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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> What most amazes me is how blatant this is. Late-Stage Capitalism in it's death throes?

Retirement age used to be the point where people were physically unable to work, with justifications being that past 65 workers were completely unable to do anything useful [0]. If jobs have changed enough that a 70 year old can be productive (and they can) this represents a reversion to an anachronistic mean rather than death throes.

If you want death throws of capitalism, look to whatever [1, 2] changed in the 1970s that delinked wage growth and productivity; the pressure that forced the US to abandon the gold standard is probably also the pressure responsible for a lot of other ills that are building with time. It isn't a fast process.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_retirement

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

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What changed was computers. Computers didn't just improve productivity incrementally. It was easy for the management class to deal with giving a worker an 8% annual raise when their productivity grew by 10%. Then computers showed up. And workers using computers were suddenly gaining 80% or 150% productivity (if measured with the same metrics as previously). The management class could not tolerate giving out wage increases that large. The 'work hard, be more productive, and you will make more' mantra was only ever meant to be a means to preserve the status quo. It was not meant to facilitate the large-scale social change that rewarding profound productivity increases with profound wage increases would create. There was a very well-defined concept, held by both the upper class and the middle and lower classes, that it should require 40 hours of sacrifice per week for 40+ years before a person could financially survive retirement. If people could retire at 40 years of age, it would throw everything out of whack. Or at least that was the presumption.

All those stories about how automation and technology would enable people to work less have two sides. They're very appealing with workers. They're grim horror stories for those who define themselves by how many people they control and how much value they get those people to produce for a low price.

Depends on the job and the physical and mental state of a given person. For many manual jobs, this is unrealistic. Also, many people experience gradual mental decline and they become semi-unemployable in those ages

I'm not sure how things are run in the UK, but in Australia the theory goes that issues of physical and mental state would be picked up through the health system case-by-case.

I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the retirement age was never universally seen as a reward. If a 70 year old can work, they should work. On basically the same principle as when I say that a 40 year old who can work, should work.

If they can't work then fair enough; 70 is a delicate age and life gets really hard past the early 70s. But it is a reasonable policy to say that the official age is 75 and then find a different way of filtering out people who can't work for health reasons.

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