help that every danged one of us knows at least one way to make the math work [without even pulling a horrendously appalling dick-move on the entire voting workforce], and no one with a speck of the republic's authority over the matter ever even talks about trying one of those ideas.
You should read this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene...
I think modern industrial civilization encourages a sort of compartmentalization of roles and terms that isn't actually real. Certainly, for many people, their job is not a pleasant part of their life. From that angle, sure, no one wants to keep doing that until the day they die.
But that doesn't mean the alternative—pure idle leisure—is that great either. Doing nothing sounds awesome when you're burnt out, but after a week or two of it, most people will start chewing on the wallpaper.
This dichotomy that "everything that you do for money is unpleasant and unsatisfying" and "everything that is recreational is easy and unchallenging" is false. There is a whole spectrum of difficulty, reward, and monetary compensation and jobs, hobbies, recreations and pastimes occupy all sorts of points on it.
For most people, they want to spend a good portion of their time doing things that are rewarding, and not necessarily easy. Being retired just means you can optimize for personal satisfaction without having to also optimize for monetary gain.
If I could retire today, sure, I'd get a bit more sleep. But I'd also hack more open source code, write more books, and volunteer. Those are difficult things (especially that middle one). Does that make them "work"? In the sense of "working on the book", "my life's work", etc. yes. But is it "work" in the sense of "thing I'd only do for money"? Certainly not.
Did you take a lesson from dogs there? They'll literally start chewing the wallpaper unless you give them "work". We're not all that much different.
That's because people have been conditioned to not do anything significant out of their jobs -- except maybe from some tame passtimes that get boring soon.
But there's a universe of things to do, and stuff to do with job-level concentration+personal freedom to do them as you like, if you don't have to work on some 9-5 job.
What we could really do with is establishing some new norms for short-week working for older people (and the not so old). There are plenty of people who'd be happy to do a few hours a week to top up their income and stay in contact with the world, but are starting to be physically incapable of the 40 hour + commute week.
This seems like a Lump of Labor Fallacy. Productivity-per-worker-hour has been growing for decades, while we've kept work-weeks and retirement ages the same (or even, in some countries, increased the retirement age). If people work the same amount and productivity keeps growing, there ought to be more goods and services to distribute to the retired as they live longer. And indeed, the per-capita GDP has been growing.
Of course, the generation ratio (retirees to workers) is rapidly becoming problematic, but given the sky-high youth unemployment rates, I don't really trust that's driving the supposed inability to fund pensions either.
Like your former self? Retirement fund contribution is compulsory in Australia (as a %age of income), and probably elsewhere.
Why would anyone want to work at all?
Just as it'd be absurd to imagine a world in which no-one works and yet we all have food, clothing, new computers, entertainment &c., it's absurd to imagine that people capable of being productive members of society (which is what old-but-not-debilitated people are) should not be working.
> I think we, as a society, should be trying to figure out how to let the elderly enjoy their twilight years with some dignity
Work is dignified!
That's not always true for the rest of the 95%. For them, dignified, yes, but fun, not always. That 95% is generally very interested in retiring so they have more time to themselves.
There are plenty of headaches that come up that suck (customers not renewing), things I don't want to (tagging thousands of photos manually), or things that get in the way of family (not being able to turn my brain off from work mode when I am home).
There are some also great benefits though like feeling more free in terms of hours and vacation time. However, all of the customers and people I interact with don't have that luxury so I pretty much end up working the same ~8-5 day everyone else does so I can get things done.
That's not always true of, say, a line chef or a street sweeper, whose job is equally important to society, but they aren't doing it because it's their life or because they get a sense of enjoyment from it. They're doing it because it pays the bills. For a lot of them, they sure as hell want to live a life outside of work, and draw a clear line.
There are people well past the age of 65 working at Walmart! There are even people in their 80s and 90s working there and at many other retail jobs. For the most part, they are not there by choice. They are selling their remaining years to faceless corporations just so they can eat and pay rent.
The retiree homeowners in my life also need it for medical coverage. Feels like this country is a pyramid scheme that's falling apart.
Ever heard of automation? We might not get a world in which "no-one works and yet we all have ...", but we sure can get a world in which no-one works more than a small number of hours per day, and maybe even 2-3 times a week, and we still all have food, clothing, new computers, entertainment and co.
Most work done in modern societies (especially outside of Chinese factories, African sweatshops and Latin American farms) is busywork. And even most work done in those places is to get us 2000 varieties of t-shirts, sneakers and mobile phones, when we could do with 100 or 20 just as well (and even better).
One downside I can see is that if retirement ages are extended and old folks work longer, then opportunities for young folks to enter the workforce will be delayed and overall unemployment may increase.
Most people have jobs they hate and no workable path towards finding something they love. In tech, we are very lucky to have skills that we a) enjoy employing, b) can mostly keep doing until our minds fail us, and c) are in high enough demand so as to pay us a living wage.
The vast majority of people aren't so lucky. Your criteria, autonomy, flexibility of hours, nice coworkers, low stress, can't be prioritized unless the former are also satisfied.
To want to work until you die is a privilege afforded to very few. Workable, socially-subsidized retirement plans are needed for everyone else.
BTW these (and similar) reports intrigue me so much that I'd consider moving to Scandivian country for a couple years just to see it first-hand.
What is the huge difference between programming and most other white-collar jobs, really? Is programming so incredibly liberating and personally fulfilling compared to them? If so, why? It's not that I can't believe that it is true. I'm just curious why it is such a massive difference, apparently.
On the other hand, even for people who looove coding, there is no shortage of those of them who complain that they don't like their coding job. A programming competition is different to coding your own project by yourself, is different from coding whatever greenfield project for a job, is different from being stuck with a monolithic codebase as a maintenance programmer.
Meanwhile, if management does something I don't like and gives me the impression they'll do it again, I start casually applying for other jobs with an expectation of finding something better in a month or two. I can tell managers "no" if they ask too much of me and if they insist on a yes... OK, fine, but you'll be receiving my two-weeks notice before long, hope that was worth it. I can be relaxed in interviews because I know I am the kind of person they're looking for, and if this place doesn't realize that then the next one will. I can bid up my salary because eff it, why not?
I have these liberties and I'm not even in a hot market, and I'm not some superstar developer. Just competent. I'm pretty sure this is very unusual, even in white-collar jobs.
This situation won't last—especially for those down the skill/experience ladder—but it sure is nice right now.
And it's not the end of the world, it is possible to find satisfaction in other aspects of life: family, friends, hobbies...
When people generally retired at 65 or so, "mid career" would be around 35-40, where you'd start managing or taking on more senior roles. Now you see people still clinging to their senior executive jobs at 85, crowding out everyone else's advancement. You have 40 and 50 year olds still in low level jobs, and you need to be in your late 50s or early 60s in order to start climbing the ladder. Kind of a crappy situation, unless you're one of the lucky type who doesn't care about advancement.
A great example of the changing mindset in the scientific community is a new study on metformin to increase longevity.[0]
Given how low interest rates are and the profound savings from delaying senescence, it is a great fiscal opportunity for government research.
As a male born in Australia in 1982, my life expectancy is....72.
I feel a lot like the Clydesdale in Animal Farm, working my entire life to enjoy a very brief (or no) retirement. It's complete nonsense and I refuse to do it. I just quit so I can drive around Africa for a few years.
(I'm aware life expectancy doesn't work like that, and that it's already gone up seeings I've lived to 33 already. I'm using it as an illustration)
along the same line as nugget's comment, I wonder how those older workers' quality of life/job/work life is?
On the other hand, really? A person is institutionalized from a very early age (school), proceeds to follow orders from a boss (work-life for most), and now policy makers want to limit even the small part of life that a person has to himself (retirement). Might it not be a better option to impose a wealth tax on the very rich and use that to fund retirement?