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Comment by YellOh | Hacker News Reader

Japan often faces claims of especially harsh work culture with terrible hours/overtime expectations; I would expect that to contribute more than things like grandmothers being cruel. (Being unable to keep up with work culture ?=> perceived burdensomeness ?=> less social connection?)

I'm a little worried that this will become more common in aging countries as they place higher demands on the working-age population. There's that saying about Japan's social issues being a look at the issues the rest of us will have in a couple decades.

As a side note, if anyone's looking for an indie psychological horror game related to the discussion of hikkikomori, Omori was pretty enjoyable.

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I've recently wondered if we are under-estimating the burdens being placed on the working age population in most developed nations. While public benefits are one mechanism to support the aging population, we have also returned higher than typical returns to capital over the last 3-4 decades. As capital is not evenly distributed across generations, and all else being equal - higher capital returns inherently means that less capital is flowing to the younger generation.

How much of the general cost increase we see in housing, education, and other fields is due to the funding needs of pensions/401k funds and other retirement vehicles?

Its fixable.

Govts needs to print cash to fund the basics - edu, health, housing, pensions.

Banks and Wall St should be banned from profiting from these sectors.

To force the issue everyone in the country needs to stop paying their credit card bills for about 2-3 months.

I've noticed the sentiment in some countries in southern and southwestern Europe that the working-aged prime earners are being squeezed harder and harder to support the generous benefits received by the retiring and retired.

In at least my bubble of the US (Republican ~40yr old family members), there's starting to be some grumbling along the same lines, too.

Although I don't usually think of the U.S. as particularly generous to the elderly, social security and Medicare spend ~$2 trillion of the $6.3 trillion federal budget. I've heard complaints that it's squeezing the young too hard to pay for (increasingly longer & sicker) retirement for the old.

I don't understand the alternatives well enough to have a strong personal opinion, though.

The moral argument I always hear for our high prices is that it uniquely benefits medical research. I'm not convinced that dichotomy exists, and that those aren't largely indepedent of each other.

Social security is almost double the outlay of Medicare. We should definitely be looking at decreasing medical prices (especially for enraging subtopics like insulin), but I imagine supporting non-working elderly is going to be an increasing slice of the federal budget regardless.

Social Security is a classic Ponzi structure. If you can't see that you're deliberately not looking. Ponzi schemes always collapse, and the fallout is never pretty.

By that broad metric, running low but positive inflation at central banks is a Ponzi scheme.

A fuller definition would be that Social Security is predicated on a growing working age population.

Which historically, has been a valid assumption.

It's a Ponzi scheme in that the money isn't being invested. The money isn't working and earning a return. That's why people suggest private pensions as an alternative to social security as it can put money to work. And there's skin in the game as it's not a Pension fund board member investing tens of thousands of members savings with a single decision, it's you deciding your own future and the level of risk you're willing to take on

The alternatives are fairly simple: you can either increase revenue or decrease benefits.

Increasing revenue (number games aside) would come from productivity gains or additional working population.

Decreasing benefits would come from cutting the payout or increasing qualifying age.

Honestly, taking Medicare out of the picture as a different problem that requires different solutions, Social Security should have been indexed to life expectancy from the beginning. It was never practical to build up a surplus that would be of sufficient magnitude to address demographic imbalances over decades.

Grandfather people in the program into the current rate, apply a sliding scale to people close to retirement (only fair, so their expectations don't drastically change), and make the hard decision.

I agree on indexing retirement age to lifespan, but I doubt that would get much support. See ex. the protests in France. In the U.S., the elderly are a very powerful voting bloc.

I'd argue another concern could be useless/harmful interventions. Like taxpayers paying 82k a year per person for Leqembi treatments, which seems useless at best. There are also a lot of interventions that drag on terrible-quality lives in an attempt to forestall death as long as possible; I have personal experience with elderly family members who expressed a preference for death over their treatment plans (but were no longer able to choose). If I retain the ability to choose, I would go to great lengths to avoid some of modern medicine's pallative care.

I don't know. It's all hard. Obviously I want elderly people to be healthy and cared for as much as possible, but not at infinite cost (to the taxpayer or to their own quality of life).

Medicare is an entirely different ball of yarn that should be separated as much as possible.

It's complicated enough that including it in any other reform overcomplicates the effort and kills it.

That said, I do think the "death panel" branding from Republicans was extremely intellectually dishonest and in poor taste. Everyone knew exactly what was really being discussed, and to claim mock outrage in front of cameras for political points was dodging the hard question and hurting the country.

> I don't usually think of the U.S. as particularly generous to the elderly

US benefits for retirees are quite generous by European standards, which is often surprising to both Americans and Europeans. Americans are consistently messaged to save for their own retirement throughout their lives, which lends to this impression.

I think it's rather more than a 'sentiment', at least in the UK.

To me it's also pretty interesting, how politicans (at least here in Southwestern Europe), almost never consider or talk about ordinary, middle class working people. It almost always has to be about the elderly, or benefits to the ultra-poor. Seems to me super weird that none of the major political groups "speak to me", as a normal, middle class worker.

Interesting you bring up southwestern Europe, here we have people that are almost the same as hikikomori, as in, living with parents up until 30-35 years of age, not studying, not working.

But the main difference is, since so many people share the same experience (young adult unemployment), it's not looked down socially.

Actually, this kind of phenomenon and the environment it creates (e.g. many people hanging around in evenings, doing a botellón), contributes a lot to how Spanish people and culture is perceived - carefree, "lazy", siesta-loving, night owl.

My point is just that almost the same phenomenon can either be viewed extremely bad, or good.

Yes. Germany is steering towards a massive cliff and nothing's changing. The mandatory retirement tax I pay goes straight to retirees today. That system only works though if you have a growing population. Every year the ratio of retirees/workers increases. Even today that system isn't self-sufficient. In 2021 the government had to allot an additional 91 billion EUR. By 2030 it's expected to be 134. Most of my peers (20-30 year olds) are fully aware that we very likely won't receive a government retirement or one so low that it wouldn't make a difference.

Didn't the german chancellor say recently that Germany would have to take in 1.5 million immigrants a year so that its pension system wouln't collapse? I personally don't think that is the solution but Spain is going through a similar phenomenon (pensions-low TFR).

German politics/demographics seem balanced carefully between {need for immigrants to maintain population growth} and {cultural reaction to immigrants}.

Although, credit to Germans, at least they're talking about the problem like adults. Mostly. Or moreso than other countries.

Spain has the advantage of having an entire continent who speak Spanish, are generally Catholic, and were former colonies / have overlapping culture. Failing that, British expats might suffice.

> That system only works though if you have a growing population.

That's true, but there are other systems. Japan prints more money. They are the poster child for modern monetary theory.

By the time you retire, you will be part of a generation significantly smaller than the one younger than you.

It's the boomer bulge creating today's issues.

True, but what will the population pyramid look like then?

There's no guarantee that it will stabilize and stay constant.

I don't buy the work culture thing, I can't back it up with hard numbers, but I think Americans work equally long hours, some even two full-time jobs. It's not unheard of that in certain corporate environments people work 60-80 hours a week. Or is it that Japan doesn't have a "water cooler chat" culture and/or breaks are frowned upon?

Maybe this also helps explain part of the reason the problem is prevalent in the US as well? Corporate culture in some places can be utterly soul crushing, and the rewards are rarely worth it.

Some people are able to survive, while others get crushed and give up.

Yes, probably.

I don't think the raw working hours matter. Do a job you love and it's much less of a burden compared to something you dread but do anyways because of social expectations.

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

Looks like Japanese people worked significantly more hours than Americans in the 80s and 90s, the gap narrowed in the 00s, and the U.S. just (barely) passed Japan starting in 2015. I could be outdated in my understanding of Japanese work culture.

Japanese people seem to stay in the workforce a few years longer, but given the older population, I'm not sure how to weight this.

I'm not an expert on Japan by any stretch, but I do know that there was a severe economic collapse ~1990 (called the lost generation I believe), this changed a previously very strong economic/social contract where people were essentially guaranteed well paying jobs given a relatively low barrier of entry (in exchange they were obviously expected to work very hard), however this led to a removal of that system and many people from that generation have had to struggle to find meaningly work outside of low paying temp work (maybe like a gig economy deal), this led a lot to feel they had been abandoned by their government/corporate entities even though they had done all the things they were "supposed to do" to get into that system.

In a way, I lived through a similar thing in a post-soviet country. Pre-1990 it was illegal, to be unemployed. But on the other hand people got a guaranteed job if they wanted to work. Sure it was in most cases a meaningless job, but a job nevertheless.

Somehow that part of the world seems to have avoided this phenomenon. Maybe because it was a big political/external change (the collapse of the soviet union), so people found it easier to cope with it.

> It's not unheard of that in certain corporate environments people work 60-80 hours a week

> certain corporate environments

it happens, both in terms of company, and situation (e.g. crunch weeks), but that ain't the entire country all the time the way it is in Japan.

I recall a study about how the average workday in Japan was peaking at 13 hours, and the corporate execs were worrying that it was starting to trend down. Similar approaches like 996 are a thing in China, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

And Chinese Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

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