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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

People also live longer. Social security (retirement) was never intended to support people for 30-40 years. The age has to go up with the life expectancy to keep it solvent.

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the life expectancy for blue collar and low income white collar workers has sadly kept steady.

Is that really the case?

"What’s remarkable, however, is how much life expectancy increased between 1990 and 2010 in counties of all poverty levels"

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the...

Those results disagree strongly with the most recent JAMA paper on the topic:

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The 2000-2010 increase in your source is ~2 years for the poorest men and ~1 year for the poorest women. The 2001-2014 increase in my source is ~.3 for poor men and ~0 for poor women.

That seems like a really big gap, and I don't have a good way to reconcile them.

Over what time period? Life expectancy has grown continuously except for a few dips over the years.

Yes, but the growth for the poorest people (not blue collar workers, the poorest 5%) has been tiny-to-flat over the last 15 years. Well, according to one good looking study, I've seen wildly divergent results in this thread alone.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11405954/health-life-expectancy...

The poorest 5%, presumably people who had little to no employment in their lives, would not be getting much in the way of social security retirement benefits anyway.

Disability or other welfare, maybe, but that would be different.

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