The Economist magazine pension issue | Hacker News Reader

The Economist magazine pension issue

blogs.law.harvard.edu

31 pointssamh21 comments

I like this blog (other entries of which have been posted here before), but I find it a bit misleading that it shows up on HN as coming from "harvard.edu" -- which I assume to be Harvard's official web portal. (Clicking through reveals it to be a posting on blogs.law.harvard.edu, which provides free blog webspace to anyone with a Harvard-affiliated email address.)

Am I just being too picky?

blogs.law.harvard.edu also belongs to harvard.edu, so what's the problem? Many universities give blog space (and email accounts) to alumni, as a way to keep them engaged (and hit them up for donations...).

ISPs and other services often give customers customername.isp.net... - I do this, customers get username.xen.prgmr.com, while prgmr.com is for official business stuff. most of the stuff on something.xen.prgmr.com has absolutely nothing to do with prgmr.com, other than paying me eight bucks a month or what have you, so marking a something.xen.prgmr.com link with 'prgmr.com' would give people the wrong idea.

Not at all, it’s a known problem here on HN; while this case is relatively untroubling, other domains can be much more problematic (e.g. google.com entries are not always written by Googlers at all).

I think the article may be attempting to show how dire the situation is. Or that the fix may lie in some form of equality of pensions throughout the work force, still a hard thing to fix.

With unemployment at such a high level today, increasing the retirement age would keep all of the baby boomers employed, rather than leaving the work force. It does not look good any way you look at it.

I wonder if at some point some sections of society will voluntarily move to less efficient methods of production to generate employment - aka resurrecting the self sufficient village.

If that does occur I'd take it as a sign of some serious problems with social order. More efficient production should see gains for everyone, but a look at the last thirty years suggests otherwise.

If you look at industries with an irreducible reliance on labour (eg medicine, law) then productivity has surged through the accumulation of capital. Programmers today can achieve in minutes what used to take years, because of the accumulation of software and faster hardware.

This leads to the paradoxical situation that as a percentage of GDP, those irreducible-labour sectors begin to loom larger and larger.

Correction: industries without an irreducible reliance on labour haven't seen productivity surges.

Yes, this might happen eventually, as more and more jobs are automated. Automation pushes down the value of things. So people might start to prefer "genuine" hand crafted items to mass produced stuff, and this will spawn an economy of itself.

This is the usual demographic problem. However, the problem is bigger on the military end - you can't defend your interests if 1) you don't have the money 2) if you don't have the manpower.

However, the back to the problem with taxing jobs out of existence: fortune is on youths side. As bad as the problem may sound, once the problem hits criticality, you get a sudden societal upheaval and things right itself immediately. No one should count on their pensions as being forever.

The first paragraph describes a common structure of the articles in The Economist, which goes a long way towards explaining why it is so satisfying to read.

The missing solution? Immigration.

If economic growth averages 2% for the next 35 years America will be twice as rich as it is now. We can provide for old folks now, just like we did 35 years ago, and we can definitely do it 35 years from now. This is just another rich dude complaining about the proles.

No account for inflation? No account for the rising costs in healthcare, and diminishing returns on that "investment"? No account for the fact that 35 years ago the proportion of economic active people to retired ones was completely different?

If you are going to dismiss a (very middle class, by social standards) dude, at least you should do a little bit more than hand-waving.

We might be forced to stop spending such absurd amounts of money on the military, and we may also be forced to restructure our healthcare system to something resembling sane and efficient, but the parent's got a point.

2% is real. The US has average around 3% for years now. And since I don't believe in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall I don't think assuming at least 2% is unreasonable. But let's say zero. Does anyone really think we'll lose the ability to care for the old?

Here's the simple way to think about pensions/SS: we take about 4% of GDP and cut checks to old people. They buy food and pay their rent. Nobody starves. It always works, in 1961, 2011, 2061, whenever. Anybody who says otherwise is trying to fool you.

Define "old people".

It should be this simple. Hopefully circumstances will force society to cut some of the bullshit and implement it. At the moment there is a lot of waste and mis-allocation of resources.

He mentioned this, "Part of the magic is that they don’t promise unlimited inflation indexing. If their country gets poorer, the pain will be shared by the working and non-working alike. "

Will we have the political will to do it any time soon?

In Japan, pension outlays, right now, are more approximately 10% of GDP. In the US RIGHT NOW, pension outlays are approximately 6% of GDP.

As the ratio of earners to pensioners moves closer to 1:1, this % outlay is only going to get worse.

Am I trying to fool you?

[edited to remove pointless ad hominem]

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