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> Taxing the rich won't provide enough

The rich shouldn't be taxed just for providing for other people, but also as a sort of dampening effect to make sure that getting rich doesn't become the non-rich people's only objective in life (like it seems to, for many in the US).

Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich) to be able to enjoy the kind of "semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work" that you mention.

In fact, taxes on the rich could be set up explicitly to fund something like basic income programs for older people.

>Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich

It doesn't work this way. Ambitious people either just move to a county that's more open to business, bringing jobs and economic growth there instead, or they go into politics and get rich just by leeching off the economically productive populace, like corrupt officials in Russia and China.

Europe is a good example of this: it's got the highest tax rates globally, and some of the lowest GDP growth rates (and number of new businesses) in the world. People in France, Germany and the UK are seeing their standards of living get worse year by year, not better

A place can still be good for business and still tax personally wealthy people at a high-ish rate. Sane and easy to understand regulations, fast and competent permitting processes, good labor stock, easy capital access for business growth, etc. are all separate from making extremely wealthy people pay 35% effective tax rate instead of only like 10%.

https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and...

Trickle down economics is a myth. You cant just shout "Job Creator!" enough to make it matter.

You(a nation-state government entity) has the power to drag someone back home to pay their taxes. If Apple went 100% based out of Ireland, you could tariff the hell out of Apple products until their sales drop to zero.

You can put sanctions on places that run offshore bank accounts where people hide their money.

You can nationalize industries that are falling apart due to the requirement to increase profit, ie rail infrastructure.

The issue is why would the elected officials who benefit from this, do something to counter it. They're fine with an inequitable world governed by the Koch Brothers' school for business fairy tales.

The economy is a sham, the government could pay people to run the farms and clothing factories and stockpile the excess rather than burn it to create scarcity. There are other ways to live beyond this narrow system of faux economic sciences.

Why would the rich continue to create businesses and employ hundreds of millions of people if the end result was just to be taxed to oblivion. Yes there are rich people that have more $ that they can spend in a lifetime, many of them also provide more to the economy than they take out. Also much of their wealth is imaginary as it exists in shares that they cannot sell without losing control of their company.

Musk is the obvious example. Tesla provides ~120k well paying jobs. Its the first electric car company that makes having an electric car cool thus putting tens of thousands of people in non polluting vehicles. SpaceX has fundamentally changed space travel plus employs 12k people directly. Should we have just capped his income after he sold paypal? Think of all that would have been lost.

Also who are we to decide what people should aspire to?

Imagine if Elon Musk has $100 billion (I believe the number is somewhat higher), and the government takes $99 billion from him in taxes. Do you imagine that he would stop doing his thing? Do you think he would be materially less comfortable than he is now?

Yes. He does not have $100 billion liquid. He would have to liquidate his ownership in spacex and tesla. Losing control of the companies. So yes I think he would be forced to stop doing his thing as he would no longer control the companies.

It has nothing to do with comfort, dude lives in a 200 SqFt fabricated house or sleeps at work.

I'm sure if we implemented this, we could make accommodations such as making it possible to transfer share ownership 'in kind' and stripping voting rights from those shares. Musk would still be able to do his thing, the government would have a boatload more revenue to work with.

Now, some might make the argument that without the possibility of becoming a multi billionaire some might not be motivated to start or run a business. That, I think would be a small enough loss to be worthwhile

Would it? Imagine every private company of a certain size just ceasing to exist as soon as its owner reaches a set net worth. What happens to all of the millions of jobs that exist at those companies? Companies would essentially go public and then all leadership would quit immediately. Why work for free?

Why would the companies cease to exist? Why would leadership quit simply because they could no longer be multi-billionaires.

I've always seen this as a very weak argument. With future automation we will have to figure out some form of collective ownership and dispersal of profits.

lets say you are allowed a max net worth of 1 million. You hit it. Why would you keep working? You are now working for free. Every extra dollar you get is taken from you.

Why do anything, shut the company down and leave, its not your responsibility any more

For a paycheck.

1M isn't what we're discussing here. It's 1B. Let's not strawman this discussion.

even better, 1B, I painted myself in a corner with such a low number. So they will never have to work again, 1m they may have had to. I now have 1B. Why would i keep working? I would send a company wide email say hey guys I'm done. Good luck and shut it down. Why do anything else? You may argue there are reasons but they are all emotional / moral ones, not based on finance. I've peaked, going to go spend my life doing whatever I want, why incur the stress of anything else?

Not to mention all the ancillary jobs that are going to be lost. Boat builders, private aircraft manufacturers, etc.

No judgements on you, but frankly you're not the sort of person who builds a billion dollar company to begin with. Neither am I. I know damned well we'd both cash in our chips after 10s of millions and ride off into the sunset.

Those who build billion dollar companies do so for more than money.

If you had an 61% stake of a billion-dollar company, sell off 10% for your $10 million and keep running it.

>I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame.

A lot of people do that in some form but it's generally hard to convert into something that pays. (It's easy to contribute to open source projects for example. It's a lot harder to get paid a modest sum for doing so at your own pace and at your own pleasure.) The same things applies in general for casual consulting, writing, etc. in semi-retirement. You can certainly do it for the stimulation but it's hard to get someone to pay you and, in any case, that probably requires a certain amount of maybe-less-fun business activities.

Retiring to open source work is exactly my plan, because there's very little demand for part time software developers.

There's plenty of contract work for very experienced lead developers that isn't publicly advertised for. Being contract work, it doesn't have to be done 40 hr/wk. You have to build your network and lean on that to find such positions, which may be foreign to many.

I'm not saying this isn't true, but I find it very hard to believe there's a pool of shadow jobs that are completely unadvertised. Whenever I chat with recruiters about the potential for part time jobs in retirement, they tell me 'that sounds nice, but we never see employers open to that'. I guess if you've 'made your bones' with BigCo and you're in a very valuable niche you might could pull it off, but otherwise it would very much be an uphill slog.

I'm sure there are "names" that can get cushy gigs as advisors, board members, etc. My personal experience is I can certainly pick up a few dollars here and there but getting a steady income flow is harder--and I'm not even sure I'd want to if I were in that position.

ADDED: Most of the cases I've run into of decent part-time/freelance work are indeed through people I know but it's been mostly in the beer money category--I admittedly like better beer.

> Whenever I chat with recruiters

They're not the ones you need to be talking with. They only serve to gatekeep, don't really understand what the company needs, and can't champion you from the inside.

The engineering manager from two jobs ago on an adjacent team who's since gone off to start their own startup with some other ex-coworkers who need help in area X that you've spent years working in, but not enough for it to be a full time position yet? Reach out to them.

I'd say modern retirement doesn't work. Retirement of the old era worked in two ways.

a) people were passing away shortly after retiring. E.g. the early pensions after the industrial revolution.

b) people in retirement would take on essentially unpaid social work. Carrying for elders and kids and so on. E.g. what was going on in late USSR and soon after it's collapse.

Those options may survive even with no population growth. But nowadays people expect to live long AND social work to be done by paid employees. And that is not sustainable with or without population growth.

The boomers pretty clearly want a 20-year paid vacation on the backs of everyone else. I’m not sure how the working class pays for half the population to do that.

We need to separate the concept of pensions from the concept of retirement. If retirement should go away as a concept, that would mean it is somehow impossible to put away any money so that you don't need to work your last years. Obviously unless something radically happens to the way the global economy works, many people will be able to set aside 20% their pay, and and live the last 20% of their lives on that.

But pensions on the other hand usually involve some sort of government system which often ends up trapped by demographic swings. The key for a pension system is this: don't allow it to depend on demographics. Make sure each generation provides for it's own pensions.

Fundamentally you cannot make each generation provide for itself. Most food cannot be stored for 20 years, so we need to have current day farmers. Even if you say automation, we still need someone to maintain those machines when they break. That means if you retire it must be on some store of value that the future generations want and will trade for food.

I used food above, but lots of other things likewise need current work. You cannot retire and sit on a log watching birds, you need to get lots of things from society.

Yes of course a society in demographic collapse will fundamentally not work. I'm talking about providing for your own generation financially here. Society must manage the task of supplying enough hands to do the work, which could mean e.g. maintaining a reasonably stable fertility rate of at least 1.8 over time for example (Or a corresponding immigration to ensure the same thing). Otherwise yes of course eventually you have a country that is a retirement home with no staff...

Lower population works if we can build better machines. In the best case it can work even for a retirement home country. It requires some political improvements to make sure the machines are employed in a way to make that possible of course.

So long as the demographics shifts are gentle enough it's also not a huge problem to have an aging or shrinking population. Higher efficiency will help maintain standard of living with an aging or shrinking population though. The only think important to not have an "end of retirement as we know it" is to not have wars, hyperinflatoin, or a complete demographic collapse (e.g. extremely low fertility rates for a generation).

You could always pay for retirement by building a few houses out of Roman concrete, that would stand for 1000 years with no maintainance.

That doesn't pay for the feed you need to retire on.

Sure, but if the current generation would build housing with very low maintenance costs, at least that would diminish the load on the next generation by noticeable amount.

Just storing value as cash just means that you have a greater claim to the productivity of a given society than other people, it doesn't necessarily "grow the pie".

We are past the golden age of retirement. Growing up I saw my entire Grandmothers family retire early and live a long time. They would retire in their late 50s. (Mostly government related jobs) I also meet plenty of my friends parents that would retire around the same time from one of the big three auto plants.

You can actually see it here, the age keeps going up. (Canada) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141000...

Why would retirement become impossible? Because humans would become unable to work 50 years and in that time save up money for another 20?

You can't now due to inflation (and inflation is higher than the gamed CPI). Those dollars you earn at the beginning will be worth pennies when you go to spend them. If you had a home you can offset this, but younger people aren't getting on the property ladder anymore due to, you guessed it, inflation.

Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned, you used to be able to make up for it by investing but the line can't go up forever.

> Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned

Few that save for retirement keep their savings in cash. Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc. You might not always beat inflation but you also aren't seeing your savings eaten at the rate of inflation.

> the line can't go up forever

Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2% meaning they literally want everything to slowly go up, forever. The problems usually occur when it's faster and slower than that...

> Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc.

The historical returns are a aberration from a high growth world, populations are falling. They won't look like that in the coming decades.

> Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2%

2% CPI. CPI is a political measure first and a scientific measure second, from hedonic quality adjustment, owner imputed rent and the simple fact that most households don't have teams of economists planning their budget in order to maximally limit inflation means its far from a accurate barometer for the experiences of real people in the economy.

The single income households of yore had a higher percentage of discretionary income than two income households today. CPI was unable to capture this change and finds those households are wealthier somehow.

> high growth world, populations are falling.

Apart from some countries with curious and massive drops in fertility coupled with low or no immigratoin, are there any signs that global population is falling rapidly? If anything it seems it's entering a pretty stagnant phase (for example in the US). Of course stagnation might still mean an aging population, which is a problem in some cases especially when it comes to pension systems, but it doesn't magically make the economy stop growing. GDP growth isn't merely population growth.

If you look back historically as industrialization took place birth rates plummeted. So far this as been true in every culture that has industrialized. The industrial revolution is ongoing and much of the world will be "modern" within a few decades.

Not only that, there is evidence birth rates fell when regions were conquered or captured by the Romans and Greeks. Birth rates fell during the end of golden ages in China, I believe birth rates fell during the renaissance.

I believe there is some limiting factor in humans. We paradoxically make more children during bad times and stop producing them when times are good. We wouldn't be alone, crickets have genes that respond to cricket population levels, changing behavior, I think we have something similar.

Also lots of environmental stuff is messing with fertility, plastics, etc.

Bank deposits have had terrible yields over the last generation or so. But even if you place your money at 0% real interest rate, if you spend only 60% of your net income, you will still have enough after 50 years of savign to live another 25-30 years at the same standard of living.

And if you put your money in something like global index funds, it would take something like large scale war for it to not give a positive real yield. Even just a 2-3 real interest becomes quite significant if left ot accrue over 50 years.

I think it might become question of availability of labour. So unless we increase efficiency massively a unit of currency that buys x amount labour might not even with above inflation investment returns buy even same amount of labour. Simply as there is not enough of it available as most of it has retired.

>I have doubts about the survival of retirement as an institution.

>I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lifetime of experience could probably be leveraged to provide valuable insight or work on high-value niche problems in specific domains, and that can be fairly lucrative and is often very amenable to remote part-time employment.

This is how most old folks lived for all but the last 100 years. I'd totally be down to work 1-2d / wk if the labor market allowed it, but most jobs are 40h / wk or more with very little in the way of part time flexibility. We're going to have to change to allow this sort of work again in the future.

On the flipside, saving money in the bank will become viable again.