Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
When THAT lucky generation is gone, I think statisticians will realise that their children are /nowhere/ near as lucky, and I'm pretty sure the life expectancy number will fall off a cliff.
I don't have anything to back it up mind you, but raising the age of retirement, more stress related to job stability, whatever, you name it; it's just empirical but I've seen a lot of people in my environment die in their 60's -- many of them who had a perfectly 'sane' way of life. I know what you are thinking, many more people will die at 60 then will die at 90, but I'm still pretty sure there's some underlying pattern here.
Also, I do have a vague impression that making access to the NHS more difficult PLUS raising age of retirement EQUAL MOAR PROFITS for someone, somewhere.
I think part of the point is to find a avocation that is not stressful, you enjoy, and can do a long time. That may be worth more than money.
This is usually related to the kind of job you are doing.
My mother was cleaning schools and that is a killer for the back. Being retired, she takes long walks and keeps herself active and healthy.
But when I was studying I saw quite old teachers still active, and happy. But that's a different kind of job with different effects on your health.
> I think part of the point is to find a [a]vocation that is not stressful, you enjoy, and can do a long time.
I agree. If you are lucky enough to get a job that fulfills you, then continuing working can be a good thing. That's why we can't just delay retirement age, but we need to take into account personal circumstances.
A not stressful and enjoyable work also helps you to keep your good health for longer, so you get in better shape to old age.
One of the best professions I can think of retiring in is probably academia... I've worked/studied/socialized with professors very much older than me, and they seem to continue to enjoy teaching/talking to students despite their age.
In 25 years they'll still have 25-30 years of work left in their lives, and by then most of them won't have received any significant reschooling, and they will still be competing in a tech world, where 10 years ago there wasn't a thing called smartphones.
Some of them will do just fine. I know a lot of old programmers, but I also know a lot of former older IT employees who are spending their 60ies in the unemployment lines.
If you don't care about having a wife or kids you can easily retire forever after 10-15 years of work in SV or NYC.
In 10-15 years in SV/NY you can earn $1MM after tax + growth and then move to a lower COL city/town and take it easy.
I'm living in a studio, have a parking spot, walk to work and go out with my coworkers/friends after work.
What am I missing out on?
NYC is even worse - lop another thousand off and pay even more to live.
Then, if you invest $46k a year for 15 years at a real return of 4% you end up with ~$943k in present day dollars which is right around what the parent was saying.
Not to mention $140k total compensation is relatively low for a senior dev in SF/NYC, you will likely be making a lot more 10 years in.
You can definitely sock away enough even without a 4% rate of growth to put away $1MM of after-tax money in 10-15 years, if you're smart with your money.
1. mrmoneymustache.com 2. earlyretirementextreme.com 3. gocurrycracker.com 4. madfientist.com 5. thepowerofthrift.com (I could go on for a while here)
It's not only perfectly possible, it's not particularly difficult.
Moral of the story: Be an Engineer, not a Programmer. Be Valuable, not Replaceable.
I've worked in public service all my life and I took a master degree in business and leadership which was paid by my employeer. Which moved me from engineering to management.
When I see my old study buddies, who all work privately, none of them have gotten any form of reeducation and very few have kept up with the tech.
I'm sure most of them could learn the new buzzwords if they wanted to, but who would hire them until they do when you could simply pick a fresh candidate with newer CS knowledge, all the buzz and a lower pay requirement?
People switching careers at 40 or 50 aren't going to be established and have tenure after a few years in academia.
Mostly dealing with octogenarians+ whom I know; the more active you are (more so socially, as well as physically) the better off you are at living a long and healthy life. Having a routine like a job sets also seems to help human psyche. Your point about vocation that is not stressful, enjoyable, and is lasting satisfies all these requirements.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3563954/Retirement...
http://fortune.com/2016/05/03/retirement-living-longer/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/02/early-e...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/02/early-e...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/retiring-after-65-may-help-peop...
That's from both sides of the pond.
Retirement should be a focus for these types of activities. Things like tending a small garden, or playing with grandchildren.
My father is 65, my mother in law is 59, and my father in law is late 50s (my mother passed away recently at 59). All three of them must still work full time because they can't afford to retire, preventing them from helping with our 1 year old (causing us to have a limited support system, which I supplement with a part time nanny).
But heh, GDP!
So there are upsides and down sides to work/retirement thing. The best you can do is academia or a retirement spent learning new things.
My dad retired at 55 as his health began to decline. He's still alive at 78, and there's no way he would have lived this long if he didn't retire when he did.
Free treatment for everything. That does help a lot when you get old, starting with all the minor problems happening with an aging body, and concluding with the last few years where you could literally be kept alive despite a critical condition requiring constant care, all paid in full by the tax payer.
https://www.ft.com/content/78146114-15f5-11e7-80f4-13e067d50...
> Updated projections from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, based on death statistics from the Office for National Statistics, suggest that men aged 65 will now live another 22.2 years, down from 22.8 years in 2013. Women aged 65 will now live for a further 24.1 years, down from 25.1 years in 2013.
(Same reported also cited here http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/pensioners-uk... )
The analysis seems to focus on first order changes, not longer term second order changes so if there was an effect like you describe e.g. those born 80 years ago being much healthier than those born 60 years ago, their positive contribution might mask deeper problems.
The UK's ONA publishes various mortality related data sets here - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... - might be an interesting side project for someone with time to spare...
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Why-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/07/rural...
it's probably due to demographic changes more than defunding healthcare as such. If you have communities where there are no jobs, people move out, population diminishes, that also means that some services are shut down.
This happens also in my country (which is a North European welfare state with good pre- and postnatal care and very low child mortality): some people have to go quite far away for the check-ups.
It has in part to do with increased cost of healthcare, difficulty of having one family doctor offices, necessity of specialized services (all leading to an agglomeration effect, why you now see "healthcare cities" in more rural areas, where one city among a dozen has the only hospital and lots of other medical services available.) I'd also say that many hospitals are now parts of large chains that are "not-for-profit" in name only, while acting exactly like for profit entities.
While rural areas are typically shrinking, there is still a very large amount of people who live in rural areas in the US. It's the loss of their economic impact (and the above factors) that have made their medical services disappear.
But it's a complex issue and no one seems to have found a solution here in the US yet. But it's going to keep getting worse in the foreseeable future.
What?
With no wars, no shortage of food, with all the advancement in health care do you really expect to live less than my grandma, who's 94 and outlived three major world financial crisis and a world war?
Some experts fear we might loose (some) antibiotics in the coming years. If that's going to happen then I am sure life expectancy will go down massively.
Yes I do. Your grandmother had a life expectancy of 58.5 years.
Source: http://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
One of the great ironies is how the abundance of food in the west is leading to obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure. Instead of people being unhealthy due to chronic, persistent malnutrition, people are unhealthy from carrying too much body fat.
Last I heard, nearly half of all Americans were overweight or obese. Have you ever noticed how few fat old people there are?
Much of the developed world is having a population crisis. When pensions/government benefits were created in the early 20th century in the US, western europe and japan, they were experiencing population booms.
Take japan for example, which is similar to US/Western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bdrates_of_Japan_since_19...
Japan seems to have maxed out and now they are dying quicker than they are being born.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Po...
This is the same problem in most western europe countries. In the US, it's not as bad because of immigration, but if you only include native born americans ( non-immigrants ), our population demographics is even worse than japan. Native born americans stopped procreating at replacement levels since the late 1960s.
Unless Japan/Western Europe bring in millions of immigrants, they are going to be in for major problems because of their liabilities to retirees. A shrinking population can't hope to support the older generation. And the worst part is that if younger generation has to support the older generation, they will put off have kids because they simply can't afford them. Which in turn exacerbates the problem and it turns into a vicious cycle.
But immigration also has its own problems. So the industrialized world is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Even in the US, the pro-immigration policy is a stop-gap measure. The population can't grow forever.
Blackrock has an interesting paper on the overall trends.
https://www.blackrock.com/investing/retirement/blackrock-ret...
Yes it can, it's just a matter of productivity.
Retirees in the 2040's are going to see less resources-per-GDP dedicated to them than retirees in the 1980's for sure. But then they'll also have pervasive VR headsets and a plausible cure for cancer handy, so I'm guessing it'll be a wash.
Heard of the 1929 stock market "crash"? It was actually a dip in stock price by a mere 30%.
Time frames matter. The demographic change we're talking about is going to happen over the next 40 years, it's not like Black Tuesday.
To be fair not all of that is per-unit health costs increases; much of that is due to longer life expectancy.
Manufacturing, farming, fishing, etc were much more common industries for those who are now 85 than it is for those who are now 55.
There is a huge difference between retiring from manual labor at 60 after having worked from you were 15 and retirering from a desk job at 65 after having worked from you were 25.
Then take into account that they used to work Saturdays, that they used to work more hours per day, that fewer had recognized disabilities, that fewer received welfare, that they had much less vacation, that women had more pregnancies and that those of them that worked had shorter maternity leave.
The 'lucky' old had worked more and physically harder at 60 than we will have at 70.
A useful (though old) book on this subject:
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure – by Juliet Schor
30 years? I suspect you are overdramatizing that.
AFAIK people stop working at age 65 in Europe (its 67 in NL, was 65, and it was raised because of higher life expectancy). I think in Germany its higher. In Greece it was 55 IIRC, and that was one of the reasons of the crisis, but Greece was an outlier (and AFAIK they're raising it).
If we assume its 65 it still isn't as if people are becoming 95 on average.
So you need 2 points of data, and they contradict with my anecdotal evidence from my EU country.
Please provide your sources?
> I don't have anything to back it up mind you
Maybe we should start the debate once we do have the data.
https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm
In most well-developed countries, life expectancy of women at 65 is around 22 remaining years. I.e. once you have reached the age of 65, on the average you live until the age of 87, give or take a couple of years depending on country. Longest lives in Japan and France.
So depending on retirement age, people spend well over 20 years in retirement on average, but as the previous commenter said, many of them will be in retirement for 30 years.
In the case of NHS, wouldn't that be the tax payer?
Suppose you're 50. You probably know more people 10 years away from your own age than 40. So no surprise you see more people die at 60 than at 90, because you know more at 60 in the first place.
And of course there's always a survivorship bias in life expectancy numbers. Life expectancy for a currently-living baby-boomer is over 80, because the boomers who die under 70 are already dead and no longer pulling down the average.
I'd have to disagree with that. There are lots of people who care and have tried to be good stewards to the public. The problem is that you also have corporations with major amounts of cash and influence that actively discredit anyone who speaks out. These are facts.
For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.
People care, but caring isn't enough anymore.
The idea that, given these premises:
a) we who don't understand even 10% of how the ecological ecosystem works
b) we don't understand even 10% of genes and how they interplay
c) we don't understand even 10% of second order effects of such changes
d) we don't yet have explanation for tons of interactions and functionality in the body (from what triggers cancers to all kinds of lesser stuff)
e) we can't even have a decent dietary advice from medical bodies that is not revised completely every 10-20 years
f) corporations will even put plutonium to kids milk if there's profit in it (and then lie about it)
g) all kinds of industry-sponsored research has been shown to be paid lies
... GMOs are perfectly safe.
It's more like changing various bits in working computer memory, with a ho-hum printout of parts of the program's in-memory structure and a crappy flow-chart of what it does, and wishing that the running program (and OS and such) will continue to play just fine...
For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit. If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
Second, the species must be already related and/or compatible to a certain degree -- the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature. Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope. It's only random in that practitioners are not certain of the successful inheritance of the desired traits.
But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
Easy: You're against the less random of the two. This means that apparently you don't know how GMO and/or selective breeding works.
> If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties. Aside from some late capitalism-esque economic effects nothing interesting happened.
> Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
And that is bad because...?
Yes, I can see how "since the nineties and regulated" gives the same guarantees as "for millennia".
>And that is bad because...?
Because they don't know the side-effects of what they're doing on top of it.
Yeah, modern selective or “traditional” breeding uses completely novel methods of introducing diversity (including artificial mutagens), is done by exactly the kind of megacorps you are concerned about, and has less oversight or regulatory control than GMOs.
> So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope
No, it is way more random than inserting a known gene at a known location, and verifying he product in the ways done with modern GMOs. And the scope of genetic change in any one product is greater than in a GMO, not more limited.
My wife works in ag biotech, and has worked on both transgenic (GMO) and non-transgenic platforms.
> But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
A less imperfect analogy might be that it's like comparing writing code by hand with a reasonably comprehensive test suite with making random bit flips to machine code until it passes a much more limited test suite. And just to be clear, the latter is the non-GM option.
I think you've just created the film series that will succeed Sharknado.
For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.
By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.
Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.
It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".
Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.
Companies that produce GMO products (and the groups on the other side as well) stifle debate to the point that it's nigh impossible to find unbiased research to form an actually cogent opinion.
In that scenario, how are GMO creators incentivized to create more GMO products? Sell the first seed for a billion dollars and then the person that buys that seed can give out its progeny for free?
In that scenario, how are Genetically Engineered Baby creators incentivized to create more Genetically Engineered Baby genotypes? Sell the first baby for a billion dollars and then the baby can give its germline cells for free upon sexual maturity?
They are selling life. Life forms reproduce. It's a pretty basic assumption and if GMO merchants want to change that then they need to embrace terminator seeds.
And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science, and insisting that GMOs must be perfectly safe, "because science" -- when most of the research and assurances is from companies looking for a quick buck, not impartial scientists (which almost don't exist anymore the way they did when academic/research jobs where plenty, scientists were often independently wealthy, and tenure a sure thing).
This. It's far too common here at HN.
So in fact it's in the "global warming is real" side of the debate.
Except if you mean someone could make the same argument I speak against, and say "global warming doesn't exist, because science is wonderful and would never hurt us" or "global warming doesn't matter because science will save us". Then yes, those people would be confusing science with technology again.
I don't know if I fall in that group (I don't think I confuse the two and I don't really talk about GMO much) but my prior belief would be that GMO products are probably safe, through some kind of hand-wavy mathematical argument: it's like modifying a program to do what you want; chances are if you mess up, it'll crash quickly and won't work rather than working almost-as-intended while injecting nefarious input into the next program.
Would LOVE to read evidence to the contrary though. So please share your citations.
Perhaps you've missed my whole initial argument?
No, I made a point about the burden of proof. But of course that takes actually reading what has been written to tell.
Do you have any specific examples of damage from GMOs?
Low fat food is not really healthy.
Eat natural foods, eat less of them, avoid sugar.
Fed Up Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCUbvOwwfWM
you need more than that for a theory of a dystopian future
telling us how much you feel bad for eating too much is not a theory
it's a therapy session
Other than that, I really think there is some truth to the documentary Cooked. I don't deprive myself from food, as long as it is homemade food out of real ingredients. I can't afford organic food and the weather of the place I live in is not that great to grow my own food (and my time availability is not that much either).
If we're going to feed billions of people, it's probably going to involve staples.
and you knew it caused obesity? ...yea
so you knew it was literally killing you? ...yea
and you kept eating it anyway? ......sigh......yea.
All you can do is attempt to minimize your intake.
Which is admittedly different than completely sugar free, since that's entirely absurd.
But we've survived every generation except the last 4 without so much processed sugar, and we now have global supply lines handing us crops practically to our doorstep.
Eating a Twinkie won't kill you, eating an entire box every day for 20 years will.
EDIT: syntax. Also, forgot to mention food deserts and availability of fresh produce in various neighborhoods.
Sugar (often either table sugar or honey) is a traditional bread ingredient; HFCS isn't the form the average home baker would use, but sugar in bread should not be surprising to anyone.
> For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-w...
Taking too long to die: Some 'terminal' patients can lose hospice benefits: http://www.news-press.com/story/news/2017/07/28/too-long-die...
Hospice is not healthcare it is where you go to die.
The company providing my pension fund estimates my life expectancy to 114 years - a fantasy number, albeit one that /increases/ my monthly payment and /decreases/ my expected pension.
Are you not able to switch providers?
It's as if people exist only to make money, actually making people's lives better be damned. I doubt people will tolerate such a vampiric system for much longer, especially if it doesn't feel the need to conceal it's fangs anymore, and what comes afterward keeps me up at night.
Similar to how the Aztec Gods demanded blood sacrifices, from the best & the brightest of the population.
What I remember is that their criteria to choose who were they throwing to the volcano was very varied and nonsensical. Like "children with more than one hair swirl" (not sure about last word, hope it is clear).
And sometimes they didn't use a volcano but just remove the skin of victimes and store them in a cave. They will use the skins to dress up and dance a month later.
In any case, victims were members of their society. It was maybe an honor. Yeah, colonizers were brutal, but it seems it was the state of the art back then...
BTW, having two of those was a sign of luck, or so I was told.
One can argue that the America is conquered by Globalist institutions such as foreign banks.
It's harsh, but for cities or even countries the bottom xx% is a net drain.
So if I want to help that party to continue going on by voting it it is the same than giving them ~4 euros (money that come from my taxes).
Nothing different from crowdfunding, but public.
What's the problem?
If we optimized human life quality globally everyone would get better healthcare etc., but since everyone makes the decisions that benefit them (+family and immediate surrounding), then we end up with worse healthcare for the vast majority of the population.
As such, it should probably be the job of governments (regulation, incentives) to make 'globally' optimized decisions more attractive (centralized healthcare). In a best case scenario at least.
I don't care to be this coarse, but I've been trying for 10 minutes to find a better way of putting it.
When the local maxima and global maxima do not align suffering occurs. This is why evoLuton picks a few broad things on a global scale, but at the local scale thing developed very differently
I'd say it comes down to good management (as with anything) and priorities. A bad government is going to mismanage it and spend more on the military or other priorities, borrow money to make up the deficits and then of course everyone loses faith.
OTOH maybe that is why our vending machine is full of unhealthy snacks. :)
+ I have to add problems like these is why companies now give 401ks to employees. Whether you live long or not now is the person's problem and the risk is no longer borne by the company.
So we might find that the average age of death jumps up by 20+ years in the next 50-60 years (just like it did after WW2).
Nuclear war aside we almost certainly won't see a drop in the average age.
Given we are potentially entering the age of unlimited power (i.e. via solar/battery tech), we should be able to grow ever more food. Combined with global population growth declining we will see basic quality of life becoming almost gauranteed universally. Then we'll have more and more people + AI working on advancing tech (as they don't have to work on manual things) so production costs should drop dramatically.
Because I did.
Yep, definitely a Farnsworth quote.
All professional jobs offer pensions, I'm sure. Including all the major tech companies.
You have the "opportunity" to contribute to a 401k, and if you use the company's (poorly run) 401k option, they may decide to match up to a percentage of your contribution.
For instance, I contribute 10% of my paycheck towards the 401k, my employer matches 4% of that. That's it. And I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company.
What he is suggesting is that he can contribute 10%. Everything he contributes up to 4% is matched by his company (ie a 4% pay increase). Usually its a little more complicated than that. Like they'll match 1:1 the first 2% and then 1:2 the next 2% for a total of 3% matching funds.
In Norway there are no matches. The company just have to pay 2-7% of your salary to your fund each year. For tech jobs it's mostly at the top of the range.
The companies do not have to do this. It is purely optional, though there is a tax advantage I believe. Most "professionals" have the option at their company.
A bigger problem is that the 401k offerings are fairly bad usually. The people picking them are HR staffers who frequently don't have experience in finance, so the plans frequently have murderously high expense ratios. Even to the point where some companies repackage Vanguard funds that you can get on the open market for 10x less.
https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/401k-plans-deferrals-an...
total employee and employer contributions (including forfeitures) - the lesser of 100% of an employee’s compensation or $54,000 for 2017 ($53,000 for 2015 and 2016 not including "catch-up" elective deferrals of $6,000 in 2015 - 2017 for employees age 50 or older) (IRC section 415(c))
So the max is basically 200% match of the individual's contribution, which is maxed out at $18,000 for an individual under 50.
Many companies are doing odd things now with half percentage matching. So they will say they match all of the first 4% and then the half of the next 2%.
> In the United States, a 401(k) plan is [a] tax-qualified, defined-contribution pension account
Whether you have a pension or a 401(k) has a very big impact in how you organize your career in the U.S. If you have a pension, you're strongly incentivized to stay with one employer for a lifetime, because you lose it if you leave and your benefit usually depends upon length of service. That in turn means that you don't care how your resume looks to the outside world, you don't invest as much time in professional development, and you generally accept whatever advancement schedule is available in the organization.
If you have a 401(k), you're strongly incentivized to maximize your earning potential, because you only get out of it what you put into it (plus investment returns). That usually means switching jobs, which means you need to consider how your professional experiences will look to the outside world. It means that you need to be constantly up-to-date with how the industry is changing around you, and with how the financial markets are doing, and manage your own finances & career development. On the plus side, you take your 401(k) with you if you quit or move, and so you have greater flexibility. And you're not exposed to the risk that your employer could just die and take your pension with it. You are exposed to the risk of the stock market crashing, though.
Because life strategies are so different based on the different retirement schemes, people will assume certain things about you if you say you have a pension, and they'll assume other things if you talk about your 401(k). If you say you have a pension when it's really a 401(k), those assumptions are likely wrong, which leads to awkwardness all around. That's why they're different terms in colloquial usage.
Typically no, unless you're unvested, I think. You may get a much smaller benefit, though.
But in the legal/literature use it means any savings you keep for retirement. The defined benefit plan is basically gone from the private sector in the USA and is only existent in the public sector.
> In the United States, a 401(k) plan is [a] tax-qualified, defined-contribution pension account
In the US at least, if you say a job has a pension... it has a pension in the sense that you work X years, you get paid $y per year for life after you retire. Chicago teachers and Fire Fighters have a pension (for now). Tech employees almost never do.
No one would EVER advertise a job as having a pension if it had a 401k. It would be advertised as "401k match OR retirement benefits OR something along those lines"
A 401k is a fixed amount of money that you contribute, sometimes with your employer "matching" and it is usually invested in the stock market or in company stocks. It can run out quite easily.
Facebook didn't even have a 401(k) last time I interviewed there. This was after they went public.
In the case of pensions, they will vest over time and people would receive benefits matching their vesting level. If a company shuts down, the pensioners are creditors of the company and there is some kind of bailout system (I guess basically a federally run reinsurance program).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corpo...
It was real, but mostly only for the high born, the nepotistic, people in the "correct" church, and the backstabby. And of course white males only, hahah that almost goes without saying. It wasn't quite as amazing as people thought, but those who benefited sure did enjoy it.
The larger employers have moved from employer-managed defined-benefit pension plans to employee-managed defined-contribution pension plans, usually named for the section of tax code that describes the characteristics of the plan.
With defined-contribution plans, while you are working, your employer has the option of paying some money into your retirement account, which has various discouragements against early withdrawals. When you stop working, they stop paying. But you still control the account. With pension plans, the company sets money aside for future pension obligations, and may occasionally get audited by a regulator to ensure that the money is still there and adequate to pay out future benefits under certain assumptions that might not necessarily be true.
But the promised benefits of each pension plan are different, selected by the company (or muni-corp) that offered them. There was always a perpetuity (until death), and there might have also been benefits for surviving widow(er)s and minor children. Various health care benefits might have been attached, but probably not, as most retirees would probably go to Medicare.
The employee-managed accounts are seen as preferable to the older pension system, because some companies chose to use the employee pension fund to leverage their other investments or embezzle outright, and thus reneged upon their promises to retirees, who were forced to fall back on government-run pension insurance and Social Security.
Even now, the pension funds for municipal employees are at risk in towns that overpromised benefits to attract their employees, and are now going bankrupt because of it. What do you do if you are forced to either take a permanent haircut on your pension payments, or live somewhere that cannot afford to hire a firefighter? In short, I think it very likely that every remaining pension plan in the US is based on accounting that simply does not compute. At some point in your career, you discover that someone was lying to you and cheating you, and by then it's usually too late.
With the 401(k) plans, at least you know you're getting screwed out of your retirement as you're still working.
Live, quite unfortunately, is rarely so black-and-white.
I think the same idea holds true for the obese because they tend to die early, as well.
Being old and sick is incredibly expensive. Living healthily enough to get to be old and sick is a monetary drain from insurance companies' perspectives.
Lethargy has never gave anyone a stroke
But drinking 20 coffees a day for staying awake working 80 hours a week for your startup while you could easily have a normal job, that grants you a normal, quite life, had.
When you have increased wealth concentration flowing upwards and more involvement of profit machines in people's lives (healthcare, correctional facilities, food, environment), people on average are working harder for less pay with increased cost of living. This means less recreational time to blow stress off, less time for doctor visits (not to mention the fun games our federal government is playing with healthcare), and less time/money/emphasis to treat yourself spiritually/psychologically. I am hardly surprised this equates to higher mortality rates.
America has a huge problem spending money on the betterment of its citizens, and it is starting to show.
American's aren't dying younger, life expectancies are still increasing... The headline is a lie.
The title of this article, just like most things in our modern media, are a complete fabrication of the truth.
what are people's actual expectations for how long they should or can live? I am at the age where I am not seeing relatives who I grew up learning from passing on, I am even having coworkers pass on. Perhaps I notice it more when people younger than I go.
As for your second question, I semi-jokingly tell my kids that my consciousness will be uploaded to the cloud and I will be posting dad jokes to their twitter long after I am dead. Just need to make sure I pay for hosting in advance.
That's the news here, if there is any.
Then it will skyrocket due to medical innovations like CRISPR.
http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
Life expectancy can vary dramatically by county, even when there are no differences at all in health care policy. [1]
That's not to say we aren't paying too much and getting too little. We are. It's just life expectancy isn't the way to measure it.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-lives-longer-s...
Depends how you define health care. If you include preventative medicine, education, etc. then things look a bit different.
Note sure what happens in the US, but countries that practice what you might call "socialized medicine" do a lot of that.
I'm open to contrary claims, but if you're making one at all it's a pretty loose one.
Could that be an input into insurance? potentially...
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-brief-aug-09/)
Seems to me that our technology may actually just be hitting a wall in regards to life expectancy.
That, and the proliferation of sugar in our every-day diets has long-term consequences (who knew? /s)
"The USA has the highest child and maternal mortality, homicide rate, and body-mass index of any high-income country, and was the first of high-income countries to experience a halt or possibly reversal of increase in height in adulthood, which is associated with higher longevity," wrote the study authors.
http://fortune.com/2017/02/23/us-life-expectancy-projections...
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21725832-questi...
The author just threw out data (with no explanation of their methodology) until they got the American rate similar to the UK rate and then stopped so they could assert that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the US health industry. The author would have been fully aware of the regional differences in the US because the Economist article is a response to the various articles this summer about maternal deaths in the US which have generally focused heavily on the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and the improvements California has made compared to other states[2][3].
Not that I'd take the 21 year old interns writing without bylines in The Economist very seriously on health matters (or anything else for that matter).
[1] https://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/mcah/Documents/MCAH%20B... [2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/29/15830970/wo... [3] http://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-dur...
^ | This is probably happening there has to be a limit, also after 80 things get bad really fast, who didn't have a relative doing great then suddenly getting ill and dying in less than a year at those ages
Life expectancy has continued to rise in other countries. The US is lagging behind.
I'd guess the most likely cause is some combination of diet and having the comparatively expensive healthcare.
This is pretty good guess for the reason for us lagging behind other countries.
"Americans Are Dying Younger". That will mean that the wall is moving making technology less useful to keep life expectancy. And this is not true.
If we can do more to keep people, not just alive, but healthy. We should do it. Even if there are people that don't see it that way: Fox News host laughs at Democrats saying thousands will die under Trump healthcare bill: 'We're all gonna die'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics...
I meant that there is only so much that technology can do. That, combined with bad eating habits in general, have a compounding effect on the mortality rate, especially at ages 70+ when heart attack risks are at their highest.
Hey, how come you dressed my grandmother up as a mugger? Shut up and get off the set. Action! Push her towards Chuck! (Karate noises) Wow, he kicked her head right off her body! Did you see that? Did you see my Grammy? She's out of her misery, you've seen the greatest film of all time!"
- bill hicks
But, It really depends on the bike you're suggesting. Supply and demand for 46.2M units will surely raise the price as well.
46.2M Americans over the age of 65 (retirement age) * $15,000 a bike (conservative, since we're talking "high-performance motor cycle") = $693B.
http://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicar...
That's a really high price for a bike, you're talking a small percentage top of the line or stupid over-priced for name brand sake bikes there. Kinda feels like you might have backed in to that number?
For reference, a bike like a GSXR 600 or Ducati Monster can be had for under $10k - and one would assume a decent discount for buying a few million at a time ;-)
I also vaguely knew that HDs go for big bucks.
But we're being ridiculous here, so...
Oh wait, I forgot - we're being ridiculous ;-)
But... 2015 data says ~5,000 cyclists died out of a total population of 8,600,000, making for .05% of cyclists dying per year. Assuming a grant at 65 and a life expectancy of 85, that's an average of .01 years of life lost in the first year. (And this assumes everyone rides them as much as people who choose to buy motorcycles!) The years lost decline as people age, of course, but even raw multiplication only gets us an average of .2 years of life lost per person over the course of the project.
Obviously this doesn't adjust for varying risk profiles compared to normal motorcycle riders, but we'd be talking about being more than 15 times as likely to die as most motorcyclists to make this math add up.
All moral issues aside, it looks like the math just doesn't back this one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/upshot/medicaid-gives-the...
http://www.iii.org/issue-update/motorcycle-crashes
edit: taking bike price down to $8k doesn't really change this logic, especially given the "not actually riding" issue I didn't factor in.
As for cost, I expect mass production on a vast scale would ultimately drive the price down. Every damn vehicle manufacturer is going to want a piece of the GLR* contract. They'll knife each other in the streets for it. $10K per unit seems like a workable target.
[*] Let me just say, in my official capacity, that the initials do not stand for Granny's Last Ride. They stand for, uh, something else.
Not when used in this manner...
Is it time to begin discussing the desirability/effectiveness of certain policies, institutions, & popular beliefs?
I hate Bigpharma as much as the next guy but just look at the statistics of children deaths in the early 1900 it's clear something changed and medicine and vaccines are among it.
Completelly inflamatory statement...
As did the development of Public Sanitation, pasteurization, electricity, transportation networks, & information networks. Many factors into a complex system, yet attribution to a few select changes that just happen to benefit certain parties.
Perhaps it's time to revisit old assumptions based on old P.R. written by parties with conflicts of interest.
> Completelly inflamatory statement...
Not completely, particularly when speaking to those in an "ideological echo chamber". It helps to desensitize people to opinions that challenge unspoken beliefs.
Also, why do we always need to capitulate to the ideologically narrow-minded? America succeeded due to Freedom of Speech & exchange of ideas.
Here's a figure for death from infectious disease by the CDC - note that antibiotics don't appreciably change the rate in decline
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm#fig1
just a random find - this paper from 1902 mentions the debate, too, with some descriptions of 'natural experiments' https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2401255/?page=1
Also, I am not saying that antibiotics and medications don't work - just that the story actually is more interesting than one might initially guess.
Lastly, these data discuss Western populations - I've heard the opposite may be true in poor countries.
As I said above, in the Western world, sanitation and other interventions both contributed to our current state of health. As the graph I linked to shows, antibiotics haven't appreciably changed the rate of decline of infectious disease. This is no way means that antibiotics and/or vaccines are ineffective. As you point out, looking at specific diseases shows that these interventions are helpful.
Here's the data for measles if folks are interested - there was indeed a remarkable drop after the institution of the vaccine[1].
1. https://www.quackwatch.com/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.htm...
This is purportedly related to the use of antibiotics to decrease bacterial sequelae of measles. I saw an academic reference to this effect but I can't find it again - here's a popular article. You'll note that this commentator ascribes some of the decrease in measles-related death to sanitation.
1. http://www.iayork.com/MysteryRays/2009/09/02/measles-deaths-...
Maybe we should listen to the scientists when they say something is bad.
Sorry, I must say it's outrageously ignorant to say what you say.
Incidentally, I just wrote about early 20th century in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966404
When Bismarck introduced the old-age pension system in Germany in late 1800's, the retirement age was 70 years. Life expectancy in these parts of Germany was 67 years.
As to the OP article, it seems that surprisingly few people have read this:
There’s no simple answer for why longevity gains are slowing. For years, economists and public health experts have been trying to ascertain what’s behind America’s troubling death trends, among them a rise in death rates for certain demographic groups. A much-discussed 2015 paper suggested that mortality was rising for middle-aged white Americans, citing suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol, collectively sometimes referred to as “deaths of despair.” Women have been particularly affected.
What America then is seeing is not that old people, retirees, would die younger. It is seeing working-age people (not necessarily working people) die of unnatural causes.