The End of Retirement (2014)
harpers.org
harpers.org
I live in Europe. Retirement is very much on my mind but more in the sense that I need to secure a little more than just the state pension. You can live on that but only barely. A lot of European countries are lot poorer than the US. Yet retirement is a thing in those countries and not really under any threat.
The need to work and the reality that a lot of work is just busy work that isn't really that critical because all the critical work is increasingly automated does not help with this. No offense but I work doing CTO work in startups and technically it's been a long time since I did anything close to producing critical goods or services. It's nice what I do and I live on it but I can't say with a straight face that it is all that critical or important. A lot of our jobs are like that. We keep ourselves busy doing things for each other or ourselves and try to monetize that. I can probably do that beyond retirement if I stay healthy. I might even enjoy that.
Post scarcity society is not that different from where we are today (at least us privileged people working tech jobs). Poverty is increasingly having to do actual work to feed yourself. In most countries that at least gets you to retirement. The US is kind of unique in that it is very wealthy and yet does not take care of its people in the same way that much poorer countries have been doing for the last century.
What makes you say that?
There is no visible end in sight to this trend.
Read Smith.
Book I, Chapter 8, beginning "There are certain circumstances, however, which sometimes give the labourers an advantage" and through to "The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they are going fast backwards."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
If you want to argue that the laws of physics, human physiology and metabolism have conspired to make us all slaves, fine. But you're pushing the word "slave" into territory where it makes no sense.
It hasn't altered the fabric of reality to abrograte the laws of physics or human physiology.
If you want to go work on a farm, you can (and I know people who do). You can join some collective living arrangement, you can become Amish, you can live on a kibbutz. You can travel around the country picking up odd jobs and surviving perfectly well because food is so cheap. You're free to do what you like but what you choose to do is whine on the internet because you dislike freedom.
There's plenty of room for improvement in the world. It's sad that people instead babble about "slavery" and "sugjugation," things they know nothing about.
That phrase has been used before and after the holocaust to justify cruelty, but fair enough, it was in bad taste. Any thoughts on the obscenity of sending grandma to work the fields so she can afford her oatmeal?
> Second, nothing in nature is free. It isn't free for animals today: all of their energy is expended just staying alive.
Humans today work harder for their resources than hunter-gatherers did. Something is wrong with that.
> The death rate for children and mothers was horrifically high until fairly recently.
Again, it wasn't as high if you look further back.
> Entire diseases, once deadly or debilitating, have been cured.
One of society's great success, although again, these diseases only really started to spread once we decided to clump together year-round and slave away in the fields.
> It's sad that people instead babble about "slavery" and "sugjugation," things they know nothing about.
Good thing you're here to inform us all about how the people in the article, and forced labor around the world really need to shift their perspective and understand how good they've got it.
The hyperbole bug doesn't do an argument any favors. It's overused today.
Having to work at a shitty, thankless job just isn't in the same ballpark.
Industrial revolution and aftermath might be better example.
My retirement is based on paying ~25% of my gross income into a retirement fund, which is then spent on current retirees, and hoping that in many years, there will be enough people working to be able to pay my retirement.
If you gave europeans those 25% as an extra net pay, there would be a lot more new cars on the road, a bit more savings/investments, and a lot more problems when people get old. "Smart" people would save and invest, and have better "pensions" than they'd have in the current system, and "stupid" people would work until 85yo, and die of hunger.
...but we do live in a system, that rewards such behaviour, so yeah...
Low wage workers here (also Europe) can barely save any money (if at all), and have something like at least a 10x increase in disposable income after living expenses from moving in with someone, or getting a well paying senior dev job.
It's not always an individual's actions having this effect, and if you decide to punish or reward based on it you are not rewarding based on morally reasonable metrics.
Exactly, there is an ideology of pushing this kind of issue completely into "personal responsibility" territory which, for me, is frankly a total lack of empathy.
The way it works here in Sweden seems pretty decent to me so far: you get a public pension that you and your employer have paid into the system (of course, it pays the current pensioners) and another part of my pension is put into a pension investment account, that I can operate/manage however I want.
So you get both, a minimum pension sustained by the system paid by current working people and an investment account that I can manage and grow as a portfolio to use during my retirement.
If you get an average paycheck, pay 25% of it into the pension for 40 years, you expect to get approximately 50% of the average paycheck at the time of retirement. Well.. you don't (atleast not here). This also presumes, that there are 2x as many workers that pay into the fund, as there are retirees taking out of the fund... which sadly is not the case anymore, and the situation will get worse and worse.
Also, due to many laws and changes, every few years, you get average-paid people retired in eg. 1991 that receive more than the average paycheck in retirement, and newly retired people getting 400eur of retirement (=not enough to survive).
The only way to 'earn more' is through a positive return on investment, but pension schemes necessarily must err on the 'safe side'. And currently 'safe' interest rates are negative.
This keeps the average values the same (that's why I used the average example)
> and everyone subsidizes those with no income.
This seems to be an ongoing problem, where we on one side need workers, and on the other side pay unemployment benefits to people who don't want to work. This is then translated to pensions, where people who work only eg. 10 years (instead of 40) get a small pension, but still more than the share they paid into the fund.
We have separate saving schemes for pension, where your income tax is deferred until you take the money out (due to progressive tax brackets, your tax percentage will be lower when you're retired, than it is now), but usually employers have nothing to do with that, and with interest lower than inflation, it's just not worth it.
I don't know you but I never, ever, had the impression I'd get what I paid into any social security system. Neither here in Sweden or even less in Brazil. My salary is just too high compared to the median so I never had the thought that everything I paid into I'd get back as benefits.
And to me, that's ok. I earn quite above the average, I don't mind that I can help fund some part of society with my work if this society is functional and well managed, so in Sweden I'm perfectly fine with this arrangement. In Brazil it was the complete opposite, even though I don't care about paying taxes, I do care about taxes always being stolen by a multitude of corrupt actors in Brazil.
I chose the average on purpuse, to do just that. Poor people pay less, and are "subsidized" by the rich, who pay more, but an average person should get as much as they paid in.
Considering that some people die young (before they retire), an average person should get even more than they paid into the system, because the heirs of the dead usually don't get the dead persons pension (with some exceptions, eg. underage kids)
The L(osses) ... the pension/social/levy system - no matter which country we're looking at - appears to have been hijacked by an ever growing parasitic group of financial institutions that milk whatever they can into their private pockets (and their shareholders').
Every penny in fees they receive for "working out" specialized retirement plans is in a way a L(oss) for society. Why? Because no matter what ingenious system a state devises, it all comes back to the fact that the current working/healthy part of the population has to provide for tho elderly and the sick and whoever can't provide for themselves. Every kind of juggling around with the money adding unnecessary steps in between is just milking the system for private gains.
Meanwhile, people in 20s-30s are projected to get 25% while retiring at close to 70. The system does not make any sense to me.
I think the word 'minimum' is going to have totally different implications for those of us working and saving now, compared to the previous generation, that are living on pretty generous pension plans that were wholly publicly-funded, and which our current payments are maintaining.
Also the privatized pension plans in Sweden have been prey both to fraud and high fees. So even though they may give the illusion of future prosperity to those who are trying to save now, that's in no way a guarantee.
this in and of itself is not a problem in my opinion. The problem is the financial and economic allocation is not going to those in need in society, but those who have amassed massive amount of wealth and use it to create massive hoards of wealth, with a govermental system that makes them to big to fail.
Having massive wealth changes the rules of the game completely. You can legaly dodge taxes if you are wealthy, which creates even more wealth.
People seem to think the labour market and capitalism is like chess, in which makes the right choices can lead to a wealthy life, but for the vast majority this is not the case. Most people are stuck playing poker with very bad bets instead.
It's not a lack of empathy, it's an understanding of the pernicious incentives you are creating with such a system.
I'm being forced to pay over half of my income into a ponzi scheme that i am and will never get anything worthwhile out of. This isn't good for anyone, and it certainly isn't good for the people who are working and providing value and having that value thrown into a raging fire.
This is nothing more than theft from the responsible to the irresponsible, with the associated long term issues.
When you have support these policies you need to understand that they will not and cannot help the people you seek to help.
All that happens is remove the need for people to be responsible and make good financial decisions, for the fact that "the state will save me".
But of course, the state can't, because social security in most countries is no more than very large ponzi schemes, supported by ever growing tax revenues and increasingly high retirement ages. But even that is not enough, in Portugal retirement benefits are expected to fall by half in the next 20 years.
And don't think these pernicious incentives don't exist and that peoples reliance on social security doesn't happen. That quote of "The state will save me" is almost word for word out of the mouth of friends and colleagues, with children and families, who despite being very well paid refuse to save and invest for their retirement, choosing instead to spend what they have today and only rely on social security for their retirement.
These are terrible incentives, and they will and have had predictable results.
Tbh, in the current system (which is bad!), they are the "smart ones".
You have Alice, Bob and Charlie. They all earn the same amount of money.
Alice decides to take a loan and buy a 200k house. Bob stays at home and invests in stocks. Charlie stays at home, and puts the money in a savings account.
10 years go by, alice paid off 100k of the 200k loan, house is still worth 200k, bob has 100k of stocks and Charlie has 100k in the savings account (let's forget about the interest for this example).
They are technically all worth the same, just that their money is in a different form. And then one day, they all lose their jobs.
Alice gets social benefits, one time extra monetary help, loan refinancing and/or even a loan freeze in some cases, Bob gets nothing and is told to sell the stock (even if it's a bad moment to sell), and Charlie gets laughed at the social benefits office, because he has 100k in his account.
This might be our (slovenian) speciality, but the system is made to fuck with people who live responsibly and to always 'save' the people who spend all their money. Also houses are almost literally untouchable, even if you're a single person in a ~1mio city center apartment, and could move to a smaller one a bit further from the center for 150k.
Often, (in the US) retirement accounts are also sacrosanct, depending on the claim.
The issue of houses reminds me of how much of the US tax system is regressive. Electric car subsidies, special treatment for capital gains, mortgage deductions.
[1] https://www.ipe.com/nightmare-in-hungary-as-government-natio...
You have things like SALT tax deduction and mortgage interest tax deduction which are directly designed to benefit rich liberals in blue states by subsidizing their oversized government. Take these away and people get mad or move to TX/FL/NV because they actually have to pay their full taxes.
Also having a high state sales tax is much more logical if you don’t want to pay tax just don’t spend money.
It would make much more sense to just do a federal sales tax, totally eliminate the corporate tax as people are paying taxes anyway and it is just a disadvantage to us-domiciled corporations competitiveness, and also totally eliminate fed and state income taxes. Like purge them with fire, there’s way too much complexity and corruption built up over the last hundred years.
Then if you still care about people at the end just institute UBI and Medicare for all to eliminate the billing complexity and potential for discrimination. This policy would also be compatible with open borders and free movement of labor if we as a society decided we want that.
In the U.S. this is often referred to as the "moral hazard". True they may be the 'smart' ones, but I can't help but think there's got to be a system that prioritizes the area of the Venn diagram where "smart" and "moral" overlap.
There's some irony in the phrasing used to decry the term "moral hazard" though in that it seems to hint of morals itself.
If we're talking dollars, then it would be incredibly unwise to save them. The very fact that the fed targets some level of inflation at all makes this incredibly unwise.
Housing would never be worth just 200k 10 years later as long as population is increasing and the dollar inflating.
Stonks are stonks. They're fine, but they don't provide the (at least) two fold benefit of buying a house in American society.
1). You pay a high cost for housing either way--might as well have _some_ of it go toward principal.
2). A mortgage allows you to highly leverage an appreciating asset against a depreciating dollar.
The reliance on the state's pension scheme is also terrifying as the schemes tend to increase (if at all) under the inflation of true cost of living.
All that said, I have a mortgage and stonks and crypto (metals soon), but I'll never hold more dollars than I need for a month (I have credit cards if it really came to it.)
Edit: Why downvote? If you disagree, please say why.
Putting money in a savings account is actually losing value at the rate of inflation - interest. Inflation is usually around 2-3%, interest is a point or less. (last time I checked).
I think the downvote was the comment wasn't entirely relevant to what the OP was trying to demonstrate and might have gotten into the weeds a bit, but I don't know why people downvote. Who knows, it could have been a mis-click. Just say what you want to say, downvotes be damned.
https://www.zillow.com/refinance/
> gotten into the weeds a bit
Fair
> downvotes be damned.
Good advice.
> Why downvote? If you disagree, please say why.
Sure, so
> Stonks are stonks. They're fine, but they don't provide the (at least) two fold benefit of buying a house in American society.
If you look at averages (across multiple areas, over many decades), you get:
* stonks yield somewhere around 6% above inflation (so 9-10% before inflation).
* houses yield somewhere around 1% above inflation, after including all the other random incentives plus taxes and upkeep costs, (not including multi family rental properties, which is a different matter)
There are localities in which houses do much better (say the bay area), and there are localities in which houses do much worse (Detroit).
But on average, it's a massive opportunity cost vs investing in equities. Which is fine, because there's other benefits to owning a house, like not having to move if someone jacks up your rent.
While we're at it, other reasons for downvotes may include:
> metals soon
These yield also ~1% above inflation
> I'll never hold more dollars than I need for a month (I have credit cards if it really came to it.)
In 2008, the banks slashed my credit to <10% of what it was in 2007. Don't rely on credit cards for emergencies.
Please hold more than 1 month in savings.
But buying a house is the only way I can leverage such a massive amount and I have to have housing anyway. It also fixes my housing costs in contrast to renting.
Further, I can sell my house and take gains without paying taxes on the gains. I can't do that with stocks.
> Don't rely on credit cards for emergencies.
I'll also be able to sell metals/stonks/cryptos if need be, but overall I'm just not risk adverse. If I end up selling to get by and lose some, I see that as just making up for what I would have already lost by holding too much cash.
I strongly, strongly encourage you to put aside at least 3 to 6 months' worth of expenses outside of risky investments.
If you're at the point where you need to dip into an emergency fund, it's possible (maybe even likely) that the entire financial market is burning. You will need access to capital when nobody has access to capital, which will make borrowing very expensive or impossible.
> Tbh, in the current system (which is bad!), they are the "smart ones".
I've had people tell me I'm a fool for saving for retirement, because when the time comes, the people who haven't saved will massively outnumber the people who have, and they will simply vote to fix it. Spend it now on BMWs and fancy vacations because "Our future government will not let 90% of their population starve on the street because they didn't save."
I think your example is not really a full picture, and I don't necessarily agree that the state encouraging home-ownership, and helping out home-owners who might be about to lose their home, is wrong.
To my eyes, Alice was living responsibly.
No one in this scenario likely to end up homeless in the near term, as they all have roughly equivalent net worths over $100k. The system just favors those with their assets tied up in housing rather than more diversified investments or liquid savings.
Bob and Charlie are the responsible ones.
1. Houses aren't particularly liquid, and in a debate about what is "smart" vs. "moral," and the fact that they don't always overlap, you're going to have a hard time arguing for forced eviction from one's primary (only) residence.
2. The 200k house ten years ago is going to be worth a lot more than 200k today. On average you're looking at 290k in a decade.
3. Bob's 100k in stocks would be 217k if he bought it one lump sum and got average returns, so let's say he purchased over time and is sitting around 175k.
4. Charlie's lost money because his 100k is somewhere between 105k and 110k now but he's lost 2-3 times that in purchasing power.
So they are emphatically not worth the same.
Alice owns an illiquid 290k asset for which she's only liable another 100k, so she's +190. She can refinance and lower her payment. She can get loan forbearance because we as a society have decided that it's immoral to immediately kick people out of their homes because they can't pay.
Bob is +75k and there are plenty of ways to make money off of a stock portfolio without liquidating it. You can even get a traditional loan using the portfolio as collateral but you're unlikely to get more than 40-50% of the value given the potential for volatility.
Charlie's lost money and yes, he's going to get laughed out of any assistance office because he's using a savings account - a vehicle designed mainly for emergency funds and short-term savings - for his life savings.
To your last point about the city center apartment, there is a huge difference between a reasonably intelligent person who just lost their job selling their apartment and moving somewhere cheaper, and a bank or government forcing them to do so.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Their contributions multiply our income.
If we work with someone on a project, we don't expect them to work for free do we?
Well, look around. The machinery of society was not, and is not free. "Your income" is the product of many people over a sustained amount of time.
Doing it all on your own looks very different.
That said, the only reason pensions are under discussion is the very wealthy take too much value and are not required to help fund the system.
In the US, the cap is something over 100k. Raise that and the funding problem goes away. That cap should be raised because everyone benefits from the labor products and fertile society we live in today.
Those of us who end up with huge benefit and who do not contribute in like kind are literally diluting the future for those to come for arguably self serving in the now. I have no problem with self serving choices either. Work hard, play hard, change the world.
All good.
This is about net good, and talk of ending retirement is talk that completely ignores why we have Social Security and work until we drop is as negative as child labor is.
Some of us may choose to do that. I might!
But to make excuses for what is basically unbridled greed and largess impacting so many other people unnecessarily?
Not all good.
The deep problem is we developed expectations and made promises when there were 6 people of working age for every retiree, and the ratio is going to fall to 2-to-1 or worse. Money can't bridge that unless we invent magic ai robots in a hurry.
Just caring for one another is one of those labors and it is significant. Enabling our elders to have income lifted a heavy burden off the middle class. Having enough buying power to support the whole family, whether cohabiting or not was and remains a big deal.
We did that for our parents and their Social Security made a huge difference in how our kids grew up and our overall quality of life.
On a side note, universal health care would have a similar, positive impact on all but very large business.
We are going to need to value things differently.
We can pay people more, have them work fewer hours, allow flex in work time, place, manner.
It simply is not necessary to force everyone to work until they drop.
Again, taking the value out of everything has skewed things toward an artificial scarcity of time. Does not have to be that way.
I do not believe it should be that way.
If we somehow insist, fail to value things in ways that help us live better, the ripple impacts will just cost more.
A whole lot boils down to what we value and why.
Right now, for example, we do not value taking care of our own, instead focusing on money. We do not value basic labors well either.
These two have a serious, negative impact on things like social security, our general ability to compete with other nations and more.
Those basic labors save us doing not so basic labor a ton of time, for example, yet we pay a pittance, shame those performing them, and somehow expect the some 40 some Trillion those people did not take home to pass unnoticed?
We can run the nation leaner than we do, and we should. And those lower numbers mean those doing the labor should live well, seeing as how there is plenty to do.
If we do that, their buying power will grow our economy nicely. Liquid dollars and high demand are good things.
If we raise and or had raised our contribution caps, the program would be running just fine.
If we need to run a deficit on that for a time, so what?
Maybe we can cut back on endless war.
There are enough people, is enough technology to do just fine.
All of this is a priority problem and our priority at present is not well aligned with our people's needs and that can amd should change.
Say we do need more labor.
Fine, make being an American easy again. Plenty of people will step right up and do it.
Bring us your tired, your poor...
That's why I won't be retiring.
This is all a priority discussion.
It is not for some real constraint or other.
And simply making that choice for everyone is not necessary, and is poor policy that will cost us a whole lot more than getting our priorities right would.
Either we are willing to accept the full cost of that, which means taking care of our own, or we're going to pay hard because of what happens when we don't take care of our own.
So which is it?
Getting 1x social security is not going to work when you get rent that is going up 2x as fast. But somehow the market basket of goods will still stay at 2%yoy…
Or we could just start having large families again like some groups (Hasidic Jews, Amish, some Evangelicals) do but I don’t think there’s much political will for that.
> I'm being forced to pay over half of my income into a ponzi scheme
You are making shit up - where in the world does 50% go towards retirement funds?
Unless you are talking about real estate, which is a Ponzi scheme where children pay some of their ancestors for the privilege to own their own land and a home.
I mean other people’s ancestors (not their own where the wealth is often passed from ancestor to child).
In the US we call that Social Security.
Even in the field of software engineering where, one assumes, the employees are of above average intelligence, many are completely oblivious to what is happening in their 401Ks or even if they have one.
A lot of people want the retirement money 'later', but don't want to pay 'now'.
If you've been neglecting them all your life, it's harder than you'd imagine to repair them.
I have a slightly different view on the stock market piece. I think there's a cohort who are young enough to think the market returns over the last year are the norm, which led them to believe "the market always goes up" and was an easy way to make money. This group tends towards the growth stocks but it seems like they may now be more skittish once they got a taste of a severe market downside
For some people. Others still have very little cash.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/how-a-k-s...
I may be wrong, but my previous intuition was that if people have a recurring increased income stream they'd be more likely to save and invest than if it was a one-off.
Taking less money from people...
The current pensionists wouldn't be spending their pension then, so there would be roughly the same "new cars on the road".
The real problem seems to be that poor people's real job in this economy is to be spending their money, and the actual work is just a meaningless trap.
"Smart" and "stupid" poor people generalization is also a disheartening protofascist sentiment.
Today in the US the Roth IRA looks like a great investment. I remember when they first came out my dad transfering everything to one even thoguh as he said then "I have to believe they will change the laws and so by the time I retire the tax savings won't happen". So far the laws still make it a good deal, but there is always the risk that the promise gets broken.
[1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/germany-population-pyram...
It does not have to be like this. Canada's used to be this way, but several decades ago they saw the problems coming and changed it:
> By the mid-1990s, the 3.6 per cent contribution rate was not sufficient to keep up with Canada's aging population.[10] and it was concluded that the "pay-as-you-go" structure would lead to excessively high contribution rates within 20 years or so, due to Canada's changing demographics, increased life expectancy of Canadians, a changing economy, benefit improvements, and increased usage of disability benefits (all as referenced in the Chief Actuary's study of April 2007, noted above). The same study reports that the reserve fund was expected to run out by 2015. This impending pension crisis sparked an extensive review by the federal and provincial governments in 1996. As a part of the major review process, the federal government actively conducted consultations with the Canadian public to solicit suggestions, recommendations, and proposals on how the CPP could be restructured to achieve sustainability once again. As a direct result of this public consultation process and internal review of the CPP, the following key changes were proposed and jointly approved by the Federal and provincial governments in 1997: […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1996_refor...
There were a further update in 2017.
It should be noted that the CPP was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement, even when it was originally set up. There were provisions for pensions and private savings (RRSPs) as well. The combination of all of these was to fund people's retirement.
One other thing to keep in mind is that older people vote more so voting populations skew a lot older than the regular population. I find it hard to imagine such people voting for anything terrible for the old.
The promise of government pension is worthless in Germany (which is different from the pension system of civil servants, btw). The old generation exploits the young and will continue to do so until the system crashes.
The sane thing to do is exit the mandatory contributions schemes.
Of course state pensions are funded from current taxes, so there's always an element of pension payments that come from current tax, but at this point all contribution based pensions should really be investment based. That works much better because the money is pumped directly back into the economy, as investment rather than consumption.
This is how most state pensions work, but most supplementary pensions do not (I at least have never heard of them, and I have some experience in different EU countries). They invest your money and grow the amount, and pay you out based on your personal 'investment' or that of your cohort.
Where in Europe do you live if I may ask?
No problem. You just import more and more people.
Who supports them? Why...simply import more and more people.
A lot (most?) of the problem is that there are a lot more old people than there used to be and EOL medical problems are more of a thing. Solution? I have no clue.
Part of the problem with giving everyone more money and expecting them to invest it is that it frees up that money for competition for things like better schools (housing in better school districts, private school tuition). You can sacrifice your retirement to give your kids a serious advantage. Tons of people do this, in part because once some start doing it, everyone has to a little or their lives actually get worse than if the money were taken out for retirement before they ever saw it. Then there's the "keeping up with the Joneses" effect which is very hard to entirely resist when the spending-norms for your income-peers are set by people who aren't putting away enough for retirement.
not doing a redistributing pension only serves the investment companies selling the illusion of a better private pension.
Switzerland has understood this 20 years ago.
Well, if, and only if, their investments have positive gains.
Also you can (depending on the country) pay today extra money into retirements and pension funds which are a kind of financial investments. But good luck figuring out how much of the money goes actually into administering the funds and is deducted from your payment before any investment is made. If these funds were usually an advantageous deal, their conditions would be a lot more transparent.
My take is more or less: Pension is a kind of insurance (you do not know how long you are going to live), so it should be low-risk. If you have extra money, you can invest that - but there is no investment without real risks, so it has to be money which you can really afford to lose.
It depends, in Poland the lowest pension is less than 400 usd per month (which is less than 30sqm apartment in cheapest part of Warsaw). It's not enough to survive on unless you own your own accommodation or/and have support from the family.
Which is given for somebody who lived through PRL and got apartment from state or mieszkanie spółdzielcze which they "bought" for 1% of value.
Average monthly payment is $1,544 per person or >$3,000 for a couple.
In Canada the average payment is $736 CAD or $610 USD. Even the maximum payment is Canada ($1200 CAD) is lower the average payment in the US.
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/publicpensions/cp...
the question we should be asking is. Why doesn't all this money go farther than it does? I'd say, we may not be nearly as wealthy as GDP/capita says we are.
i wouldn't assume that's more controversial in the united states than in europe. but if you're assuming public policy responds to what ordinary people want or need, while i don't know about europe, i can say you're confused about how the united states works. the way we've gotten positive change is by being a threat to the minority of the opulent. we're not making much progress now because we've been defanged. the "political divisions" in the united states are just different approaches to coping with that fact.
Every state pension system in Europe is a ponzi scheme nearing the the end of it's lifecycle. Almost all the money going in, is immediately distributed to current retirees and the fund levels are rapidly heading towards 0. Most estimates I've seen indicate that within a decade or 2 (without considerable rises in taxes) social security benefits will be around half what they are now in most of the developed world. The young are being royally screwed and paying into a system that offers them nothing.
The US's social security system has the exact same problem, but the key difference being that a decent percentage of Americans actually have 401k's (~50% i believe) that they've been funding for a long time. Pension plans/401k'like schemes in Europe are far less common and if they do exist they haven't been around anywhere near as long.
What will ultimately happen IMO is that everywhere in the developed world will just start means testing social security. Screwing everyone who saved up anything. We won't have a choice though, as it's the only way to not cripple the economy with exorbitant taxes and avoid large amounts of old frail people living on the street. The problem with Europe is they won't have enough people to screw over this way, and will end up with crippling taxes anyway that will cause more damage overall.
it seems the current economical system is having more frequent and intense crises which the market cannot solve. Who knows how long the system will be sustainable once more and more of the earths resources are economically unobtainable?
It only takes massive social upheaval to completely change the economic outlook for specific groups of people. A good example of this is the wealth many people amassed in the 20's which they lost thanks to war or revolution during the 30's and 40's.
Except maybe some deep down comment threads in an article about programming side projects turned business ventures HN does not really favor people working a lot.
Unfortunately, I think this is just a fantasy utopian outlook. Humans have HAD to do things almost their entire existence in order to survive. When you take this away a lot of people fall in to depression. I'm not convinced our minds are able to cope with the option of doing nothing. We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals. I think the problem is not having to do stuff but having to do things that aren't directly giving you a sense of purpose.
>improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity,
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery. They do it because they have to in order to provide for a living or keep themselves and their 'allies' alive. I think you can look at your hobbies and see how you treat them to get a good perspective of how far simple curiosity will take you.
If like 80% of the population is not an "essential worker" why the fuck do we need to coerce people to work under the threat of eviction, homelessness, and withholding healthcare?
That's why the phrase "essential worker" had to be drastically expanded. To the point of completely destroying any chance of preventing the spread of covid19. Because if we actually took that term at its true meaning, it would destroy these myths that we have about work and the necessity of work. Even containing covid, which we all believed was pretty goddamn important, was not as important as preserving this myth.
We are living in post-scarcity. Which is why everyone except the "essential workers" are so alienated by their work. If you went to college, you're doing yoga and taking prozac to deal with the anxiety of your alienation. If you didn't go to college, you're ODing on fentanyl.
This problem will not go away with more culture and more myth-making.
Do you notice how during the pandemic, none of them stopped working? How many do you know personally? And how large that group, the everyone else who stopped working, is?
We might not be good at sitting around doing nothing, but it's the sitting around part that is really the problem.
You conflate "doing anything" with "working".
A lot of people would be extremely happy partying every other for most of their lives.
> We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals.
You don't know how strongly those two are correlated and why. I'd claim that a lot of unhappy individuals are such because they have no direction in life and that direction can be a ton of other things who are not paid work.
> Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery.
Correct, I'd optimistically say 20% of people would but the cynic in me says 6-7%.
Still, as said above, there are plenty of activities that aren't paid work that are enjoyable. Plus you don't need to have only hobby.
I've known some rich people who have anywhere between 7 to 10 active hobbies at a time and they successfully alternate them to keep themselves busy and engaged.
This isn't correct. Friedrich Hayek showed (and won a Nobel Prize for it) that this kind of thing is fundamentally uncalculatable. It's not just a matter of scale, it's that important information like how different inputs can be substituted for each other and at what cost are spread across a huge distributed emergent machine. No one entity knows this stuff, or even knows what questions to ask. Heck, even the individuals that are cods in that distributed machine don't even know what logic they're applying.
So throw as much computational power at it as you like, you're still going to wind up with shortages and quality problems if you try to have any centralized agency make these calls.
In Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, or Peace?
This did not work, obviously.
I'm not following what you mean by this, even after reading your example. I would not trust an algorithm to "forecast and implement" a lifestyle for me. What algorithms exist that currently do this? Are they open source? Who wrote the code, or are they AI/ML driven, and if so, where did the data used to train the algorithms come from? And what does it look like for an algo to implement my lifestyle? (Does my phone send me notifications such as: Time to go get a coffee at Local Cafe #277?)
I also think this doesn't take into consideration how complex peoples' lives are or what people do when they feel some sense of inertia in life and decide to make a change (e.g. find a relationship, get a pet, change habits like diet or exercise, have children).
Another source of confusion for me is that your comment seems to just address the decision-making process, like a sort of AI/ML centrally-planned economy. What about the work of extracting resources and converting to goods/services? Outsourcing the decision-making to automation without outsourcing the work seems like the worst of all possible worlds, the most oppressive solution to organizing society (that I can think of). But, I may have misunderstood what you were getting at here.
Nonetheless, it's an interesting thing to think about.
The chimp brain is unreasonably terrified of loosing status, cash, relationships, health, housing etc etc. That fear is used to setup all kinds of traps to keep the chimp in chains.
So lot of people have got trapped in costly social/professional status arm races, multiple alimony/child support payments, multiple mortgages, endless credit card bills etc etc etc.
If you want to retire. Know the traps. Avoid the traps - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion/
The world is not static. More people understand the weaknesses of their own brain the less things can stay the same.
On the other hand, they are so vulnerable to gamble-alike activities, which make the minority rich and majority poor, which always drastic decrease of the happiness in total (because those who gain money are slightly happier but those who lose money suffer).
But most of us don't live in a world of risk, we live in a world of uncertainty, and people who make decisions under uncertainty have to consider that loss isn't that good if you lose so hard that you're dead (literally or metaphorically), or you don't get to see the payoff.
The chimp brain is the way it is for a reason, if the tiger gets you that's it, doesn't matter how tasty the fruits on the tree are.
Is your claim that the disproportionate level of aversion is reasonable? It's my understanding this is the actual heart of the claim, not simply "people don't like losing things" but rather "people hate losing things even more than they like gaining the same thing."
Related: the endowment effect. "The endowment theory can be defined as "an application of prospect theory positing that loss aversion associated with ownership explains observed exchange asymmetries."[1]. The asymmetries as evidence that it is actually not reasonable/rational.
The hard part is getting the right balance.
Would that include your definition of a "comfort"? Namely simply not wanting to live in a place that's slowly killing you?
I think the "comforts" idea sounds cool at first -- hey, look at me, I gave up my earthly desires, I am enlightened! -- until you squint your eyes and recognize that most of us are living in conditions that, again, are literally slowly killing us.
Wanting to avoid that is not "comfort". It should be a fundamental human right but what can you do, that's not the world we live in.
Apologies if I projected. Not attacking you, just explained which neurons got triggered in my head.
No worries, and I probably didn’t take the time to explain my perspective better.
I don’t think any comforts are “bad”, assuming they aren’t built upon oppressing someone else. And there’s nothing wrong in my view with pursuing them. But there’s a needle to thread between pursuing comforts and needing comforts to be happy. The hedonic treadmill really seems to limit the latter.
There’s nothing wrong in pursuing good nutrition as an example, but I don’t want to be the person who can’t enjoy a good meal because I can’t ensure every ingredient is organic. The obsession with comforts can pull us out of the present because it’s rooted in subjective comparison.
Avoiding discomfort as a primarily goal doesn’t seem particularly healthy to me. Avoiding intense exercise because it’s discomforting or avoiding tough choices regarding climate change because they are uncomfortable don’t seem to me as particularly enlightened.
We're in a full agreement.
But I really do mean things that with time I started to consider basic needs. Hedonism I don't endorse in general -- or at least, as you said, not when it's at the expense of someone else. If you made your money fairly and without screwing over others then sure, splurge as much as you like.
Before the last generation or so, the elderly moved into family support roles.
Given that we’re bending over backwards to inflate the wealth of older investors, deflating the buying power of the younger generation in exchange, is enabling retirement a great idea?
It sounds amazing, right? But why must the youth honor the elder generations contracts at their expense?
Why must we “wait” until we can live a free adult life? Just kidding; it’s to prop up the choices of the past as I said.
There are embedded social norms that need a fundamental rethink.
But I do agree we shouldn’t be subsidizing early retirement so the wealthy elders can go on vacations.
The ones that died before 80 had turned into hermits, spending their last few months in industrialized care homes.
Being obliged to contribute to communal work may come along with cognitive health benefit.
I don’t have an issue with caretakers being relied on for difficult health reasons. But are we creating health problems through social norms?
And for that reason, we do need an industry built up around elderly care and facilitating independence from elders.
But since you mention it, I DO have a “random old person” watching my kids right now as I live thousands of miles away from my biological parents for now.
There are daycares being busted for neglect and abuse so industrialization is hardly a solution to the problem of finding the right person.
I’m done with the patronizing attitude. Have a good day.
Edit: yes down vote me for not agreeing with you, and having a reasonable rebuttal. Weird flex, but ydy.
You chose to bring a child into this world. They owe you absolutely nothing for it. They'll help you if they feel love and/or obligation for you, just like I will keep supporting my widowed mother until her death.
But this shouldn't be expected by default -- or legally enforced. It should be a choice. We pay enough taxes as it is, surely the politicians can spare some change to care for our elders.
It feels to me like I am working to keep the monetary policy afloat.
All of that was possible mostly due to a confluence of a few major things that happened at the right time - WW2 leaving US at a competitive advantage, people having lots of kids ensuring lots of economic growth, and automation and outsourcing multiplying productivity and keeping costs low, but at a slow enough pace that people could transition to better economic opportunities and a lot of the people being left behind were masked by sheer population growth since a lot of younger people were still moving up on the ladder.
And no automation was developed to turn people over in the hospital beds or change their bedpans or clean bathrooms.
It was a pretty cool idea that you could just stop working and enjoy life and its luxuries while still having a good few decades of quality life ahead of you. I believe this is really hitting Japan hard, as the age pyramid is inverted, and the relatively few working-age people need to support enormous numbers of people enjoying retirement.
As far I'm concerned, I'm living in Europe and I'm not confident at all that I'll get any retirement before my 70. Knowing that the lifespan increased a lot but not necessary the good-shape-span, it seems to me a better strategy is to enjoy more free time now by reducing work hours than to bet on an uncertain future.
I've always thought this way, uncertainty or not. Why wait until you're old and frail to enjoy life?
I've always put the matched contribution into my retirement accounts, because it's free money, but no more than that. The rest of my savings go into places where I don't have to wait until my life is nearly over to access them.
You should do the math on how much you'll likely actually have in retirement, and see how you feel about it, before it's too late to change your strategy.
I put almost 20% of my net salary in to my pension, and my employer another 8%, and it's still unlikely that I'll be able to retire particularly early or will live a particularly comfortable life in retirement. For one thing, if I'm still renting when I retire I'll likely be barely scraping by.
Doing the math can be a shock.
My basic view is that I don't want to be rich when I'm old so that I can make "dream purchases" or live on a cruise ship for the rest of my days or whatever; I want to be living comfortably and fully for my whole life.
So for example, if you want a $30,000/yr (inflation adjusted) income in retirement you need to save yourself a $1M (inflation adjusted) pot. Over a 30 year career with a 5% (real, above inflation) investment return that takes $1,200/month.
Lots of people think saving a couple of hundred bucks per month will leave them super comfortable. The math tells the scary reality.
- 1 unit/mo for 10 years at 7%/yr => 172 units.
- 172 units @ 7%/yr for 35 years => 1,836 units
vs.
- 1 unit/mo for 35 years at 7%/yr => 1,721 units
Depends on rates though who comes out in front.
Maybe some of that 28% should be put towards property?
I'm pretty sure that cases where mortgage is more expensive than renting through 30+ years are very, very rare.
>... enjoy more free time now by reducing work hours than to bet on an uncertain future.
Unknowingly or not, you've just echoed a chapter in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One with such perfect clarity, Mr Thiel may start to look like a savant.
Currently, my thought is that skilled trades are the least likely to be displaced, especially in maintenance, non-routine roles. There's currently a decent amount of research to automate the routine parts, though, like new construction.
Automation often does not reduce the requirement for labor, it only shifts the work and cost somewhere else.
Former plowshare-pullers become horse-steerers become tractor drivers. Each new invention does have it’s attendant complications, but they tend to be nicer than the basic, first job. Ie, I’d rather be a tractor mechanic than a plowshare puller.
I’m glossing over generations of social upheaval and re-skilling here, but that’s the pattern so far.
Despite all that there is still a lot of work to do. There wouldn't have to be, most of the work being done is something we could skip if we decided to let science/society stagnate at current levels. Most people have decided they want more.
Where I am(also EU), retirment is at 75 and already talks about raising it to 79, because lifespan increased, funds are in strains etc. I wonder if I will live up to that age to retire or it'll again shift several times, as the way world is changing with climate change and everything, life will probably be very different and expensive.
May be my memory is holding onto a proposal that didn't pass or something. I apologize for the misinformation.
For instance, France have, successfully, bet on immigration. But the public discourse being what it is, since the population was getting older supposedly, we are now lacking in schools and universities because we chose to not build or/and renovate infrastructures. So now we have a real education problem for instance.
But the real problem with state pension fund in France is not that the population is getting older, the reality is that companies are simply not paying their due.
With all sort of tax credit and exemption, various French government chose to artificially lower salaries for all employees. Most of them are not even aware as this is not treated on the case by case but globally at company level.
The aim/excuse (depends on your political color) is to fight unemployment. The side effect, is that the state pension fund id depleting slowly but irremediably. On the other hand, to be fair, if you have massive unemployment, money is not entering the state pension fund either.
But the population getting older is a trick politician love to use to not have explain complicated issues and arbitrations made in depth. The lazy way out IMO.
That is exactly what has been happening several times during the last 3 decades.
The question I'd have is why should the welfare state prioritize able-bodied workers just because they hit a fixed chronological age?
I can definitely understand social security (which is essentially a welfare program) existing to support those who are too frail, infirm, or sick to work. Which would disproportionately fall upon the aged. But if somebody turns 65 and still capable healthy and capable of working (as many 65 year olds are in this day and age), why is the public budget subsidizing that person's leisure?
I also understand the value of retirement as a time in later life to reflect and relax. And if this is valuable to someone they should take the personal initiative to save and invest to fund their retirement. But it doesn't seem like the purview of the welfare state to subsidize this lifestyle. The government doesn't subsidize vacations, gap years, and other types of "reflective leisure time". The purpose of the welfare state is to protect people in the most dire straits, not to make sure everybody's living the most fulfilling life possible.
Heck, I can even understand advocating for UBI, which would give everyone a fallback option to not working. But it simply makes no sense that we essentially have UBI for able-bodied workers who are 65, but not those who are 35.
There exists a need to support the old and frail. Chronological age is an easier metric to use than to leave value judgements up to whoever is going to be determining if someone qualifies.
It's also money that I as a taxpayer put into the system and will get ~70% of my contributions back. Your welfare state is my government forced retirement plan with negative returns.
>But it simply makes no sense that we essentially have UBI for able-bodied workers who are 65, but not those who are 35.
Someone who is 65 most likely has already paid their contributions to society. Compare how Norway and the Gulf states distribute their oil wealth. Norway reinvests it and only hands it out to those of retirement age. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meanwhile guarantee a job where you don't even have to show up, which basically is the same as UBI. As a result, thesr nations are completely dependent on foreign labor.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/workers-p...
I think that's a fair argument. But 65 is probably way too young as a threshold in this day and age. I happen to know a lot of 65-ish Americans, because that's right around my parents' age. And the vast majority of them are still capable of working.
Which isn't to say that they're not enjoying retirement. But they most certainly don't need to be retired. I'm happy for them if they can support themselves. But I don't think public finances need to subsidize healthy people's cross-country RV trips.
UBI is interesting but it’d never scale to the same level as social security benefits. Many people in the US live off of just social security and maybe a tiny bit of retirement funds.
If you gave out social security to everyone, we’d have a massive amount of people quitting work (potentially forever). Wouldn’t like be financially sustainable unless we overhaul the entire system and have extremely straight forward taxation without deductions, special treatment, different brackets for different types of income, etc.
Yes, some people enjoy their jobs, or are motivated by moving up to a better job or more pay, but the reality is there are many people for whom these will never be possibilities. They do jobs that are not fun or rewarding, that can be performed by nearly anyone so will never be forced by the market to pay more than minimum wage.
It used to be the motivation for these jobs was the stick, but we've progressed, and now offer a carrot instead.
1) Doom porn for those worried about their later years (Hint: it's unlikely that you can pull a full career out of programming, hw engineering, tech marketing).
2) Amazon.
3) Van living.
..a) Sounds good to a single engineer who would rather mountain bike than construct one more product that rhymes with the last 5.
..b) Van design and construction is an interesting problem, especially the unsolved issues of sanitation.
4) Quartzsite, BLM land, other big get-togethers. Burning Man for introverts. Maybe there's room for a new Woody Guthrie.
5) Bob Wells and the whole van living youtube biz. Teaching people how to shit in a bucket can actually pay the bills in our brave new world. Go figure.
6) Often discussed never solved social issues (guaranteed income, public health care). Grave concern can be shown by everyone.
It's got it all.
Edit: Goes without saying that you'll need to plan for your retirement. I fully anticipate assisted suicide being a legal option during my old age.
I have kids, but I still do not want them to spend their time caring for me on a constant basis. I hope I have the ability and physical will to take myself out before that happens. I saw what my parents gave up taking care of one set of my grandparents, I do not wish that on anyone.
They “lived” into the upper 90s (over a span of 30 years since the grandparents were 15 years apart in age) and I consider my parents to have wasted many of their best years.
You're talking about kids as financial investments and they're the irrational ones?
BTW, the average cost of raising a child 0-17 in the US ~$230k. That amount alone sitting in an index fund over many decades will provide for you more than any single person ever could.
There are those who don't have kids (or the kids are dead). There are also those who the kids have moved far enough away that they can't really take care of the parents like they want to. However those are not actually the majority cases.
Those cases are very over-represented on HN compared to what's typical nationally and may very well be the local majority here.
May parents have to first pay for childcare and then have to help out their parents.
They have jobs in their own, until they are too weak for those. And then, they are also too weak to be primary childcare. Mutual help do a lot, but asking them to replace childcare is unrealistic.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/comparing-returns-tax-favored-reti...
the current pension system in most of the world is just not scalable because people getting older and the birth rate declining, but this does not mean that money couldn't be sourced from elsewhere. in most countries today, workers contribute the majority of the pension for the current retired generation.
mind you the free market also does not have a solution for this problem, except to tell poor people or disabled people to be poor or keep working until they drop dead.
Is does scale in this situation: simply increase the retirement ages properly such that always at least roughly "inflow of money = outflow of money" holds. The problem rather is that there is no political will to do that.
By the way, the changes have been going on for much longer. When I was young we were called "Generation X" and newspapers told us that we were going to be the first generation much poorer than their parents, with "patchwork CVs" and a "decline of traditional work opportunities." Overall, these predictions turned out to be true. So I guess we could call our parents the "entitled generation." After all, the Club of Rome warned in 1972 that economic growth was not sustainable but the warnings did not lead to major changes of the socio-economic systems, although many smaller positive changes were made.
Also, it is good to remember that the "boomer generation" is a mainly american phenomenon. Most other western countries had a period of rebuilding after world war 2, which was not a time of economic prosperity.
A good example of this is the late 1940'and 50's. American's wealth grew quite a bit during this time. Most (western) european countries had wage freezes, a corve system or even rationing during that time.
Western european economic power started to increase in the late 1950's and early 1960's. (wirtschaftswunder etc)
Ofcourse, eastern europe was far worse off considering the lack of marshall aid and heavy restructuring of the economy to a soviet style command economy.
Single persons unemployment benefit
Most of this happened after thatcherism ofcourse.
Saving/Investing has become harder as time goes on. I heard about how my grand parents' parents could put their money in the bank or something and compound interest would take care of things. Now with 0% interest everywhere, people rush to gamble in stocks or real-estate. As time goes on, it becomes harder to even hold the values of what you have.
Yeah that’s for sure. All these stories about people who were cashiers or factory workers and who bought their houses… Not happening anymore.
You can invest in index funds and it seems to be the only way to keep up, unless you know what you’re doing and can pick stocks (you and 99.99% of the people on the planet can’t)
I put some money into my vanguard Roth IRA and I can not pay almost double for an index fund this year than what I paid last year.
Am I irrational?
Time will tell. But over the last 100 years you would not have come out ahead unless you are close to retirement already.
But I’d you’re looking for a shirt term gain then it’s very different.
WRT the market doubling, there has been a lot of different reasons for it, QE increasing money supply that has been plowed into the stock market inflating values, top performers generally doing better relatively to society, and higher income individuals and families generally weathering the pandemic much better than low-income individuals and families.
This is all to say that market performance is not tied to the pandemic in any particular way (in this case). Back to your other statement of not being able to purchase the same # of shares (if that was your point), it doesn't matter the # of shares you can buy per year, only the value of shares purchasable. The thread above you isn't calculating the # of shares increasing by 5% year, just the value of total shares . I care that the total value of my investments increases because that's what eventually matters when I start withdrawing, the # of shares I have could increase, but that wouldn't matter if the total value stays the same or decreases.
i also don't think that situation was a realistic mean to begin with. The one time in history where this was possible was in the US straight after world war two. A period when th e rest of the industrial world was blown to smithereens.
For most of the world, that period did not happen. For instance, my grandparents had substantial less wealth then my parents (who where born in the late 60's)
On the flip side, my Grandpa made a decent living as a press-brake operator. My grandma was incredibly frugal as well, reusing the same transformers themed ziplock bags for almost twenty years and hanging her paper towels under the sink to re-use for later.
The change in attitude is due to the fact that older people are more likely to vote and that politicians and their friends also tend to be in the past-middle age-but-not-retired-yet age bracket.
Yes, it can be. It’s not on average the case if they had invested the money in a 401K, but social security is not designed as a primary retirment system but as a safety net one.
Funny how democracy works.
The existence of 401ks have a lot of unintended consequences, and is ultimately not guaranteed.
Furthermore it's a little bit of an oversimplification to say that the market is just gambling. It allows the innovators to realize a gain from the value they generate, which gives them the capital to innovate again, while non-innovative investors take over during the capitalization phase (when the business actually generates profit). The entrepreneurs have no interest in that phase since it offers the least amount of growth and their expertise is in the innovation phase.
So yes, in aggregate... it has been good for society. It provides a quicker turnaround for innovators to innovate. And since innovation leads to growth, it's also a good way to secure people's retirement future.
The unquestioned assumption that the stock market is a source of infinite growth is both foolish and, for anyone that thinks about it honestly, very likely to be wrong.
Even if we completely disregard the fact that limitless growth is impossible on a finite planet, and that we are daily seeing more and more cases where we are brushing against our limits, the very nature of 401ks is a pretty ridiculous way to build a retirement for a society.
Putting your retirement into a 401k means that your retirement is based on the future success of the economy. Typically what you would want for retirement would be some sort of investment structure where the economy doing worse when you are older will not impact your quality of life.
But instead we have set it up so that if the economy does poorly then, aside from all the normal problems of a bad economy, suddenly an entire generation of people will lose their safety net right away.
Like so many aspects of our society, we've let irrational optimism allow us to be highly leveraged in many ways, such that small bumps along the way have the potential to drive the entire system into utter catastrophe. The fact that we respond to these small bumps today by even further leveraging ourselves means this disastrous end becomes increasingly likely.
If we've reached that point, then I'm pretty sure retirements won't matter.
Watched the movie a couple weeks back, and it's disturbing in the same way that other society falling apart movies are. There's an ambiguity over if the people are doing it by choice or if they're forced, or if they're just choosing to because the have to, and it's easier to not hate things that way.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/gokhale-N...
You could argue that a guaranteed income program consists purely of increasing the subsidies for SS and taking money from 'the rich', but that'll require more political will than exists.
An interesting situation that I see a lot of is folks who spent an entire worklife doing largely cash work (construction, waitresses, bartenders, business owners who never took a reported salary) who find themselves getting older with little money on the horizon. This is probably 50% of the people I know.
https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/u-s-governments-financi...
The rich who lost money in the stock market will never in their lives have to consider these issues, and frankly I'm shocked at how often this stuff seems to fly over the heads of people on this website.