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Comment by wueiued | Hacker News Reader

There is one problem with that. People can predict their own life expectancy. People who expect to live shorter will avoid such scheme.

To give an example: state pension in my (European) country is unfair to men. We live shorter and retire latter. In average women gets 45% more money for the same contribution. As result men are avoiding state pension and use private funds.

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In Finland this is solved by it not being possible to avoid state pension. You can collect your additional stash, but if you're getting a salary, you will be paying to the pension fund.

Yes, women live longer, but in general have a bit smaller pension due to their time off the workforce because of motherhood, and (still) slightly lower salary levels. I don't consider this unfairness towards men any significant issue.

That's an excellent point. It actually helps balance existing inequality. Maybe not 'ideal', but fairly practical.

No! You don't balance unrelated, uncorrelated things.

Do we now abandon efforts to reduce gender roles, or pay-gap differences because that would upset the balance. Are women who don't become mothers owed a greater pension?

Refusing to fix one problem, due to some illusion of karma is ridiculous. Should we also abandon cancer-cures out of concern for those who are short-lived by other causes?

Can you elaborate? Why is it wrong to base individual pensions payments on individual contributions? I'm not following.

Are you just saying it wrong to lump people into two different groups arbitrarily? Like we don't base social payments on two arbitrary cohorts like "people over/under 68 inches of height", so why would we base it on gender?

The original poster was implying that other inequalities wrt gender "balanced out" the equality wrt pensions and lifespan. I was rejecting arbitrarily linking two unrelated things (problems), and consider them as cancelling each other out.

The poster also stated "In Finland this is solved by it not being possible to avoid state pension" so this isn't basing individual pensions on individual contributions, because much like life insurance, and individual pension would adjust for life-expectancy, whereas I believe the Finnish system is a flat rate wrt gender (this is what I inferred?).

The point about arbitrary groupings is a good one, but it will fall on deaf ears in places like the US, where established groupings have high political importance.

The existing inequality caused by not working as much and choosing lower paying fields? You can bet if men benefitted from this instead it would be considered institutional sexism that would be targeted and dismantled.

> time off the workforce because of motherhood, and (still) slightly lower salary levels

This has nothing to do with life-expectancy though, so isn't relevant.

Well, I don't see the whole point of life expectancy and pensions relevant. Pension or payments definitely should not be balanced according to statistical life expectancy per gender.

Not even privately purchased annuities? Otherwise you may have just discovered why many people don't buy them; they are a suboptimal purchase for men, if the ungendered life-expectancy is used.

No, not talking about the private ones, but rather the compulsory state-driven pension system that is in place in most of the Europe.

Pensions, much like life-insurance, should probably factor it in, which would include other things too (weight, smoking).

I wrote "for the same contribution". If women pays equal money, she will get more from system, because she lives extra seven years.

Plus children are counted as a bonus for state pension. So you do not lose pension for spending three years home with kid. (men would)

We also have compulsory state pension system. It does not stop people from opting out.

> We also have compulsory state pension system. It does not stop people from opting out.

This doesn't sound like compulsory, right?

You can always leave to other country, or minimize your contributions with creative accounting.

Also very common is to build your own house by yourself DIY style. It is significantly cheaper because you do not have to pay taxes from work you do for yourself.

The United States taxes its citizens' income worldwide, at least above a certain income threshold, and from my understanding requires yearly filing regardless. IMO it's unlikely that simply moving to a different country would allow you to dodge a federal mandatory pension (provided it happened in the US).

Social security has an awful lot in common with a federal mandatory pension. If anything, it would probably be easier to opt out of a pension system (where pension implies that the individual benefit is more fully funded by the individual payments).

People that can show they are making payments into a similar program elsewhere often don't have to make social security payments.

https://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html

Social security is the United States' federal mandatory pension, and it does not generally apply to foreign income (unless in a country that also has a mandatory pension with which the US has a tax treaty).

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/soci...

Oddly enough, you can opt out of the Social Security - some employees of government agencies don't have to contribute and some religions are also exempt.

Personally, I feel that anybody should be able to permanently opt-out if desired.

I worked for one of those organizations in the past, which seems to have skewed my view quite a bit. Thanks for the corrections.

You can always add classes based on age or membership in the tontine to make it easier.

For example, a tontine of 1000 euros with 10 members, but since the last member is in the age bracket of 20-30 instead of 30-40, they get a smaller annuity than the rest.

The Wikipedia article about tontines mentions this:

> Because younger nominees clearly had a longer life expectancy, the 17th and 18th-century tontines were normally divided into several "classes" by age (typically in bands of 5, 7 or 10 years): each class effectively formed a separate tontine, with the shares of deceased members devolving to fellow-nominees within the same class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine

> As result men are avoiding state pension and use private funds.

Does that help? I imagine there could be laws against private insurers "discriminating" based on sex (or other differences, e.g. smoker status etc.).

Some countries allow driving insurance to "discriminate" though (women pay less), so maybe they would allow pension insurance as well.

"Discrimination" isn't when it is based on actuarial models. Most countries' court systems have already ruled on this.

Basically, I can charge a woman x% more for disability insurance because I can mathematically prove that women are statistically more likely to claim.

Hm... If you made this argument for e.g. black Americans (something something more likely to be criminals), most people would scream stuff much worse than just "discrimination". Yet both of these are based on math.

Actually, using actuarial science in that way is still very much open to debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science#Actuaries_in...

If you name a group, I can give you a mathematical model that will unfairly discriminate against that group, purely through how I divide up the population. "Math" is a mechanism, not an indicator of right or wrong.

Actuarial Science is a hard science that is a few hundred years old, not a social construct that you can manipulate.

There is no desire to "show" anything beyond having an accurate representation of probability.

Actuarial Science is also a mechanism, not something that indicates right or wrong. It gives you answers to questions. But questions themselves can be biased.

Same issue exists with insurance, of course - and people who write annuities know this, and account for gender.

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