The Future of Work Is a 60-Year Career | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Work Is a 60-Year Career

theatlantic.com

15 pointsgrawprog4 comments

If the "modern" career-to-retirement track has only existed for about 100 years, how is anyone confidently predicting what work will look like in 60-100 years? I think the biggest predictor of what "work" will look like is whether the US eventually figures out the healthcare situation. Smooth downshifting and upshifting of hours, short mentorship roles, and other similar arrangements like the article describes would require a de-coupling of health insurance and employment.

Personally my prediction for work in 60 years is it'll likely be closer to how it's depicted in Outer Worlds: everyone working for a handful of megacorporations which are also governments. No pensions.

The 60 year career will come before routine life extension to 100 because superannuation and pensions will explode under the stress of economics, intergenerational cost shifting and demographics: not enough economically productive babies being born in the developed economies, migration adds to the generational problems in this situation, due to lack of capital the migrants will work longer to achieve parity.

With remote work and the metaverse, not sure if where you are born matters as much.

I wonder if we'll see more efforts to "demarketize" things to try to stave off this problem.

A huge part of the retirement crisis is due to skyrocketing health care costs. The tools provided with my 401(k) plan don't even mention anything else except a warning box saying "we estimate medical bills alone to be $6,500 per month when you're ready to retire."

Nationalize health care, and you gain a huge pricing lever. If Pfizer wants to charge 20% more for Viagra tomorrow, a national health program can yeet them from the formulary and their sales will be essentially zero. You could even go a step further and start nationalizing your way up the supply chain.

Eventually this will become a political crisis: there's only so many times you can hear people say "Grandma and Grandpa worked hard, saved, did everything they were told, and now they're homeless and hungry" before it starts to look really bad.

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