Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 | Hacker News Reader

Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

telegraph.co.uk

473 pointswslh1,253 comments

This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67.

Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.

I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.

Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.

It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.

Funny that we have a ton of people asking what people would do in a post scarce society. Stating that man needs work. Yet, it also seems to be said most by the people who have been free from the need to labor for generations. They still do, they still desire more, yet their lives are certainly post scarce. Hell, the whole goal of retirement is to become post scarce, and have a few years where you can live without the need to labor. Seems like we already have some decent evidence to what such a world would look like.

People will always yearn and wonder and imagine. Sure some people will spend their time fishing but a lot of people need things to strive for a and they will make things up or seek out others who feel the same way.

I agree. Lots of evidence to suggest that this would allow humans to be the most human they could be. Calling it a new Renaissance is not a stretch. Nor reminding those that much of the scientific advancements in the past were made by those who had the luxury of enough free time to sit around and think. But I think too many confuse this message with suggesting some form of Communism or Socialism. I'm not advocating for that (personally, I'm strong believer in Capitalism, even if not the Laissez-faire kind. You can't control a wild horse, but neither should you let it freely destroy your farm). Those notions are related, but not the same thing. You can clearly, as demonstrated by rich elite and people retiring, have post scarce lives without the need for such direct control.

If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person.

If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.

While I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem (it doesn’t - fiscal policies and social policies scarily live at the intersection of economy and politics - plus even from a pure economic point of view it is much more complicated than a simple optimisation problem and I do have an economic degree by the way), on top of you being frankly condescending while bringing little to the table which would somehow explain if not justify the attitude, you can certainly get away with far heavier inheritance taxes without actually hurting your economy in any meaningful way. You can also tax the rich a lot more heavily without hurting your economy in any meaningful way.

And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.

> I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem... I do have an economic degree by the way

I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it

> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.

Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.

You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.

Do you have any argument to share outside of insulting me and Piketty?

Charitably, you seem to be implying that any actions which would disturb the current situation would be detrimental because current allocation is the best that can be done.

That seems highly suspicious to me because I don't think anyone is happy with the current fiscal policies. People disagree about what should be done but I think everyone agrees we are not at an optimum.

Isn't that exactly how retirement works though? Old people who produce no labour but just get everything given to them because of the capitol they built up previously.

No, the parent is talking about inheritors. Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes.

Those mean the government always gets its cut (and pisses off the inheritors), but functionally whether you inherit 10 or 5M doesn’t really make a difference.

    > Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes.

This is a myth. It is lower than most wealthy European nations.

Details: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/japan/individual/other-taxes

Also: https://retirewiki.jp/wiki/Inheritance_tax

Can you quantify what you think that choice looks like?

Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.

The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).

Of course there is no guarantee that your 65-75 years will be good, but it's a lot more likely that your 65-75 years will be good than your 75-85 years.

The point is, that the society does not owe you 10 years to do whatever.

Which is why he argues it should?

You mean I can't sue society if I die nine years into retirement?

This is how you end up with extremists.

And why wouldn't a society owe its citizens anything after 40+ years of keeping their nose at the grindstone, and obeying all of its laws?

Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another.

If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.

Then you just fall back to a small trusted circle of family and friends. Or, what we used to call a tribe or a clan back then.

Do you consider life not worth living during the time of your life when you're working?

What do you think you get if you don't hold up your side of the bargain? It's not like the state of nature was an early retirement.

Ask that to any serf throughout history. You don't have to "prefer to be dead" in order to recognize that what is being asked of you fails to be worth what you get in return, and then be in a rational position to decide to default on what others frame you as being obligated to do.

You support taking away social security for people who have committed crimes or had bouts of unemployment?

Based.

And this is why I give as little to society as possible. If it owes me nothing, I owe it nothing and therefore it’s only right I give it as close to nothing as possible to balance the scales.

If society doesn't owe me for working under its rules and constraints, why should I care about society and following its rules and constraints and putting anything into it? In my opinion such a stance makes governmental rule illegitimate, and completely kills the social contract, making me wonder why I should care about following the law at all except through fear, which is not a great long term motivator both historically and personally. If society isn't going to help provide for me when im feeble and old, why should I care about putting anything into it when im young and sharp? Especially when private capital economics is already so biased against me as just some regular working joe.

Sure such thoughts are not probably concerning for the majority of people, but it only takes a small percentage of people losing faith in society combined with a bit of public apathy about people living criminal lives or doing criminal things for them to bring the entire thing to its knees.

I am curious: From where did you get that it owes you that?

So, I completely agree with most things you say. The core here is: Just don't work 40+ years for a retirement.

Take sabbaticals along the way.

Change your career when it is stale.

The counter for this: Don't buy into the hype. You cannot afford sabbaticals if you need two new cars every 4 years and a house that stretches your finances.

  > This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself

No, it is a resource allocation problem.

I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.

This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.

If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.

Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.

It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.

It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.

[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.

[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.

> No, it is a resource allocation problem.

There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.

> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year

That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".

> This isn't a zero sum game

It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)

> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor

You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem

Im interested in what you are saying but I don't fully understand all your points. Where can I learn more (I have a CS and math background)?

What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.

CS and math should be a solid basis here. To be honest I don't remember at all where I picked this stuff up - a lot of it comes from random disjoint fields like optimization theory, graph theory, etc. which impinge on econ all the time, although I couldn't tell you a definitive book on the subject(s)

  > There are finite resources to allocate.

The truth of this statement depends on context.

I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.

The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).

This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.

The same is true about the economy in general.

You're right!

  >  If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.

We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...

IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.

Back when it was first introduced, it was based on life expectancy and few were expected to live beyond retirement age. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...

Turns out retirement is just an illusion to convince you to give your best years for the system.

No need to do any that, if you don't like the idea and have something else that works for you. But most people are somewhat mid and really don't.

You're just repeating anarchists' talking points.

None of them considers that "the system" gives them food, water and energy, and that procurement of these in the absence of system means literally toiling from birth until death.

This is the my response too. There are plenty of valid criticisms of our modern society, but nothing’s stopping you wandering off into the forest to forage for berries. We don’t, because even with all its flaws, living in civilisation is infinitely easier.

Humans need a constant supply of resources and shelter to survive. There is no "system" which avoids this inconvenient fact. In the absence of any "system" at all, you would still need to constantly work for survival - and in fact you'd just die as soon as you were no longer able to do so due to illness or injury much less old age.

In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement" in the first place.

We all wish that we could spend our best years doing whatever we want. That doesn't mathematically work out, though. European social safety nets are pretty damn generous all things considered. Plenty of vacation days, especially compared to the US. It's not like it's impossible to use those well during your "best years".

The "system" would fall apart if people didn't work for at least half their lives, true, but it is absolutely not true that we need people to work until they're 70.

Not with current population growth curves being what they are.

Yes, Western societies are coming to rude awakening: birthrate matters for everyone. Social support for elderly cannot be built on pension funds when there's not enough young hands in economy

Planned immigration can easily solve this. But we rather crash and burn and work till we are 70+ than let “those people” in.

In practice, immigration adds a lot of welfare receivers so ends up doing the opposite. It's not a coincidence that we are seeing supposed multiple advanced civilization talking about increasing the retirement age at a time of unprecedented levels of immigration.

I haven't worked for a long time. If others were like me, I suppose the system that exists now would fall apart, but really, I don't consume a lot.

Right, but you need food every day and shelter and clothes. Someone’s paying for that, if not you yourself.

If not 70 then what should the retirement age be? Please show your work.

find me a 69-year old that you want as your co-worker… I’ll wait… :)

What a weird comment. I've had several co-workers in that age range. They were fine. What's your point? And what does that have to do with the financial realities of limited government budgets?

I call BS on having a 69-year “fine” co-worker unless you are a greeter at Walmart

My wife's coworker is a 70yo surgeon. He's considered pretty elite in his field, even at that age.

This just came up recently in conversation the other day - don't surgeons lose the fine motor control by then? My friend was saying a surgeon's best years are in their 40s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSt1m4NFUl8

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/10/i-truly-lo...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-13/lopez-co...

https://www.foxnews.com/health/100-year-old-surgeon-wwii-vet...

https://www.rferl.org/a/my-hands-don-t-shake-says-world-s-ol...

https://www.boredpanda.com/89-year-old-surgeon-alla-ilyinich...

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

I am wondering why aren’t you on this list… Look at all these billionaires, since we have some I assume you are on as well?

Great comeback. "You called me an ageist for posting ageist hate comments, so, uhh, uhh, well you aren't a billionaire!" No, I'm not. Most people aren't lottery winners.

most people are also not in the guiness book of records either… :-)

I would not let a 70-year old operate on a squirrel that is waking me up every morning but perhaps I am in a minority... didn't expect an uproar over people wanting to work with grandpas and grandmas but here we are :)

A bigotted ageist worldview from someone with an eastern european name; that's just what I'd expect from a Saggitarius[0].

Seriously, there's 800,000,000 people over 65 on the planet[1], and you're judging all of their abilities based on a two digit number, instead of individually on their actual health and abilities. That's ageism. That's a yesteryear worldview that people have been fighting against for a long time.

And that "I thought I could say horrible things and nobody would object" is common red flag behaviour mentioned on all the "what's a red flag about X" threads that appear on Reddit constantly; "my boss said something rude about <group> and nobody said anything". That you didn't expect an uproar about judging people you don't know as incompetent or incapable based only on their age - and got an uproar - should be a reason for you to reflect.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXBPLl7gXc

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-by-age-group

you do you mate, anyone I love I do not want to work until their 70 and I also do not want any 70-year olds performing surgery either. I had a roughly-that-age person deliver a pizza to me 6-7 months ago and my heart broke, reminded me of my Dad and I was shook for awhile after seeing that… but hey, we may just view the World in a different way and that’s fine. There is no need for me to reflect, my parents raised me well to treat elderly in a manner different from the sentiment here - “lets get them all to a construction site”

We aren't mates. "anyone I love I do not want to work until their 70 and I also do not want any 70-year olds performing surgery either" these are two different positions. One is "I don't want people having to work" which I agree with. The other is "I've judged 70 year olds as incapable of doing useful skilled work" which is ageist.

“lets get them all to a construction site” - this is not my position.

if we ALL have to work until 70 which is the whole thing being pitched here, than what will construction worker who is 69-years old do? If you are in agreement with this entire thread that saying 69-year olds should be in the workforces (mandated by the government’s retirement age) than “lets get them to construction site” is what you are pitching…

You asked someone to give you something, and they did, and then you claimed that they lied. I call BS on your original request being made in good faith.

I can also just say I love working with 130-year old and they are all great to make a silly argument :) you understand the probability of this sentence being true "I've had several co-workers... (69-year olds)..." - like 0.0002319%? :)

And you, also, can claim no one can find 69 year-old they like to work with to make a silly argument.

It’s not that your (implied, guessed-at-by-me) idea is wrong on its face. It’s that you choose to (1) imply it, (2) in a snarky way that is insulting (even if true), and then when someone claimed a counter-example, you immediately fell back on made-up numbers for why you wouldn’t have to display the slightest curiosity as to how this supposed impossibility came to be.

You assume they’re lying? Why should anyone think better of you? Anyone can lie on the internet.

I generally agree with you with exceptions like general practitioners/family doctors and legal field and university teaching where workers with experience are valued without the job requiring too much physical activity.

There are plenty of excellent scientists that I know who still run a lab in their 80s.

Guido van Rossum is 69, he would be an excellent colleague at any tech company

I am sure we can found outliers in any age group, you can go up to 80 and 90 and find a Guido

Well, what is half their lives anyway?

Let's say you live to 80, half your life is 40 years. You only start working a decent job around ~22 years (4 year college degree).

22+40 = 62, pretty close to 70 already. Assuming some people die early, so others have to pick up the slack, some people work part time, etc. and you end up pretty damn close to 70.

I don't think we need nearly as much as most people think. How much is being taken by the wealthy from the workers already? How much effort goes on the work of maintaining and protecting the system of inequality? How many people are already doing nothing when they would be willing to work?

These are the right questions to be asking. Suboptimal system configuration problems.

You can absolutely raise taxes on the wealthy and close loopholes (we should do those things) but it's not gonna fix the massive hole that is social spending in the budget of nearly every western nation. It's more structural than that.

The loopholes just make it easier to funnel money away from the taxman. It's still possible due to how capitalism works and not fixable unless we go for something equivalent to nationalizing big companies.

You could mandate that money transfers go through banks and tax the transfers.

Let's see how rich can get richer without transferring their money.

You can also tax where the asset ownership is recorded. Property records, securities records, etc. If it isn’t recorded with a public body where taxes can be assessed, it isn’t recognized. Wealth must exist on the books somewhere.

Yes, there are ways to tax the rich. We aren't doing it because those who decide about such things are the rich.

This assumes that there is only a single country on Earth or that the rich would not be willing to move to a country with lower taxation. Hint: they are already doing that.

right, because what will really improve their business is moving to a country with less and poorer consumers, they could extract money from

also .. what's bad about the rich moving out? you can always print more money to balance out the money they've taken away

and companies and properties that they used to owned are gonna be sold to some new people who are not that rich yet

Cranking up the taxes will just make life more expensive for everyone. And printing more money is a terrible solution to financial problems.

Letting wealth of the rich grow so much faster than the growth of the economy is so much worse, because it means that the rich are increasingly draining poor of their resoruces.

Debasing the currency has the same effect, as it is equivalent to a flat tax, which hits lower income brackets harder than the wealthy.

That has the same impact as other, similarly radical solutions. In the best case the rich will just remove as much of their property from the country as possible. They might keep a villa or two, some cars, and some pocket money, but the majority of their income will be out of reach of the taxman.

Or they might just rent everything they need from a local branch of a company and pay a branch in another country, and the two interact via crypto. Or indirectly via remittances as there will be a market for asking low-income people to transfer money on behalf of rich people, as transactions of low-income people would probably not be taxed.

There are approximately 87,296 people in Denmark who are already doing nothing when they would be willing to work.

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/be...

As for how much we "need", sure we can technically survive on very little. Most people choose aim to higher. Reducing inequality through a more progressive tax system is generally a good idea but taken too far that cuts overall economic growth and hurts everyone. At some point the most productive people just emigrate to countries with lower taxes; we've already seen that happen with numerous high profile entrepreneurs and companies moving from Europe to the USA.

I live in a cheap house, don't own a car, and rarely travel vary far. I just laugh at people at the people who "choose aim to higher", thinking that they need an ever more expensive house, car, phone, whatever. None of these things would improve my quality of life.

I question whether your QOL is that good if you laugh at people for wanting nice things.

Amusement is part of my QOL.

Edit: Amusement is cheap. But it's also a serious issue, if "people wanting nice things" are damaging the environment in the process. I don't think that the world can cope with a lot more people flying around in private jets.

Not that many people these days have a house or a flat they own. These things are expensive.

Not true. Many people own their home. The home ownership rate is 60% in Denmark and 65% in the USA. The HN demographic skews toward young people renting homes in expensive cities so if you read the comments here you tend to get a distorted view of reality.

Owning the house is essential where I live, for quality of life. Tenants don't have any right to ongoing tenancy, and moving is expensive and tedious even if it's only once every few years.

It would be interesting to break down these figures across age group and income levels.

Cities are expensive because people want to move there. They do it because of quality of life or because of work opportunities.

In the long run the issue might indeed disappear as the population shrinks. But it will probably just leave behind lots of unoccupied houses in the countryside that nobody buys. This is already happening in Japan.

> I don't think we need nearly as much as most people think.

It completely depends on what standard of living you want. People who would be considered wealthy by 1920's standards are considered poor today.

If I could trade that wealth for happiness though…

    > People who would be considered wealthy by 1920's standards are considered poor today.

I did a double take when I read that sentence. Is this really true? The 1920s in the West (North America and Western Europe) were a golden age for income inequality. The rich were... well, crazy rich. Would they really be considered poor today?

Well, who these days can't afford to build their own Art Deco skyscraper complex in New York?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Center

That is a cheeky reply, but some light research tells me that the Rockefeller family borrowed huge sums of money to build that complex. Also, modern day technology billionaires worth 50B+ USD could easily build their own Hudson Yards -- the modern day equivalent of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Typically these arguments boil down to how many high-tech items you can afford that were still crazy expensive back then, completely ignoring things like living space that actually matter much more to your quality of life.

That's true, I would never ever consider moving to the US for that reason alone. Our vacations are very generous and I always struggle to use them all up. I get about a month and a half effectively (if I take them all consecutively with weekends in between)

When I worked at bigco the US employees were remunerated a lot better but they only got 10 days off a year and were pressured to not take off more than 5...

Yeah I don't really care about money as long as I have enough to live. Work life balance is much more important.

Also, in countries with high wages, expenses like rent are also much higher. Except for goods that are roughly the same everywhere.

I live in a low wage country in Europe but I don't have nor need a car (I hate driving). That helps a lot as it's a huge money sink for fuel, parking, maintenance and insurance. I have unlimited public transport for 20€ per month.

But yeah we have US employees too

That sounds great. In which country is that?

Spain.

Oh and healthcare is also free here.

I know the Spanish healthcare is free(I'm from Europe) but isn't the jobs market in Spain also not that great? Except maybe in Barcelona or Madrid where CoL is as much as northern Europe but at lower wages? At least that's what I heard from the Spanish expats who left.

It's ok, although a lot of international corporations are clamping down now due to the trump tariffs crap and uncertainty surrounding that. The one I work for pulled all job offers, and Meta closed down their entire moderation center in Barcelona. Also because they suddenly think moderation is 'woke', ignoring that it is required in Europe.

Cost of living in Barcelona is nowhere near that of say Amsterdam. But I don't live in Spain for the money. I live here for quality of life.

thanks. Which city do you recommend?

Out of those two, Barcelona. The climate is milder and there's the sea.

There's other big coastal cities like Valencia but they lack the international employers.

A key distinction is that there is no statutory vacation in the US. If there was, it would be set by the States, as that is their authority. Despite that, I’ve had 4-5 weeks of vacation at every job for 15+ years in the US. Companies use it to differentiate themselves.

To be fair, if you are working in a tech field you are already a massive outlier compared to the average person in both pay and benefits. 2-3 weeks is very commonly the standard for other professional fields.

Maybe, but I’ve had partners in wildly different and non-fashionable industries that had similar vacation time.

My friends on an hourly wage don’t get as much but oddly they have way more freedom to take unpaid leave. Their employers would rather let them run off at random for a month than lose them, since they would be immediately employable somewhere else when they came back. This partly reflects the persistently low unemployment rate in the US for vaguely competent people that want a job.

5 weeks would be considered insultingly low for a tech job here.

France?

Sure. But given automation we need a lot less labor than 100 years ago.

Some studies suggest (sorry am mobile right now, don’t have links) in the US automation has been able produce the average persons essentials entirely since the 1950s.

But we still were taught growing up to put on the show of going to work. At great resource cost and ecological destruction now threatening everyone in deference to memes of long dead laborers and rich who would often be able to shoot anyone that didn’t work hard enough without repercussion.

We do not live in the 1900s or even 1800s.

And how much stuff? New 80” TVs and iPhones every year?

We’ve been conditioned by salesmen who also probably didn’t produce anything but emotional demand. Sure let’s keep living in the Newspeak of the rich media class, and ossified politicians; we’ve always been at war with line go down.

Your same old copy paste “don’t rock the boat” euphemism is thought ending nonsense. It’s capitulation not discovery of options.

Retirement and old age are expensive due to the cost of medical care and nursing care. If people wouldn't need those then it would be possible to retire much earlier.

I don't see the problem. So medical and nursing care is expensive. We can change the society so that relatively more people work in those fields. Instead, we are cutting on those services. It's just a thinly disguised attack on the elderly.

Healthcare share of economies is just trending up and up over time, there is very little cutting there. At best you go back a year or two sometimes, as you can see here.

So what you are asking for is already happening.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/health-expenditure-and-fi...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Healthcare-spending-as-a...

Part of this is a cultural issue. I completely understand why people struggle with addiction, smoking, obesity, stress, depression, and so on. I don't blame the people, but the current culture of cheap and fast food, stress, overworking, lack of time and/or energy for cooking, family, hobbies, and taking care of health. Many of these preventable diseases could be addressed by cultural changes and government care, which could decrease the cost of medical/nursing care.

Like other commenters just said: just buy less. On the surface everybody agrees, but on the streets everybody buys more, and throw stones at the police when they are blocked doing it. So how is it? It seems this evidence "buy less" is not exactly shared, not even half-heartedly. Please stop claiming something is "easy" or "obvious" when it is neither.

When you state that "European social safety nets are pretty damn generous" it seems to imply that someone else, rather than the Europeans themselves, is being generous and footing the bill.

I don't think it implies such a thing:

definition "generous":

• (of a person) showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected: she was generous with her money.

• showing kindness toward others: it was generous of them to ask her along.

• (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary: a generous sprinkle of pepper.

Yeah. And creating those resources cost less and less with less human labor every year.

What a pile of .... Humans have lived for 2 millions years, had no system and were just fine and survived the freaking ice age.

It's not to convince you of anything.

You can't retire if you don't have savings or children to support you.

Even if you have savings and/or children to support you, you can't retire if your society didn't make enough children so that your savings can have some value.

Social security was always a ponzi scheme that doesn't work in the long run as fertility rates _necessarily_ drop to or below (really, always below) replacement rate.

Even without social security, if you want to retire, and to have along retirement, then you need your society to have near replacement rate fertility. Or insanely high productivity. I guess you can look forward to AI rendering most jobs obsolete, and hope that humans can -as always before- create new jobs that can't be easily automated.

Denmark has nice a nice page for fertility rates:

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...

I think GDP is somewhat disconnected from that rate though.

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/oekonomi/nationalregns...

The problem isn't that it's a ponzi scheme. It's that humans have to be replaced the same way anything with a finite lifespan (e.g. cars, buildings) has to be replaced.

In theory your children are your pension deposit. People who don't have children should get a significantly reduced pension or they must provably support the children of a family that has more than two children per woman.

The problem with modern society is that you need children at the end of your life. Agricultural subsistence requires children very early. It's a scheduling mismatch that causes people to delay having children all the way until they are no longer fertile.

Countries should be extremely focused on financial literacy education from an early age

>just an illusion

It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).

So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.

What "system?" If you don't work, you don't eat. That's always been the rule.

Wait until you find out about how the best years went before having any pension systems.

Paywall.

But life expectancy at birth is not the same as life expectancy after hitting working age.

In 1900, if you made it to 10, on average you’d die at 63, meaning plenty lived well into their 70’s.

http://www.jbending.org.uk/stats3.htm

Sure but the real problem is that we don’t know how to deal with bad quality of life for those suffering the effects of senescence and we have a society that is only just starting to come to grips with the perils of the sedentary lifestyle while allocating a lot of resources to people who haven’t done the work to live a good life past 60.

And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).

A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.

Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.

There's only one issue I can think of with your idea that someone who is 75 now leads a life as you're describing.

The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another 35+ years.

> are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?

That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?

Does anyone know if there's any kind of metrics for healthspans? Meaning the "good" part of life before it's just doctors, medicine and retirement homes.

My impression so far is that we've done a lot of work at the lifespan, less at the healthspan. What's the point of living until 90 if the last 15 years isn't that fun at all.

Healthspan in Denmark, who just raised the retirement age, went up from 67.6 to 71.0 from 2000-2019. (+3.4 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthy-life-expectancy-a...

Contrast this with Denmark's lifespan growth over the same period, of 76.8 to 81.4 (+4.6 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=2000...

So from the data, prior to covid-19 Danes had gained about 3 and a half years of healthy life, and an additional year of unhealthy life.

It makes sense that Healthspan and lifespan are well-correlated, as most of the ways we have of extending lifespan do so in a way that makes you clearly healthier (such as preventing chronic diseases).

That said, it is true there is a bit of an increasing gap. This isn't just in Denmark, it's global - lifespan rose by 6.4 years from 2000-2019 while healthspan only increased 5.3 years. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...

> Does anyone know if there's any kind of metrics for healthspans? Meaning the "good" part of life before it's just doctors, medicine and retirement homes.

The metric I've come across is Quality Adjusted Life Years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

But generally, work has gotten way less physically demanding so it balances out. Tech allows you to work in via Zoom in the comfort of your home. I hope to be coding literally till the day I die.

With an aging population and increasingly long work lives, individual stressors will increase and societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle. Baby boomers, having lived through some of the most incredible growth in human history, will perhaps turn out to be an anomalous blip in the life expectancy stats.

Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive.

Not that it's an easy problem to solve, what with the demographics being what they are. I think we'll have to get used to the thought - and reality - of sinking living standards in the west.

You get downvoted a lot, but I challenge anyone to name a country that hasn't slashed _hard_ social benefits, pensions, % of GDP for healthcare, and similar..

I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc.

But overall reduction of cost with reduction of salaries will ultimately lead to worse healthcare.

A friend was in Germany skiing this past winter. The 10k population town he was staying didn't have a paediatrician and they had to drive 2h to get care for their kid. In Germany, in 2025. I wonder how this very town will be in 2030 or 2050 with that trend..

It's a tough reality to face. Problems are piling up for the west that aren't easily solved, and not just with social benefits. Something as mundane as aging sewage systems is starting to become a real problem in many countries.

Demographic collapse is hardly unique to "the west". Have a look at the population age histogram in China, South Korea, and Japan.

Absolutely. I seem to recall South Korea having a TFR well below one last time I checked. That doesn't mean we're not facing problems in the west, and specifically the Nordic countries, which is what TFA is about.

Both to you and the parent:

I don't think that in a 10k ski-town there aren't kids. They definitely got 'young' people living there having kids.

I was reading the Systemantics yesterday and they discuss how a 'system' does not 'solve' a problem, but it breaks it down to smaller (easier to hide) problems. The book uses as an example the "garbage collection in a town", and how this one-big-problem breaks down to 100-small-problems. So the "we need rebalance our fiscal blah-blah" eventually breaks down to "no extended leave for new mothers", "not every doc-specialization in towns below 50k", and so on.

> docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies

This is a common thought. It is incorrect. I’m a doctor. I have gotten pharma money for talking for their drug once, which was absolutely game-changing and which I would speak for without money (sugammadex is the generic name, if you want to look it up). I get lunch twice a year. The age of free vacations is long gone.

I have similar concerns. We have nurses watching way more patients, working unbelievable hours.

16 hour shifts with no notice, 60 hour work weeks, and often disgusting work does not make for an attractive field, so I’m not surprised there’s a massive shortage issue.

This will probably only get significantly worse in the Certified Nursing Assistant field which mainly involves the most manual of labors - changing bed pans, cleaning patients, etc. with many of the same shortage problems. (And way less pay, of course)

> "societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle"

This is not a complete discussion without the elephant in the room - diet and lifestyle are making us sick and much of that is a choice of how we design our world. most Americans and Britons are overweight or obese, and the Coca Cola company and Nestle and all the rest are doing everything they can to encourage their product sales, and society is not doing much to counter it. [smoking deaths halved in the UK between 1990 and 2021 [0]]

America and the UK are car-centric, the CDC says less than half of Americans meet the guidelines for physical exercise[1] and UK Gov says 1 in 3 men and 1 in 2 women are not active enough for good health[2]. People say that if the health benefits of exercise could be bottled up and sold, it would be one of the most potent drugs known, and we're designing places and lives which get rid of it as a regular part of life, and make it harder to add in. UK Gov link says "can help to prevent and manage over 20 chronic conditions and diseases, including some cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression". There's millions of people with type 2 diabetes, which is reversible for many people with low-carb eating and fasting and exercise. The Lancet[4] paper saying 4.5 million people were diagnosed with liver disease in the USA in 2021 and alcohol is responsible for almost 60% of cirrhosis cases.

Then there's cities which build car-dependent suburbs, so they can get money today from new build taxes, but set themselves up for large maintenance bills paying for the sprawling roads and water/sewer/electric infrastructure with such a sparse tax base. This is bankrupting cities in North America, which are having to allow more sprawling suburbs today to pay for yesterday's suburb's maintenance in a pyramid style.

Then there's big box stores[3] which sued state governments to stop taxing them as functioning businesses on the grounds that they build their buildings so shoddily they are completely worthless to sell to anyone else or use for anything else, and should be taxed like an empty valueless building. Walmart pays employees so little that many of them need food stamps (SNAP) and those get used at Walmart which then moves the money out of state. Big box stores make cities poorer.

When cities and states say there's no money for pensions, care homes, social services, health services, public transport, it's they're busy mismanaging it and spending it all on subsidising wealty car-dependent suburbanites and 'prestigious' big box store developments. Not to mention health insurance middlemen denying treatments and taking money from the sick and wasting the time of healthcare professionals tying them up in paperwork.

If things were better, with more long-term thinking, people would be healthier and need less support for that reason, things would be closer and easier for people to walk/use public transport to get there so they could remain independent longer in declining health, healthcare would be a lesser demand on society, and there would be more money available to fund it. Then add the 'missing-middle' of American housing so people who have aged and their kids have left could downsize to a smaller home in the same area with the same community, and they would have a more manageable home and more of their money for healthcare.

This is like writing a bubble sort and then declaring that sorting is too expensive so we just can't have sorting in the future.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/smoking

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/exercise.htm

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/physical-activity...

[3] https://thecounter.org/how-dark-stores-loophole-helps-retail...

[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2468-1...

Poorer individuals, who need retirement most, don't tend to live as long. Millennials and Gen Z are already victims of old, no-longer-applicable narratives (e.g. save cash, avoid debt, go to college...) and these ones about life expectancy will likely be added to the pile and used to disenfranchise us more while having no connection to reality.

Those old narritives were consiedered out dated for ever generation - but those who do it anyway tend to do well.

Sure, but one of the reasons that people have fewer children is a bigger risk of downward mobility. The cost of raising a child to an expected middle class living standard has increased substantially.

many of those costs are optional. You don't have to put your kids in dance, karate, soccor, ... However many do, and all those things add up in costs.

Speaking as a parent, there are plenty of options, some are really expesnive, and some cheap. You can choose which to pay for.

note that the things I listed above are fun, but won't get yoru children into a great college and thus won't ensure a better life for them and yoru grandkids. Choose wisely where to spend your money.

Saving cash was actually a fine strategy when cash was backed by gold or even (to a lesser degree) some time later when the national debt wasn't over $30 trillion - This massive public debt is forcing the government to print money at a rapid rate to cover interest payments and this is creating enormous inflationary pressures. Society has become totally distorted around the goal of keeping this scheme going, the distortion has permeated every facet of human existence.

Avoiding debt was a good idea when interest rates were high. In the modern age where money is not constrained by scarcity, interest rates have been low. Banks have been loaning out the people's money at near 0% interest rates; often towards the goal of helping corporations to monopolize industries; if it was YOUR money, would you loan it out at near 0% interest rate? It doesn't even cover inflation, let alone the risk of default... Yet the government has been doing exactly that with the people's money; YOUR money. The situation has never been so generous towards borrowers and so bad for taxpayers.

Going to college used to be a good idea as it would allow you to stand out among your peers and guarantee you some sort of management/coordinating role. Nowadays, everyone has a bachelor degree and those who have a PhD are over-educated to the point that they've lost their sense of pragmatism. It doesn't allow anyone to stand out. Education feels like some scheme, disconnected from value-creation.

Saving cash is currently a bad idea I'll grant. However I was inclueing sevings in things like the s&p500.

debt is note as bad as it used to be, but most people are not using it for things that grow in value. You talk about 0% interest - but a car loan has much worse payback rates.

Wait, what's wrong with those narratives?

College is free in Denmark (in fact you get paid to study).

At least in the US, the SSA projects current 30 year old men to live another 48 years, putting them dead around 78. 30 year old women are expected to die around 82. [1] A quick Google shows life expectancy is about three years higher in Denmark, not an extraordinary difference, and some of that number is probably lower infant mortality.

Barring some revolutionary technological breakthrough, we aren't going to be living, on average, into our 90s.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_10.html

The earlier they increase retirement age, the less painful it's going to be.

I’d rather a robust pension starting at 70 than an anemic one starting at 55 or an underfunded one starting at 65.

You can fill a gap before that pension starts with part time work etc. It’s much harder to make up a shortfall when you’re 85.

But for an individual that would die at 71, which pension would they rather have, in your opinion?

For me nothing changes.

The benefits of a pension start before retirement. I can avoid setting aside a huge pile of money for the potential of an extremely long lifespan and then worry as minor changes to that pile become really critical near and in retirement.

Suppose you’re 50 with 2 million USD in savings. How soon do you retire and what kind of lifestyle do you live in retirement? That’s heavily dependent on what kind of pension is waiting.

Where I am, we have personal pension plans. You can check "what kind of pension is waiting" by going to the pension fund website and checking. Gov't doesn't play any role in any of that -- except (a) prescribing mandatory monthly payments and (b) determining the retirement age. (You only get small gov't pension if you haven't collected enough in your personal plan.)

If it’s just a savings account, that’s not a pension.

Assuming it’s a defined benefit pension it can include guarantees like inflation adjustments. That’s the fundamental advantage which largely offsets the disadvantage of lower average returns.

I’m not saying putting all your money into a defined benefit plan is ideal, but due to the diminishing marginal utility of money a guaranteed minimum lifestyle is extraordinarily valuable.

It’s not a savings account. My employer and me both pay monthly installments to the pension fund which are tax free. The money is under my name, and is not used to cover any pension of someone else. I can decide where it is invested, and change it at will. Once I go into retirement, the accumulated amount is converted to monthly payments which I will receive until I die. If I die before the retirement, my children will inherit the whole sum.

In what way isn’t it a savings account then?

In the way that (a) its establishment and monthly installments are mandated by law, at the rates prescribed by the law (which isn't the case for "a savings account"); (b) both the installments and the revenues are tax-free by the law (which isn't the case for "a savings account"); and (c) the law that establishes the fund, mandates payment on both employees and employers, determines the rates, and frees the whole thing from taxes is called "the Pension Law" (which isn't the case for "a savings account").

However if all of the above also applies to savings accounts in the place you reside in, you can call it "a savings account" all right.

a) Historically pensions weren’t mandated by law, that’s irrelevant to the definition.

b) We have tax breaks for retirement savings accounts

c) Laws names are just a PR exercise, I’m sure you can think of several that don’t do what they imply.

I think this is very similar to 401(k) or IRA, or "self-invested personal pension", except that the law sets the percentage amounts for both employee and employer contributions.

We don’t call a 401(k) or an IRA a pension. “A 401(k) is classified as a defined contribution plan while a pension is a defined benefit plan.“ https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100314/whats-differ...

But there’s little point in arguing over definitions when it’s clear what’s actually going on.

What country it is? Can you choose monthly payment?

The one where they get to stop working at age 40 and enjoy 31 years of retirement?

Not sure why their opinion matters.

Most people won't get to 85.

Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not a problem that has easy and/or fast solutions. Yet, actions have consequences...

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.

As Bill and Ted would say: Bogus!

I think what they missed is that people typically work for much longer than they are retired.

If the periods were of equal length, I think the Ponzi scheme thing would be true.

As is its sort of a modified fractionated ponzi.

Ponzi, or no Ponzi, it's still an illusion: let's assume that we all generate enough money saved in those funds during our productive years to sustain ourselves in senior periods, even counting in the almighty inflation. The problem is it's not money you need when old, and frail, you want somebody doing work for that money. So the whole scheme still requires enough young workers entering the market, and them be willing to perpetuate it. Which is kinda not guaranteed if each gen is smaller then the previous one.

> Ponzi, or no Ponzi, it's still an illusion

What do you think money is?

> you want somebody doing work

This is one reason why the robotics work going on right now is so exciting. Without the demand for elder care, it wouldn't attract as much investment or development.

>What do you think money is?

Money is basically a coupon for labor. If there are no vending machines (read young workers) for labor coupons, then you won't get labor, no matter how many coupons you accumulate.

Holding money does not teleport people into the future. (= the store of value myth)

Seniors are also really expensive. By some estimates you spend half of your lifetime healthcare cost in the last five years of your life. It typically takes multiple working people to support a single senior on government benefits.

Do they?

0-25 education, 25-67 work, 67-82 pension, it's almost equivalent (42 working, 40 not working)

Education isn't work?

> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history

Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)

This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.

Sometimes you gotta know when the parties over and it's time to leave.

Those people literally dug their own graves.

NIH / WHO put infertility at somewhere between 10% and 17.5%.

You've condemned a sixth of the world's population through no fault of their own.

Adopt some orphans.

George Washington chose to found a country instead.

Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.

Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Frida Kahlo painted some art.

Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.

Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.

Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.

Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.

All infertile due to no fault of their own.

Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.

These people were outliers and they could pursue their passions and contribute to the societies because vast majority of adults were rearing a bunch of kids.

The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.

> These people were outliers

What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.

Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.

"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.

Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.

> What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

The 1/6 number is made up. Here's an example source: https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globa...

The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/i-keystat.htm

Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.

> The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.

> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"

The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.

What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?

The page I linked to has a top-level section called "Infertility". It has a table with a column called "1 or more births". The data in the table say that a positive proportion of those women are infertile.

As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.

> As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.

I understand you feel that way. Perhaps you are just a person who is experiencing dissatisfaction.

The research seems clear and sensible to me. And wholly relevant to OP. You may want to mail your criticism to the authors.

But it's not like birthrate falling has been mainly because of infertility?

They would work until they couldn’t, and then die?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088316

> it was your kids taking care of you when you get older

This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.

The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.

It doesn't negate the claim that parent made though. "Your kids" had a wider meaning (and still has in a lot of places) but the principle remains: an adult had to provide, and protect a limited number of (usually related) kids to be cared by those of them who survived later in life.

No. You've failed to get the point.

"An adult" didn't provide. All adults did.

That's not how it works unless you try to say that adults in general are interested in kids survival. This would be true but it's not what drives larger efforts, and resources allocation. For that there are always related kids which get the most of one's resources, and other kids which may get something sometimes. And there are your elders and others' elders as well. Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them and I dare to say I know what I'm talking about.

> Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them

And you left them for places with a stronger social safety net. Interesting.

Word. I haven seen so many misconceptions about our state here in these comments, planted in our consciousness by our capitalist system to justify its existence. This, that we don't naturally rely on mutually supporting each other, is one of them. That our elderly are useless and unproductive, is another one. That it will take people working until they are 70 and utterly worn out to provide the pitifully inadequate support our society provides our elderly and our poor, is yet another one. Such inhumane beliefs persist all while a tiny minority skim off a sizeable proportion of the the wealth our labor produces for themselves.

I think nearly all of it is starting with people not wanting to pay taxes (who blames them?) and reasoning backward from there. It doesn't seem like an attempt to have a consistent non-hypocritical worldview so much as an attempt to justify wealth hoarding which capitalism encourages and happily provides ideological tools for. Nevermind that by allowing ourselves to be split from each other and our extended family support structures, we are all becoming more vulnerable and in need of the very societal support some would rather withhold.

It's all incredibly short sighted and selfish.

>something humans have done since before recorded history

Inuits would leave their old out in the snow, and walk away. Just saying.

I looked for references. Found the following which cites three references across 5 decades. It indicates that this practice was 1) rare even before it ended in 1939 2) considered repugnant by many Inuit 3) an alternative to starvation when there was no other choice.

https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...

I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?

I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.

Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.

Wild that I should have to say so.

Steve is 75 and retiring. Quick! Barbecue him!

> You've created an impossible situation which will never exist

It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)

> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.

Humans took care of THEIR elderly. The system was made to take care of THE elderly. Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)

> It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)

Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.

> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.

Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.

> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)

I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

> The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen.

It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring. This is why it is happening in slow motion. There are still people having kids but not enough for sustaining the current population levels.

> We're all related.

We are also related to bugs. Humans generally care for their very close relatives (kids -> parents -> cousins...) and emotionally care for the rest of humans.

> It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring.

All of humanity has never decided to do the same thing ever. Society follows a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution , and there will always be folks who decide to do other than everyone else. Oppositional defiant disorder is a thing. You're living in imaginary land.

> We are also related to bugs.

Yes. And many very intelligent people besides myself think that we should be taking better care of the environment and all the other creatures in it besides ourselves as well.

I mean, I literally said "economic theory", the basic idea is that you simplify the assumptions to make a point. That's literally what most of economics is!

In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model, but you can still transfer the same conclusions - in this example, that pension requires making babies and that without a good negative feedback mechanism, the system eventually collapses.

> In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model

1: Correct.

> but you can still transfer the same conclusions

2: Incorrect, see 1.

It depends on the system. In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing. Luckily there are still parties fighting the implementation.

I don't think ponzi scheme is justified, it is too negative, it just makes no sense to actually accumulate all that wealth for so long.

> "every man for himself" 401(k) thing

It allows you to do that. In most cases there are various life index funds that operate the way a traditional pension scheme would and is likely the default option in any employer plan.

You can additionally add your own money outside of your paycheck and you can use the money inside of the fund to make your own investments. You are also allowed to take personal loans against your own 401k. Which is a generally overlooked benefit of the system. You pay interest on the loan but it just goes back into your 401k itself. You pay interest to yourself.

The great thing with a 401k is it's not industry dependent. If your employer or industry goes out of business you still have a lot of options to move your retirement to a new employer or use some of the funds to bridge yourself to a new line of work.

I used to hate it but now that I've used it I quite like it.

I prefer the old system because it's simpler (the last thing I want to do is manage investments) and it doesn't run out like a personal pension does. You just get the monthly amount as long as you live. Because it's a group scheme. Some people are luckier than others.

Unfortunately Holland has become very neoliberal and everything collective or social is frowned upon. That's really why they changed it.

> and it doesn't run out like a personal pension does. You just get the monthly amount as long as you live

It doesn't run out? What's this magic infinite money? It doesn't run out because when it runs out other people are working for you. It's a great system that exploits the young to benefit the old that didn't save enough. The new system removes the magic and you have what you saved.

The young also benefit from it later.

The people that live longer benefit from the ones that don't, but it's about reassurance, it's not an investment. If they had lived longer they'd have had that reassurance too.

> the last thing I want to do is manage investments

You are not required to. You can set your portfolio to be 100% mutual funds. Several exist. They have names like "Fidelity Freedom Blend 2045" or the "Blackrock Lifepath 2045." Your provider almost certainly has a default in this category they will pick for you if you signal no other intent.

> Because it's a group scheme

A 401k can be group or individual. It's your money in a special status that's allowed to be used for certain purposes before taxes. The proceeds are tax free under certain circumstances. It's entirely up to you what you do with that money including just stashing it into a fund and forgetting about it.

> and everything collective or social is frowned upon

There are advantages and disadvantages. Populations and circumstances change over time. With the world working to phase out petroleum it should be no surprise that Holland needs to adjust.

    > In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing.

Do you mean the second or third pillar? Ref: https://www.pensioenfederatie.nl/website/the-dutch-pension-s...

EDIT: (added below)

    > US-style "every man for himself"

Also, the US system has (at least) two pillars: national pension (called "social security") and private, tax-sheltered savings as 401(k)/IRA.

The second. The first pillar I don't have full access to due to not living there all my life.

About the first pillar (national pension), Google tells me:

    > You are insured for the state pension if you live in the Netherlands and for each year you are a resident you accrue 2% of the state pension. If you have been in the Netherlands for the full 50 years prior to your state pension age, you will receive the full 100%.

Many highly developed countries used to have a second pillar (company-sponsored pensions, either defined benefit or defined contribution), but those are slowly fading away after adopting more neo-liberal economic policies.

Personally, I am OK to privitise/personalise some of your retirement pension risk, but not all of it. Large parts should still be guaranteed by the state. The real problem with privitisation/personalisation of retirement pension risk, most people are much worse than professional investors. Also, a huge portion of your retirement savings are earned in the last 10 years when your invested capital is almost peak. If there is an economic crisis during that decade, you are screwed. Can you imagine being 5-10 years away from retiring in 2007... then 2008 Global Financial Crisis happened? You will definitely need to delay your retirement by 5-10 (more) years. Awful.

I live in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement, and the government pension is intended just as a back-up for those who are too poor to do so. Everyone has an investment account ("superannuation", or "super" for short) which is taxed at at a reduced tax rate, and your employer is required to pay 12% of your salary into it. There are many providers of such accounts ("superannuation funds") to choose from (normally your employer has a recommended fund, but you aren't obliged to use the one they recommend) – and if you really want to you can set up your own superannuation fund (a Self-Managed Super Fund or SMSF) in which case you can make all the investment decisions yourself (subject to certain legal restrictions–you risk legal trouble if you make non-arms-length investments, like invest your superannuation into your own business, but other than that you can put the money in whatever you like.)

So, lack of young workers is not an inherent problem – you can invest your superannuation overseas (most funds invest a certain percentage of the money overseas, but if you want to take the risk of putting 100% of your superannuation into international investments, that's allowed), so even if the Australian economy were struggling with lack of young workers, you could still live off the investment returns from other global economies which lack that problem. And the reality is that Australia is unlikely to run out of young workers, because even though we have similar problems with low fertility as many other Western countries (although significantly higher than most of Western Europe), we've also always had a relatively high immigration rate, so younger workers immigrating makes up for the insufficient births.

> in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement,

I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:

The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...

> The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%.

Yes, but that’s because the current superannuation system was only introduced in 1992, and when it was first introduced the mandatory contribution rate was only 3% (as opposed to 12% starting this year)-so a lot of current retirees had limited super because it didn’t exist for a big chunk of their working life, and then even when it did the contribution rates were arguably insufficient. Younger workers (20s/30s/40s) generally have had much more money put into their super, so it is expected that by the time they reach retirement age, the pension:super balance will have shifted more in the super direction.

> Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

That period saw significant economic and social disruption due to COVID-19, so I doubt that change is representative of long-term trends. If an economic shock causes a rise in unemployment, that can push people near retirement age into unplanned early retirement-and the people most likely to be impacted by that are likely to be the least well-off, who inevitably are more likely to rely on the government pension than their own retirement funds

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme.

It's most appropriately a shared investment scheme. Your pension money should not sit idle while you are building it. That money can earn a percentage in many ways and dividend reinvestment makes the fund grow massively.

> Retirement depends on having young workers.

Profits do. Retirement is going to happen regardless of how many young workers there are.

There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages - mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.

> There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages

Except we're using it and it works. It's demonstrably better than the previous scheme wherein when a business failed it could take the entire pension with it leaving thousands of people high and dry.

> mainly due to distancing "investors" from the investment

It puts me directly in control of the investment whereas before I had zero control and had to accept whatever the company administrator decided.

> which means that the goal of the system becomes profit only without any consideration for ethics.

Do you want to solve the retirement problem or ethics in investing problem? If you insist they both be solved by the same action then I think you're going to end up with a system that has _negative_ advantages and _everyone_ will hate.

> There is zero advantage to a society-level investment scheme and many disadvantages […]

The first advantage is they're generally a mix between tontines and annuities, which helps to mitigate longevity risk.

Pensions aren't a Ponzi scheme.

They just need to be calibrated that the years of pay-in and years of pay-out are balanced as to the ratio of the people in the age cohorts. If you have 10 people paying in for 40 years and only 2 people receiving pay out for 10 years then the system is cheap.

Except if you take a portion of the contributions and investment in incoming-producing assets.

Kind of like what the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security) does.

Not all pensions are the same or created equal.

Part of me wonders if capitalism is the solution to the Fermi Paradox because the endless chase of profits is driving us to extinction.

In many Western countries, younger people are facing the prospect of never being able to own a house and never being able to retire. Beyond this basic lack of security, people are realizing the cost of having children is absolutely astronomical. In many parts of the US childcare may be costing $3000/month or more per child.

For many people, pets are proxy children, and yet capitalism (private equity in particular) is ruining that too as all the vet clinics are being bought up so people can be gouged on that front too.

I'm someone who views the Labor Theory of Value [1] to be trivially true. After decades of Red Scare propaganda, Americans in particular dismiss Marx but they don't realize that Marx's most famous work (Das Kapital [2]) is primarily a framework for economic analysis, regardless of your political beliefs. I guess the problem is that as soon as you accept the axiom "there is no value without labor", there is no other conclusion than to see capitalism as the exploitation of surplus labor value.

The US corporate sector produces something like $4 trillion per year in corporate profits [3]. There are over ~210M working age people in the US [4] (about ~262M adults total). So that's ~$20k per worker in surplus labor value at a time when we spend ~2x per-capita on healthcare for worse outcomes and less coverage [5], housing is artifically expensive because we allow people to hoard it and education is unjustifiably expensive.

None of this has to be this way. We've simply chosen to prioritize the interests of fewer than 10,000 people at the expense of everyone else. People need hope. They need their basic necessities taken care of. They need something to live for. We're rapidly heading towards a future where only the rich survive but there's no one left to work in their sprawling estates.

It's also wild that we're seeing the rise of fascism in the West while there are still survivors of the Holocaust still alive. This is absolutely true in Europe too (eg AfD, Reform, National Front, whatever Hungary is). I also think we've passed the point of being able to resolve this with electroal politics. Now it only ends in tyranny or revolution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

[3]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/apr/whats-dri...

[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

[5]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...

Capitalism would be a great filter, like nukes and never evolving past single celled life

This is one of the more rational comments. I’m really surprised there aren’t more comments expressing how insane this topic is.

It’s absolutely insane that technology and productivity are increasing so rapidly, yet we’re talking about raising the retirement age and people being increasingly unable to afford children.

Something is incredibly wrong here.

Isn't this more about letting people who want to keep working do that? What's stopping people in Sweden and Denmark from retiring earlier? I would imagine there are some pensions plan withdrawal requirements or criteria for government assistance but can't you just save money to bridge that gap?

Maybe we need to start thinking about these things differently. I would love to have more time off but still have a job and not need to make this so binary.

Can't speak for those countries in particular, but generally you can work past retirement age, or retire earlier if you have funded/planned for that. A retirement age is usually just the point at which you can receive government assistance as part of a safety net. I assume if it's not pegged to life expectancy, the cost to the public grows.

Here in Australia, and I imagine elsewhere, there are strong systems (e.g., superannuation) to encourage personal savings towards retirement.

It’s not as easy to save individually when you’re also taxed heavily.

It feels like the problem is that we've drastically improved people's lifespans, but not their healthspans. Back when these systems started getting implemented, you could reasonably work up to the retirement age without too many issues. Nowadays, people may be living to 80 instead of 60, but our ability to work and willingness to hire people past 60 hasn't gone up with the increase in lifespan.

We did not improve people's lifespans. At least not that much. What happened is that young people die less due to less hazardous conditions which improved the average age. Also the average age is not the problem. The problem is that social security was setup as a ponzi scheme (younger pays for older) instead of a saving scheme (each one build a nest for himself). A ponzi scheme will eventually implode but if you manipulate the parameters you can make it go further.

> We did not improve people's lifespans

Are you sure about that? The statistic I always heard is that we have seen a 1 year rise in life expectancy every 4 years for the past 80 years.

I don't necessarily agree with the Ponzi scheme. If the ratio of old people to young people is constant then the system can be made to work with setting the retirement age without changing the burden on the young. The issue is that this ratio was reduced because the population isn't growing anymore. We need to find a new retirement age to balance this (or start a transition to a saving scheme, which might take at least 100 years).

I have a great grand parent that made it to 90+ with relatively little clinical care. So human's life expectancy didn't change much. What changed is that many humans died of what is now preventable causes (ie: diabetes).

Your evidence is that your great grandpa lived to 90?

This is why it’s better to have a higher salary vs relying on government to provide a better standard of living at the trade off of a lower salary.

With the high salary, even if the cost of living around you is high, you can still make choices to save and invest money to eventually become financially independent and retire when you want, where as if you have a low salary, you don’t have that flexibility, you are at the mercy of the systems around you.

"Investing money" is insufficient. You still need kids and the newer generations at the end of the day.

Think where you are going to invest and how that investment is going to provide returns. Stocks? Those companies actually need to produce and hence need workers. There also needs to be a broad consumer class to purchase those products. Without younger generations, you have no workers and no consumers which means your stocks have no value. Same with bonds. Same with real estate.

consider what humans did before society. they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. but at night they would spend a few hours looking at the stars. what we have now is pretty similar. except instead of stars we have screens. i would say life is ok if you can read something interesting every day and have a job that you enjoy. i would say you should prioritize having impact or having a job you love. everyone accumulates as much money as possible at the expense of everything else… there are people with millions saved up at the age of 60… who then die shortly after and did a bunch of work for nothing. keep enough saved to cover modest expenses for a year. beyond that, priotize other things

I take issue with the idea that pre-modern humans were working 90% of the time. We know medieval peasants didn't, we know bronze age societies didn't, and we have no real evidence to support hunting based societies doing it either, especially when we consider the lower nutritional health of past humans that made physical labor far more difficult to maintain consistently without just dieing from pushing the body beyond its limits. It is far more TV trope than reality going by historical sources. Medieval peasants spent most winters doing mostly random home tasks and small crafts while they sat around a fire. And farming based societies generally put in the vast majority over their work in a two months in spring and in the fall. You don't plant fields in July, you just complain about the weather not being ideal for plant growth and did basic living chores that you always do like washing and mending your single pair of clothes or patching up your roof or milking your cow. But there is only so much mending and washing and milking to do.

Or look at ancient egyptions, they very clearly didn't need to work 90% of the time if they got time to build massive pyramids, and there is considerable evidence that pyramid workers were not forced to work, but simply offered extra booze and food for doing so. If you didn't work on those projects you weren't starved to death, you just didn't get to drink as much alcohol with your buddies or brag about how you helped build a wonder that will stand for hundreds or thousands of years.

ah, sir please read my comment. “before society.” ie the environment we evolved in. not post agriculture. so your whole comment is moot

> they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives.

This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.

a quick google is apparently completely wrong

> "they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours"

Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.

we didnt eat or hunt sheep. we followed herds of nomadic ruminant animals across entire continents. simply keeping up with them on foot would be a lot of work. let alone hunting them, moving them, dressing and processing them and then you have the task of making and maintaining all the tools and equipment that were necessary. fires had to be tended… can i respectfully suggest that you are completely wrong?

OK you don't like sheep, so I Googled cows and found they graze 6 - 11 hours a day and spend much of the other time resting. They eat 60+Kg of grass per day and you aren't going to get 60Kg of blades of grass quickly. Nor are they going to cross continents anytime soon. The BBC fact file on Giraffes says "Giraffes spend most of their time eating, feeding between 16 to 20 hours a day."

Can I suggest that if you want to support the claim, you offer some actual reasoning and evidence - there should be some diaries of native Americans and how they ran so many hours a day they coverd several marathons every day, and about how many mountains of knives they amassed working 15 hours a day knife making, and so on.

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.

You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.

I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.

Isn't democracy the negotiation part?

Yes.

Those that came before you negotiated on their own behalf, how badly to loot your future.

Now you must do the same..

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism.

As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.

Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.

    > Nordic model

I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.

    > with limited ambitions outside their borders

I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more? Some examples and counter-examples would help.

Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).

> I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.

The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian.

So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.

Germany was first. Bismarck did it to preempt the socialists. https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html

By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.

Age 70 actually at first, later adjusted to 65.

I can imagine the workers joking about making it to retirement... Coal miners probably had little chance, we can't imagine today how hard that work was. They were usually "worn out" around age 50.

> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.

> Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

Then why is it based on earnings? And why can't I opt out of this death pledge?

> Your health is probably not going to be as good

Ah, the old, "your life will suck anyways" play.

> you should have known for most of your adult life

That you are a slave to the state, until you cannot work anymore, and then you will be discarded brutally.

Hard to figure out why the younger generation doesn't want to buy into this.

Does the younger generation have a choice about buying into this? I don't think they have another option. They can emigrate but all of the other countries with a decent quality of life are facing similar demographic problems.

Only future will tell right?

Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years.

It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."

You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more working people than retired people, which is no longer the case, so pensions have to be reduced.

Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.

Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.

I agree that it should be kept to a minimum and that luxurious pensions at the cost of working people should not exist.

> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.

This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.

Exactly. Saving is not a thing for an economy. The future economy needs to actually create all those goods and services for which you saved up. If the future economy doesn’t have enough labor because of demographics then some major price adjustments need to happen in favor of the future workers.

All money is imaginary until it becomes realized as food in your belly.

It's fundamentally different in any society with strong private property rights. A private pension is a set of investments, i.e. something that ultimately is owned by you. How much those investments pay off, if at all, is unknown, but if they do pay off then it's yours.

A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.

That's how it works in Sweden though: part of your pension is your own private investments, they aren't taxed as normal investments since you can only withdraw after reaching retirement age, the other part of it is a state pension. Even with this scheme we still got our retirement age risen.

So it seems it doesn't matter if it's public or private, the benefits of improved productivity is not trickling down to workers, a lot more is produced, generating a lot more wealth, and even with private funds we still get shafted because the capital class wants more and more of the pie.

But how much do workers pay towards pensions? In Austria, 20% of personel costs go directly towards pensions, and almost 30% of the entire state budget also goes to pensions on top of that, which is insane.

> […] allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.

As someone who frequents personal finance sub-reddits, this does not work. The number of people who would save for their long-term needs is generally small.

And for some folks it is a 'personality problem' in that they are short-sited, in numerous cases it's a matter of not having any available funds. Forced savings are an absolute necessity.

Further it is also necessary for the funds to be away from people's hands so they don't fiddle with the money.

Canada went through this debate in the 1990s when it reformed its government pension system, and between fees and behaviour issues, the general consensus was that have a pool of money separate from private retirement accounts (RRSPs in Canada) was absolutely essential. A history of the reforms:

* https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831

If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.

What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them. But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.

Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.

The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom. The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.

It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...

In almost no country those taxes work like a normal pension. They are an as is fund where people pay now for those pensions now. You do not save for your own retirement, you pay for the retirement of the current generation.

Yes, and with an aging population the bill gets ever more expensive so people have to work longer to cover it.

I don’t like it either but can well imagine I’ll be working until 70, if I last that long.

That is a thing that should be changed. We should sacrifice one generation to do that but nobody is willing to accept it.

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive?

Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.

> 1371 hours

Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?

Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.

With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.

Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.

In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.

Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.

A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.

Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.

"Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.

In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer. And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.

> Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States.

I have seen it go one of several ways.

- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)

- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.

- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.

Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.

It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.

There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"

On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.

From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).

> It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

Okay. It seems that the cited numbers are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... which in turn is derived from OECD data, which also allows you to view employees by bands of hours worked per week:

https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateF...

In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.

Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.

> Out of curiosity, what drove that shift?

Denmark has (had) very strong labour movement and left-ish governments, though that has been changing over the last decade or so...

> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries"

In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.

>, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.

That is strange, by this chart the Italy have 1694 and Germany 1340. In Poland it is still 1814 in 2024 hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Damn, I looked again at my source and it is https://www.eurostaf.fr, not Eurostat.

Sorry for not catching this.

When at look at OECD, they give other numbers:

Italy: 1723

France: 1501

Germany: 1347

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oe...

Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...

That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.

> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive?

But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.

> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.

Hold on. That's what tech is for right?

certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??

Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less.

What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?

Again, that's a different story for poor people.

Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.

> What's preventing us from going on sabbatical?

Companies are not thrilled to hire people with long gaps in their resume, in my experience. (I have 2, 1, 1, years each gaps in mine.)

You risk making yourself unhirable. And, if not now, at some point you will need money.

One can only do it so much, that's true. And at some point will all need some money.

Are you unhirable now or do you simply feel you are less valuable ?

Who says that? Because that’s not the prevailing opinion among me (soon 40), my friends snd my family.

Benefits from «stuff» caps off ar a certain level. After that you want to work less so you have more time to, among other things, actually enjoy your stuff. The exception to this are wealth chasers with multiple yachts etc., but that isn’t «we», that’s a tiny tiny sliver of the elite.

Assuming your country is similar to Norway:

1) Unions say it when they always demand increased salary (= focus on private spending) rather than reduced working hours

2) Voters say it when the right and far right is polling high. Lower taxes = wish for higher private spending, if people are going to work less then tax rate must up for society to function as public expenditure will increase, not decrease, with lots of elderly needing care and fewer workers available.

3) Lots of people have the ability to reduce working hours by working fewer hours (in Norway, if you have kids you can always get 20% unpaid leave by law). And most could do so economically if they reduced their consumption and spending. But people do not seem to consider reducing their salary as an option. The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.

PS: You talk about getting more stuff, but to meet the future labor problems we are talking about reductions being needed to peoples consumption, not staying at the 2025 level.

I don't want fewer working hours. I want to make enough money so I don't have to work for a few years.

No tax revenue

>The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.

They're not taking it because living costs are up across the board. The laws allows you to work part time, but your expenses don't so you have to work 40h week to keep up in the rat race with everyone else.

You could argue the opposite to all your points.

1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.

2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.

3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.

Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".

On 3), sorry, I should have been more specific -- I was talking about Norway specifically and also specifically about the middle class segment.

I was a bit clumsy -- I just meant that if people wanted to prioritize time over luxuries then SOME people, who are in a position to, not all, could have sent that signal. Because luxuries (vacations, cabins, boats) are still getting prioritized in the scandinavian middle class, and those specifically could have sent the signal they wanted more free time instead.

I agree with your points outside of that context and I should have specified it.

>Who says that?

People who believe that consumerism was something that the general population opted into willingly rather than a result of a torrent of post WW2 psyops campaigns designed to deal with the "problem" of industrial overproduction.

Rent is a fixed expense that keeps rising. Therefore there is a minimum amount of work you need to do that keeps rising even if you want nothing.

My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings. I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay. My salary (and my friends') in IT is 2-3 times more than the average pay, and 60/80% is more than enough to live comfortably

I don't think time worked linearly correlates with profitability, especially when talking about long timeframes. E.g. working 120 hours per week for a year is extremely unlikely to result in 3x the productivity as 40 hours a week. Same with working 3/5ths as much, it's unlikely to linearly scale down to 3/5ths the value (not that "it can't ever", just not as a typical expectation).

That aside, plenty of places offer a 4x10, or are fine with it when asked, and I think that's a more productive way to put in 40 hours each week while also being more convenient for yourself (before even getting into wanting to lower total hours).

4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.

You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.

We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.

If you're already time constrained to the point working 2 extra hours means you can't get through the day without caffeine and skipping meals then of course it's a bad idea, but that's not an inherent fault of a 4x10 in itself.

A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.

Those don't exist because of unintended (but obvious) consequences of government regulation. For all sorts of reasons the risk and cost profile is pretty similar per employee whether they are 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week (non exhaustive examples: health insurance costs me the same to provide no matter how many hours an employee works. Depending on your regulatory regime certain payments like pensions/unemployment are capped so more workers earning less can actually cost more than less workers earning more, firing regulations makes more employees riskier because the probability you hire junk you can't get rid of or an employee turns to junk and you can't fire is higher with more employees, etc.) Since there is a very real cost with what you want your skill set has to be scarce enough to make the added cost worth incurring. As long as I can hire someone that will work full time for similar hourly equivalent pay, the part timers will not be seriously considered.

Health insurance being dependent on your employment, is a whole problem on its own. Of course these things need to be arranged differently, ajd with more freedom for the people themselves.

That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.

Health insurance is complicated and I think it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying). I think it's more accurate to say the cost for service is way too high in general, and we are missing out on network effects and efficiency gains by not providing healthcare to some and/or no not providing enough healthcare soon enough to some (and by providing too much healthcare to some too soon).

Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.

I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.

> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)

These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.

The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).

They are not different. They are linked. Who is paying only matters because the item is arbitrarily too expensive for the person to just pay on their own.

Of course they are different. It's easy to lose your job. From what I understand, there are even countries where you can be fired while sick. And then you lose your health insurance exactly when you need it most.

Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.

It's definitely possible, and my current company were very happy to agree to 4/5 of the time for 4/5 of the salary and it's working out well for everyone. However, I've also found some organisations - that are otherwise good - to be hostile to working less than full hours. Since we work on interesting problems and they were happy to go with 80% it made it an easy task deciding which job to accept!

I should add that's it's a start-up so some weeks I work more and others less. But I still have the day my kids that I wanted.

Perhaps try quietly asking your current company? They might surprise you and start a trend.

If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day.

The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.

Depends on what they do with those 30 and 50 hours. If they're burnt out, even 100 hours chained to an in-person desk, they aren't going to accomplish much, so that's just not true. The right software engineer can come in, have a pointed discussion, have some coffee, go look at some code, have a few conversations, and have a bigger impact in an hour in terms of setting future direction and avoiding pitfalls than a different engineer could do in a week.

In Germany companies are legally required to allow part-time deals for previously full-time employees. (§ 8+9 TzBfG (Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz)

You shouldn't have 4/5 of the salary when working 4/5 days because you would be doing the same amount of work.

No, the capital class wants you to work more and sell you more slop. I would certainly do with less work and less things, as would many.

Do we? Most people struggling to get the things that were easily available 50 years ago

> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less.

Why? When was that the deal? I’m genuinely confused.

That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things:

convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)

Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.

Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.

We are working less than ever, living longer in retirement, AND spending more of early life in education and training rather than working.

Denmark in particular is seeing some great decreases in annual working hours for working people. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

I’m not sure I understand your point. You’re disappointed by progress? Get in line.

You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.

Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?

By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?

I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all.

Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.

Working just means that you get paid to do something.

What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.

A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.

Yep that's pretty much it.

If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.

What we’re really talking about is freedom. Freedom to do what you want with your time whether it’s relaxation or work, but on your own terms.

When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.

It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.

They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.

This is a nice outlook from a vacuum. The reality is those perfectly healthy elderly people are still going to struggle to compete with the younger workforce who will be anything from more physically/mentally apt to just simply cheaper. So they’re probably going to be forced into retirement without the means to actually do it.

Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.

I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.

Older people can charge whatever price they want for their work. They can even undercut the young by exploiting their high rates of home ownership and receipt of pensions. Where I grew up there was a DIY supermarket famous for employing mostly retirees or older workers. And the elderly have the benefit of experience - there's a meme that employers don't want that, but it's not true. Employers love experience. What they don't want are bolshie activists who create trouble. Plenty of people out there who are willing to trade cooperation and experience for salary, and can thus easily outcompete youngsters who might be willing to do what's asked but don't have the experience to do it well.

> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong

This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?

No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.

> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.

I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.

pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.

There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.

And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.

Yeah, China.

China isn't a generation.

When half of your work output is taken away to give to your already well-off parents, you don't have much left over to have kids.

If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.

Allow me to remind you that Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". Or in this situation, pensions are the worst form of retirement savings, except for all the others. Political parties struggle even imagining alternative solutions, but if you found a better idea by all means please come forward and we will all vote for you! I will for sure.

Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. Maybe _that's_ why they struggle, because they don't find a way of taking your money without telling you... we changed forms of government, but taxes (and hidden taxes) remain, did you notice?

I honestly didn't notice. I know exactly what my taxes are and where they go, and I can even vote to direct them this or that way. I highly recommend such an approach.

> Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea.

As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart.

> Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops.

In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).

Then make the govt pension plan opt in and make the citizens choose whether or not to have the money invested (maybe give a discount to those that do). Be transparent and track the total you already payed and what your pension will be at retirement age. Don’t change retirement age suiting your ego and fake needs, but let people decide. Don’t come up with excuses to strip some more money from the citizens, and make the government more efficient instead. How does that sound to you?

"Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government"

Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.

This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it.

So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.

This was exactly my complaint when the Dutch retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Baby boomers, the largest generation, were about to retire, and the argument was that the younger generations weren't large enough to provide for them, so they'd have to continue working longer.

But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire.

At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.

You can't say they did nothing about it. They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary.

It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy. They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.

And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.

When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.

The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...

But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.

> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?

"which may never come"

But you pay for it all your life, so it's unfair.

It would be better to manage your own retirement funds, invest it and retire when you want, free from the government.

Well if you have enough money to do all that then you probably have enough to retire a little early. Why not stop working at 60 and fund the first few years of your retirement out of your savings?

From what I understand if you retire early you must fund your retirement until the end. So you either work until the requested age and get something, or you don't and don't get anything. You can't just stop at 60, fund your retirement from 60 to 70, and then expect the gov to pay for your retirement from 70 to the end. Maybe I'm wrong tho.

Not sure how it works in Denmark but in Poland you have to work certain amount of years (20-25) to qualify for retirement even though the retirement age is 60-65. The amount you get depends on how much you paid into the system, so you will get less for not working, but it'll not prevent you from receiving the pension. And in the US, you become eligible for pension after just 10 years of paying into the system.

Whereas in Turkey you will actually get less if you continue working after you become eligible (65 years of age and 25 years of work, with some exceptions, early exit with partial pay available after 40 years of age) to retire (unless you get enough income to have your premiums paid at maximum, in which case you get a very slow increase in pension for the time after you become eligible).

I doubt this is true in most countries. It would introduce all sorts of problems if people stopped working because of illness or their employer went out of business when they were 60. Not to mention somebody who stopped working the day before their 65th birthday or other strangeness.

You also have people who have not worked much throughout their lives.

But there are a lot of countries and types of pensions out there and some (such as for government workers) may work the way you say. Checks first before you resign (don't be like some UK women).

> we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted

Don't you get a whole month of vacation every year while you are in your working years?

Why do you think Sweden decided to raise the retirement age instead of raising taxes to keep the current retirement age?

Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.

    > I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.

The problem is that huge number of people live way longer than 75, like to 85 or 95 and such, which imposes a huge financial burden on the state (pension and healthcare costs).

> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.

On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.

Just let two immigrants in to replace me. Much cheaper and easier than raising kids.

Ethnic replacement.

I see this twofold: what happens if net outcome is negative. Who would pay for it?

The same argument could be made for children, but a counterpoint could be made that given family history outcome is more stable than with unknown immigrant.

On the other hand, there is VERY interesting idea: personal immigration responsibility. Just as „mail bride” look for immigrants you’d be willing to sponsor in exchange for retirement.

Probably there are 5 million problems but would put personal stake for sponsor. Limit to 2 per person and people would do a lot of research as their retirement would depend on it. The country might also gain because I’d expect that people would look for high-value individuals that would maximize their chance for well being.

Finally, this could be used to revive drying out regions: bind this to a country/state/administrative region and that could help shaping it in the future.

It’s a profoundly sad trend. Our obsession with nuclear families and individualism has led us to a point where raising a family has become financially impossible and unimaginable.

The immigration fix is analogous to quantitative easing. The problems are systemic, and turning a blind eye to them won’t make them disappear.

Honestly, we need to rethink capitalism. By promoting shareholder returns over the wellbeing of employees, companies are destroying the social fabric necessary for a healthy civilization.

Of course, the rise in costs and the widening wealth gap are equally to blame. This situation compels both parents to work, sometimes even holding multiple jobs, leaving them with insufficient time to raise children. This cycle continues until the next generation has no chance of affording their own home (or even a rental). How on earth are they supposed to raise a family?

That's a great plan. Also make sure to deny citizenship to them and their kids, otherwise they'll eventually vote to stop paying your pensions. The glory of apartheid states of the past awaits us.

It would be hard to distill the fallacy of human fungibility into a purer form than this. If you’re say Danish, the kids you raise will be Danish. The immigrants won’t be Danish, they’ll be like the people from their country of origin: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....

And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ironically undermining the whole point of immigration: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...

The tremendous contribution that Danes can make to the world is to have and raise more Danish children!

Far right talking points!

They'll be as Danish and any other Danes, just choosing to live life as they see fit.

>"And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ", how does someone with a different religion, or choice for music make them less economically productive? Are you suggesting they don't know white collar skills? Or are less intelligent due to were they were born?

It's as if culture and religion matters, what an insane idea...

What makes Danish children productive is not their Danish blood, it's the culture and infrastructure that they operate in. The children of any nation would be equally capable.

As an immigrant myself, I find the second article silly. You import people according to your own criteria, and they arrive pre-raised and pre-educated. A larger proportion of them will leave the country before retirement age. It's a hell of a deal for a country, and that's why it's everyone's solution.

Immigrants are a much bigger drain on the country they are leaving.

A Dutch study found that non-western immigrants have a negative contribution even in the second generation: https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.

It’s not a “hell of a deal”—no European country is in the black from its investment in immigration. It’s a Dutch Tulip bubble. The Scandinavian countries, the most well-governed in Europe, have already done the math and started switching course.

You’ve mentioned before that you were from a third world country. (Bangladesh, was it? A 90% Muslim nation?) Yet I assume you believe yourself to be a net positive contributor to your country of immigration? That your children will help the native culture instead of hindering it?

Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

Immigration is about the movement of large numbers of people. It makes no sense to think about immigration in terms of individual immigrants. 1 Bangladeshi immigrant could be anybody. 270,000 Bangladeshi immigrants (as we have in the U.S. today) is a group you can analyze statistically and draw conclusions about.

As to Bangladeshi Americans generally, they’re probably a net negative economic contributor. Their median household income is 15% lower than for white americans, and the real gap is probably even larger because they’re concentrated in high-income states (New York, California).

Though the situation in the U.S. likely isn’t as bad as the one in Denmark or the UK. The anchor population of Bangladeshis in the U.S. are people like my family who came over on H1, which is a very small (only 65,000 annually), unusual population (e.g., my grandfather studied medicine in London).[1] Family reunification dilutes the pool a lot in the U.S. But the pool is far more skilled and employable than the Bangladeshi immigrant pool in say the U.K. In the UK, only 58% of working age Bangladeshis are employed, and the poverty rate is 46%. Bangladeshi immigration to the UK isn’t a “great deal”—it’s reparations for colonialism.

[1] In the U.S., our priors about immigration from the subcontinent are based on immigrants from the 1970s-1990s, i.e. a small number of highly educated people who were already somewhat assimilated into Anglo culture from British colonial influence. Pre-H1B, they also tended to move to random places around the U.S. rather than concentrating in ethnic enclaves, which forced a greater degree of assimilation. So you think about guys like Ro Khanna, who grew up as like the only Indian kid in Newton, PA. That doesn’t reflect the kids growing up in Little Bangladesh in Queens today.

According to his logic, his kids should thank their lucky stars that their mother is American by his definition, namely that she was raised here and her family has been here for many generations ....

Correct. They’ll be better participants in American democracy as a result. I’d much rather have almost anyone in her family running the country than almost anyone in mine, even though my family is a lot more affluent and educated. Their socialized habits and attitudes are far more suitable for participatory democracy.

1. Denmark has a special retirement system for people who started work life earlier than normal, allowing them to indeed retire after some 45-48 years of work. All these rules are broken though.

2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.

3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...

But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.

The point just flew over your head.

Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.

> The point just flew over your head.

It did not. I'm just pointing out reality. Kids are expensive, and it's probably easier to save for retirement if you don't have any. Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything, and I have no problem working more and harder for them, but we don't live in the age where retirement depends on having kids anymore.

Maybe you meant to propose to change that, so only people with kids have a right to a government pension, which is certainly an interesting idea, but also doubly painful for people who wanted kids but were unable to have any.

You're still missing the point.

Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.

Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.

If everybody suddenly stopped having kids, I think a lack of retirement would be the least of our problems. But you seem to feel as if only people who have kids are entitled to retirement, while people without kids don't have that right. And that's very much an opinion, not a fact.

It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.

That's why the current system is so screwed up, it has the incentives backwards.

> But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.

Empirical studies have found the opposite: if you don't have kids you tend to spend more on yourself, which means you have (on average) a higher life-style during working years which you take in retirement. A higher / more lavish lifestyle means you need higher income and more savings… which many folks with a lavish lifestyle generally don't do.

People with kids spend less on themselves and so are in the habit of a less lavish life-style and so need less savings in retirement because their spending habits are lower.

As a general rule if you have kids you need 40-50% of your working-age income in retirement, but you do not have kids you need 50-60%.

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/retirement/re...

* https://archive.is/bzJMV

As for having kids and saving for retirement, there's ways to balance both:

* https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/retired-money/the-rule-of-...

They have to pay for the immigrant who leaches off the system.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250525195310/https://www.teleg...

IMO retirement isn't a long holiday but it's for people who cannot contribute to society anymore.

That point might be reached earlier for some people, e.g. those who have a hard physical job, than others and a general retirement age is an approximation for when that point is reached for the general population.

Retirement doesn't mean I won't contribute to society anymore. It'll mean that I can contribute in ways that I am most interested in, without having to make money doing it.

What's sad about it? Even with raising retirement age, the average duration people receive pensions has increased A LOT over the last few decades simply because life expectancies have increased so much. Someone who retired in the 1970s would receive a pension for less than 10 years on average - someone retiring now will receive a 20+ year pension.

> Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.

Do that today. Tomorrow isn’t promised, let alone 10, 30, 50, 70 years. Don’t be one of those “When I retire”-people, do it now. _If_ you make it to retirement you may not be physically able or willing to do things you’ve been dreaming of for so long.

If you are waiting for retirement, then you are not living.

I’m so sorry to see this American mindset infect Europe.

As an American, I can’t realistically retire until 65.

65 is when Medicare is available.

I’d prefer Medicare started from 21 paying out-of-pocket as an option; then the payment starts slowly phasing out at 65. Not this abrupt, all-or-nothing.

This presumes that people over 60 are effective at working. Which they are not. Mostly they waste everyone's time.

I am in Denmark right now, I feel similar.

But my solution is to be an entrepreneur and also avoid working whenever possible.

So If I stay here and I need to work in my 70's, at least I will be happy I didn't work in my 30's like a slave.

Where I live, people have issues getting hired past age 50, and it’s near impossible past age 60. It’s a stroke of luck if you score a job then. So yes they can raise retirement age, but that will just create misery for all those who can’t cling to a job long enough. There‘s got to be a better way.

Part of the reason employees are reticent to hire someone past 50 is before they worry they’ll retire soon, even if they’re mentally and physically in good shape. So increasing the retirement age might actually improve the ability of folks in their 50s to find work.

Not saying this is a great trend, but it’s unavoidable due to the low fertility rate (already a problem everywhere in the developed world and soon to be a problem the world over, as by 2050–before I retire—the global average total fertility rate will have dropped below replacement.).

We already have 15y to go here, at age 50. That’s WAY longer than the median occupancy.

Also, large companies go out of their way to offer early retirement packages to their workforce, often starting even with 55 year old employees. That does not fit the expectation of people working till they are 70. Politics and employer orgs need to talk about that.

Companies that have an average churn of more than 7%—which is most of them—have no place worrying about some 50-year-old retiring.

Not that that stops managers, of course...

I don't buy this at all. I've hired many people in my career, and:

1. I've never had more than a max 2 year time horizon when thinking about a hire.

2. If anything, I've found younger people more likely to job hop than those 40+.

This might not be the case for your hiring principles, but this doesn't reflect the reality and statistics in my European country. People after 50 have a near zero chance of getting hired here as confirmed by the unemployment office.

I didn't see them say it's not harder getting hired over age 50, I think they're questioning that the reason is really job hopping.

Employers will never say what the real reason is because they don't want to get sued for age discrimination.

We’re on an anonymous forum. Many of us make hiring decisions, and are willing to be honest about it.

I responded to a comment that said the reason getting hired over 50 is difficult is because employers are reluctant to hire someone who may retire soon. I objected to that rationale, which makes no sense IMO. I have no doubt that getting hired over 50 is more difficult than for younger people.

And somehow you think your perspective is the only one out in the job market and everything else doesn’t make any sense

    > People after 50 have a near zero chance of getting hired here as confirmed by the unemployment office.

What are the causes for this in your country? I assume that you are an advanced nation with strong labour laws.

Yes that a big part of the reason, laws here make it harder to fire those over 50 versus those below 50 where it's basically at-will. So companies fire you before you get to 50. Same with pregnant women, they get firing protection so companies are less likely to hire you if you're pregnant or if you're at that age were women tend to get pregnant.

You can have regulations all you want, but private companies are still profit driven and will discriminate and take dehumanizing measures to satisfy that profit incentive. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved manufacturing to Asia if they cared about labor so much.

How many people over 50 have you hired?

Young people today job hop like there's no tomorrow.

Young people today can't get jobs, this take seems a couple years out of date

What do you mean by "young"? I'm 51.

Companies today get rid of employees like there is no tomorrow.

> (...) the global average total fertility rate will have dropped below replacement.

My pet theory is that when the system becomes untenable, procreation slows down, which will in time trigger a kind of reset - not that it's going to be fun to live through or anything. Self-regulation.

That’s not a plausible theory to me. IME older people are just less likely to work hard. They bring a “rest n vest” mindset. If an older person rounds a 40hr week down to 35 hrs, and a younger person rounds up to 45 hours because they are passionate and ambitious, all else equal the younger get person is better ROI for the team. Obviously this is stereotyping and may not be accurate but that sentiment can explain many decisions.

depends on the type of work you’re doing. “Work smart not hard” can apply to many jobs. Other jobs not so much…

In addition - when i was a younger engineer i appreciated have a few older engineers around the office because they were always a wealth of knowledge.

> they worry they’ll retire soon

Sorry but how is this different from hiring someone in their 20s and they are very likely to job hop to another company 1 / 2 years later ? I don't think anyone will believe this.

In Denmark, you also have to have a medical exam to maintain your drivers license after you turn 70, but they have no problem with carpenters running around on roofs until they're 74.

There's a huge difference between endangering other people vs endangering only yourself.

you've clearly never been fallen upon by a septuagenarian roofer

Yeah, it's not like operating heavy equipment at a construction site will ever endanger anyone.

Yes, doing so at a construction site it is considerably less dangerous to society in general than public roads. Not to mention the individual is more likely implied to be operating at some baseline of function (observed by foreman and others at the work site) which is not the case when a private individual is just driving on public roads.

You are straining credulity.

The carpenter isn't endangering himself, he's being endangered by his employer (and the politicians who voted for that retirement age)

Well you normally don't kill someone else if you fall off a roof.

Running a car at highway speeds into something or someone else has a much higher chance of injuring or killing multiple people besides the driver.

So that's the plan ? Make sure enough people die before reaching retirement age ?

My point is, if you're unfit to drive a vehicle due to cognitive or physical decline, you're probably also unfit for most jobs involving those skills, and yet you have to soldier on for 4 more years.

What happens when they're putting a new roof on a building next to a crowded street, and the 73 year old carpenter drops a bunch of tiles to the ground 6 floors below ? or he falls and slips off, taking another colleague with him ? Or he simply operates heavy machinery somewhere and gets caught in it.

You can concoct these make believe hypotheticals, or you can look at countries where this is the reality (South Korea; high elderly poverty), and how there is no "elderly employee accident crisis". Whether it is right, moral, just etc. is the issue. I would just say to not wait until retirement to "live your life".

What does the unemployment statistics say about craftsmen in the age bracket 60-70 ? Or any other line of work ?

Many craftsmen in Denmark are working contracts where they get paid more the faster they finish the job, and nobody wants a 70 year old dragging down their hourly wage just because they can't keep up, so the 70 year old will just have to "keep up", either making mistakes along the way, or wearing out their already worn out bodies some more.

There are options for "early" retirement at 70, provided you've spent 46 years employed. That means you started working at 24 at the very latest, and was not unemployed for longer periods.

Saving up for your own retirement is also hard with low to medium income wages in a country where you pay 40-50% income tax, 25% sales tax and retirement funds are taxed at deposit (meaning capital gains will be lower).

    > South Korea; high elderly poverty

It is interesting that you selected South Korea as your example. There are as rich as Japan, but have much worse social benefits, including national pension. I don't understand why.

I think South Korea is just a horrible example for almost everything in general anyways. There are South Koreans still alive that remember when it was still 90% peasant farmers living a 15th century lifestyle, that basically did a single skip through industrialization, and it is now one of the most technologically advanced countries on Earth. And it is still plainly evident by all the fairly unique major social and cultural problems they face today.

“Older drivers have 3 to 20 times higher risk of fatal crash than non-older drivers” [1].

We simply don’t have those data for roofers.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...

Are you asserting that older roofers are in fact killing other people by falling on top of them?

If not, I think you may have missed the point that licensing is to protect others rather than the driver/roofer themselves.

I think OP was saying that it's riskier for OTHERS in traffic - which should be the main thing with reissuing a drivers license.

Like motorcycles are orders of magnitude higher risk for (including fatal) accidents - but they aren't as dangerous for other traffic participants so they get licensed.

If motorcycles were killing orders of magnitude more pedestrians or other traffic participants than cars they would get banned immediately.

> OP was saying that it's riskier for OTHERS in traffic - which should be the main thing with reissuing a drivers license

My point is whether it’s others who are dying is irrelevant. We have evidence of increased mortality with age for driving. I’m not seeing similar evidence for roofing. If geriatric roofers were constantly falling to their deaths, we’d see a movement to regulate them, even if they’re falling on flowers and not people.

I think part of the reason that we don’t have those numbers is that there is in general not that many geriatric roofers, or geriatric craftsmen for that matter. Most physical crafts takes a toll on the body, and while it has gotten a lot better in recent decades with machines doing most of the heavy lifting, the people retiring now will still have decades of bad lifting and old injuries. I think only farmers have a higher incident rate than craftsmen.

Every single craftsman I know have abandoned their craft for something else because of body issues or injuries. Also, you’re nowhere as nimble at 50, 60 or 70 as you were when you were 20 or 30, so the risk of work related accidents increases, assuming you’re still doing the same tasks.

> part of the reason that we don’t have those numbers is that there is in general not that many geriatric roofers, or geriatric craftsmen for that matter

This is a good hypothesis. Whatever the reason, I see no evidence for old roofers causing death or injury to anyone, including themselves. There is zero hypocrisy in regulating old drivers while being laxer with old roofers.

Of course it’s relevant. If geriatric roofers want to risk their life that’s up to them. They don’t get to risk others lives though.

> If geriatric roofers want to risk their life that’s up to them. They don’t get to risk others lives though

Nice theory. Doesn’t work in practice. Most societies are not okay with people taking excessive risks, even if it only impacts them. It’s why we require seatbelts even for single-occupant vehicles.

That attitude is a very recent phenomenon and may not be as widely supported and obvious as you seem to believe.

I for one use seat belts, and I want them to be required to be manufactured in vehicles, but I believe it should be a personal choice whether or not you wear them.

That makes perfect sense though?

That requirement was removed in 2017 by the right wing government at the time. It was a populist move to secure the elderly vote.

Shorten lifespan.

Cut all things that promote or enable public health.

In neo-feudalism, only lords and perhaps some of their most favored serfs, deserve private for profit health care, and the barrier to entry is cost. Why be wealthy if you can’t buy things other people can’t?

There’s always a surplus of peasants in this model.

When people talk about raising the retirement age the assumption is that the people affected will all be unemployed, not that they'd still work in some capacity.

You won't work in your career field at that age unless you have profound skill and expertise. You will put cans on grocery store shelves.

Realistically, what are countries supposed to do?

Almost every single industrialized country has a birth rate below replacement, so there's fewer younger people to help carry the burdens. Medical care means the elderly live on and on and on, draining enormous costs as they age.

I'm not trying to be cruel, but from a pure numbers sense it makes perfect sense. Would you prefer taxes go up instead? Lessen spending on infrastructure and healthcare? Lessen child labor laws? There's no a lot of winning answers here.

And overall, the problem is just going to get worse in every country for the forseeable future. Expect to see more of this as time goes on. It's a bandaid solution though.

Realistically productivity increased by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. If leaders can’t figure out how to take advantage of that instead of taking advantage of the people then they have no business leading a country.

The solution they are applying now is a dead end, literally. It doesn’t scale, the only place it leads to is people guaranteed to die “at work”.

And elephant in the room, people in their late 60s aren’t even close to productive compared to the younger employees and if you lose your job in your 50s or early 60s you’re condemned to a decade or 2 of being supported by the family if you’re lucky.

So a person in this position is a hidden “tax” on the tax payers in the family, or on the companies who still employ them, if any still have them at that age. Countries are better off just directly taxing the companies regardless of whether they hire 70 year olds. But that won’t happen.

1) Work less hours

2) Consume more

3) Have less kids

4) Live longer after the retirement age

Productivity increased a lot but expecting it cover all four is way too optimistic.

5) Real wages went down, in general. The productivity pay gap has increased significantly. Take a formerly stable country which is a good indicator of the progression. [0]

Getting terminated at old age is already a huge problem made worse by delaying pension. And it will get even worse as families have to subsidize their elderly even more, making it even less likely to have more (or any) kids.

The current crop of leaders put the entire burden on average Joe. Companies are insulated, always one restructuring away from solving their problem.

And then we wonder why populists win everywhere...

[0] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Would you prefer taxes go up instead

Yes.

100% yes. My father is 67, and to be honest, he really shouldn't be working anymore. Both physically and mentally. And he is not very sick or disabled in any way. He just doesn't have the same capacity as he had in his 50s so after a 9-5 he was just recovering and going to sleep for the last few years. Terrible.

He retired last year. He didn't have an easy life. Very few jobs would benefit from his work and continuing working would have a great toll on him.

You can raise you personal "taxes" and provide for you father if you so desire.

That’s not even close to the same thing, and you know it.

It's the same if you sum it up across the population: all the benefits that elderly consume without producing are subtracted from what young people produce without consuming.

If you want your parents to retire earlier than the population-averaged system can allow, you're free to do it a non-averaged way.

What if my father didn't have kids?

Then, as a matter of fact, he'll have to rely on someone else's kids to feed him, whether directly or through taxes.

If he voluntarily chose not to raise kids, not even adopted ones, then he placed himself at the mercy of strangers. This may or may not end well, depending on how much spare resources they have.

so this: "You can raise you personal "taxes" and provide for you father if you so desire." was just a non sequitur

Tax wealth. I know that's a very hard thing to do due to the mobility and political power of capital, but we need international co-operation and just do it. That's where all the money is and where it's going at an accelerating rate.

The way this tends to turn out is that the type of assets accessible to younger/working people is taxed and the type of assets held by older/non-working people is not.

E.g. look at Ireland. Ireland has a de-facto wealth tax ("deemed disposal" - taxing the unrealized gains) on ETFs starting at the first euro, which makes investing basically pointless. Meanwhile it also has one of the lower tax levels on property in the EU.

Yes, it needs to be done in a fair manner. France used to have a tax (Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune) which was anybody with more than X millions of assets had to pay 75% of income tax. (I believe it was 10 millions, but I could be wrong) It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't a bad idea. IIRC it was slashed by Sarkozy right before the 2008 crisis as part of his campaign promises, and he just kept going with his tax cuts on the wealthy after 2008.

Another thing could be multipliers on property tax. For example, you would pay 0.75× of the property tax on your primary residence, 1.5× the property tax of your secondary residence, and start going exponentially on third, fourth, ... residence. Of course, there would be loopholes (like owning properties through companies), and these loopholes would need to be closed.

You could also tax buy-backs and dividends. (If a company buy their own shares, they have to pay a 50% tax on it)

There are a lot of possible implementations that could add up to each other. It's a fallacy to just point at the bad ones and say "look it doesn't work!"

The main issue is that there has been a transfer of global share income from labour to capital in the last 50 years. However we expect to pay for pensions just by taxing labour. It doesn't matter if there are less young people, because (as shown by GDP growth) they are producing more overall, but misinformed politicians use this argument because they don't understand that these folks didn't profit from the increase in productivity. We need to fairly take a share from this productivity increase and distribute it as pensions. The goal is to pay for what we promised, while relieving burden on young people.

Wealth = power

With power, comes the ability to change systems so those with wealth/power do not lose it.

There are exceptions, but that is the rule.

    > Tax wealth

Are you saying that Denmark, a nordic socialist country, has not taxed wealth enough?

Yes. Wealth tax was abolished quite a while ago.

And in Sweden, another "nordic socialist country", there's no tax on property nor inheritance, as well as very low taxes on invested capital. There are about 1.5x more USD-billionaires per capita in Sweden than in the US. I think there's room for some more taxes.

Americans still don't know what socialism is, huh?

"Democratic Socialists" in America aren't socialists. Even Bernie Sanders doesn't advocate seizing the means of production. You can argue we use it wrong, but we can argue it's our language and we evolved it.

But I don't think even all the nominally socialist parties in Europe are really socialist either.

The person you replied to is in Pakistan.

Taxing 100% of the wealth of all the billionaires in the US would fund federal spend for about 8 months.

And you only get to do that once.

Why would you limit to only billionaires, and why would you compare it to all spend? Try funding pensions and healthcare by taxing the wealth of the top 0.5% and it doesn't sound so impossible.

It still sounds impossible I'm afraid.

A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.

To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.

Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.

You're probably right, though U.S healthcare costs per capita are much higher than they need to be, and would be much lower in a "proper" single payer system like in Europe. In any case, a wealth tax would still help a lot with being able to fund these programs. Yes, the working class does have to pay as well, but it'd be much less if there were a reasonable wealth tax.

But yes, global co-operation to enable a large enough tax on wealth is not going to happen any time soon. A more likely scenario is that as automation develops and as the share of income that capital gets grows, the working class will end up in a position bad enough that capitalism will collapse and be replaced with something else. Hopefully with something better, but could also be worse.

Any solution that starts with "if we can all..." is no solution at all

> Would you prefer taxes go up instead?

Yes. Looking at my country, we've applied economic liberalism without any positive results at scale. I would prefer we go back to taxing companies more, go back to taxing the rich on their assets and crack down on fiscal fraud (20B€ estimate, about 6% of the national retirement cost).

Instead the government privatizes services that used to bring a steady income and defunds hospitals, education and public research.

short term, there are only bad options.

Long term: incentivize to have more kids.

this will solve the problem in ~25 - 30 years.

but that's too late for most voters and politicians today...

there should be a term for that? how about democracies demographics dilemma?

Incentivising to have more kids is not going to work. Things have changed. A lot of people just don't want to have children, and it isn't a financial issue.

There does not seem to be a strong correlation between countries which make it easier and more affordable to have children, and the replacement rate.

The government isn't just responsible for finance but all of society. Incentivizing kids doesn't have to just mean dangling money in front of parents. Not having government-funded media encourage lifestyles that lead to less children would be a good start.

What "government-funded media" are you talking about?

Hopeless measures. Nothing can persuade a couple to f... for kids, except if you force a medieval-like state based on religion and women oppression. Only such states historically guarantee >2 kids per couple, unfortunately.

If a progressive state can only exist as long as somewhere else oppressed woman keep supplying human material then it's not that progressive after all.

Shouldn't expenses be proportional to population size? If not so, then spend less? Birth rate below replacement doesn't mean population size is not enough to pay for expenses, it just means it will slowly decrease, which btw is good, we are definitely too many. In nature only bi-sexual reproduction is capable of reducing population size when needed, that is a very good indicator that when resources become scarce, only those who can reduce their population size can survive, otherwise we would reproduce by binary fission.

Infrastructure can't be scaled down easily once it is built. You can't just shrink roads, water lines, electricity lines and otherwise once a population has shrunk. Nor can buildings like hospitals and fire stations. So no, expenses are not proportional.

Those costs continue, and now you have fewer young people to pay for it - and more elderly that will need assistance. It is vicious.

Some countries like the US have skirted past this problem due to immigration. Others like Japan have not have much immigration and are beginning to suffer the effects.

But every country will face it in the long run.

The cold hard fact is that when people are educated and have access to healthcare, they simply stop having enough kids to meet replacement rate - even when wealthy and when having great support systems.

Humans do not act like most species. We do not form neat equilibrium with our environment based on available resources. That kind of logic didn't apply the moment agriculture was developed.

Good luck

Denmark, 6 million wealthy people, 4% economic growth, 1.5% inflation, 2.9% unemployment, national debt of 25% of GDP and budget in surplus. How did it all go so right?

Sensible immigration policies

Also, one of the highest taxes.

So what?

Their model obviously works well.

What are some examples of sensible immigration policies?

How does the US compare / contrast?

US has highest immigration #s of any country.

Canada is close in some respects.

The USA has the highest total number of immigrants but many other countries are higher on a percentage basis.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

Can you elaborate on your comment?

What makes Canada's immigration policy sensible in your mind?

I find that comment confusing because dissatisfaction with our immigration policy was a huge part of our recent election. It almost brought down the Liberal government.

I'm guessing the type of immigration each country receives is very different.

e.g. some examples from this list (% immigrant population): - Qatar (76%) - Australia (30%) - Canada (23%) - Belgium (20%) - USA (15.2%) - Denmark (14.2%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im...

Denmark’s immigration policies are not nearly as tough as their reputation nor to credit them as the source of economic prosperity.

Denmark’s economic prosperity comes from investment in free higher education for all, generally healthy lifestyles and the flexicurity-model, which provides a flexible labour market and promotes risk-taking.

Which western countries have "stricter" immigration policies? Even the US now doesn't treat refugees like Denmark did a few years ago (mass, wholesale expulsion to a country that was still at war, with very little exceptions). I get the reasoning behind it but the Danes are not the most welcoming of peoples, with regards to immigration.

Ozempic & Novo Nordisk contributes something like 2% of the economic growth.

they were rich before ozempic

skinny too

and tall

Actually, the Danish economy was a lot more interesting (read more complex and diverse) a decade or two decades ago. Lots of mid-sized engineering companies, for instance. The government is rightly worried about things becoming a Novo Nordisk monoculture, becoming fragile, and ending up like Finland. Novo Nordisk is facing tough competition from Eli Lilly and many other pharmas, who have better GLP-1 drugs but were slower in their development.

And yet they all have to work like idiots until they're 70, whether they like it or not.

I feel they could do better than that with all this wealth.

They’re not working like idiots, they have universal unionization and lots of time off.

You can have the best working conditions in the world, it still sucks to have to work if you don't want to.

Well yeah but then your problem is the fact you have to work at all. I doubt any modern societies have solved the issue of needing people to work.

I get it but then we should be moving towards less mandatory work, not a 70 years old retirement age.

Should we? As life expectancy increases, wouldn't it make more sense for people to work a bit longer, so as to keep the costs of retirement the same?

Life expectancy increases 5 years and pension age is increased by 10.

What? Already 100 years ago the retirement age in many countries was at around 65 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age

Work isn't mandatory. You're free to stop any time, and accept the consequences of that choice.

What we should be doing is aggressively cutting the cost of living so that people who want to can afford to retire while still maintaining some reasonable quality of life. The number one thing that would help is to set policies that make it easier to build more housing because that's the largest expense for most people.

Sure, but modern societies have solved the problem of needing to work until you're 70. Working until 65 or whatever still sucks, but 5 years is 5 years is not nothing.

It's the 5 best years that you have left to live. It's not nothing indeed.

Some of us are fortunate to have jobs that we enjoy but the majority of people don't really want to work. They work to survive. That's just life.

Well, yeah, life is largely about work. Retirement and living very comfortably off of one's savings/pension is a rather new phenomenon, and I'm not even sure it's a good one (in terms of health impact).

People are living longer. Demographically there are fewer younger people to support them. Something has to give.

On the other hand, productivity has improved tremendously. It's not clear that we actually need everyone working.

Productivity improvements have been partially eaten up by cost of living increases. We don't need everyone working, but how do we decide who has to work and who gets stuff for free? Should workers pay higher taxes to support more retirees?

Yes? Old age, and to an extent disability, are great systems for deciding this because unless you die young everyone becomes both.

So how much lower should the retirement age be, and how much should taxes increase to enable that? Have you done the math on that?

> Should workers pay higher taxes to support more retirees?

With what money? The poor folk don't have any by definition, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, which leaves... who...?

Cost of living doesn’t wipe out productivity increase. Cost of living is a money transfer. People buy things from other people. The question is therefore where is this money actually going. A casual look at how richness is shared in the USA will give you the answer to that.

You explained it yourself. People buy things from other people. The money goes in a circle

how are will still framing this as an ethical dilemma?! THE RICH should pay higher taxes to support retirees! there are people with hundreds of millions of dollars! we just turn down the dial labeled "how rich you get to be" until this shit gets figured out

You absolutely don't need to work 37 hours per week if you are willing to live 200km from the big cities in an old house.

You buy something dirt cheap for less than 80k USD. It's not great, it's old run down. But if you do minimal repairs and don't live the high life, you can get by with very little.

But if you want a new car and nice comfy house in a decent location, with all the modern amenities, well, that's expensive.

>something dirt cheap for less than 80k USD

brother rusted out farm houses 2 hours from any office building, let alone one that hires programmers are like 350k in rural states. Idk where you live, but it ain't Earth.

How about ND? Steele, New Salem, or Turtle Lake for example.

I'll concede that of the two properties available in Turtle Lake North Dakota you can get a trailer on someone's property for ~100K, 417 Putman St, Turtle Lake, ND 58575 looks like you got me there.

EDIT: reporting back from Steele, looks like there's an undeveloped acre next to a highway and a power junction for ~75K, it's under 80k so I guess you know where to find me pitching my tent.

https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1618-Beave...

For those who don't want to click, a house in Des Moines for $125000 - this was the very first house that came up when I searched des moines real estate, I didn't bother to look farther.

Patently false. 30 seconds on Zillow and there's plenty of 2b2bth homes in Austin for 350k.

Houses less 400k DKK ~ 60k USD, granted houses at price range are small, worn down, far from cities and job market in area a bit challenged - but not impossible.

https://www.boligsiden.dk/tilsalg/villa?sortBy=timeOnMarket&...

I'm not suggesting that this high life or secret to happiness. Just that of you want to work less, you can choose to spend less.

Personally, I'm happy with my 700k USD home, I'd probably be working anyways, since to me it's preferable to work full time and enjoy modern amenities.

If you’re willing to put up with 1925 living standards, you can get away with working way less than people worked in 1925, and way less than most people work in 2025.

What is 1925 standards? All organic food? Mostly tailored clothing? Custom fitted shoes? Only one spouse working? Brand new, incredibly high tech cars being made affordable to the average factory worker? Incredibly high tech entertainment centers? They even had washing machines. So are we talking giving up a dishwasher, a clothes dryer, and only having 1.5 baths in houses? Or are we talking the affordable city workers' hotels where man/women mingled, that enable people to live affordably with dignity in the city center, and actually have a life?

What does '1925' mean? No more shein plastic semi-disposable clothes that fall within what 1920's would consider sci-fi dystopian, universal basic income disposable clothes? Or hormone/chemical saturated 'food' that they wouldn't recognize as such? Or huge McMansions made of literal urea board and plastic extruded chemical 'luxury vinyl' floors? Brand new technology such mass produced cars, affordably available to the average person?

You have a really rosy view of life in 1925.

Only half of US households had electricity. I imagine many of the ones that were electrified didn’t have washing machines.

Likewise, about half of US households had indoor plumbing. So we’re not talking about giving up multiple bathrooms, we’re potentially talking about giving up bathrooms, period. Do you enjoy outhouses? I don’t.

Only one spouse working? That’s a myth. Who do you think was making those tailored clothes, washing the dishes, washing clothes by hand, and all that? Maybe you mean only one spouse getting paid to work, which is quite different.

You’re looking at a life in a small, drafty house that’s very cold in the winter and excessively hot in the summer (my houses were like that in the 1980s, even), crapping in an outhouse, and washing clothes by hand. But you won’t be washing a lot of clothes, because you’ll probably only have one or two sets.

If this lifestyle sounds attractive to you, you can have it right now for quite cheap.

Yes, but living in a house without indoor toilet and no electricity.

Organic fresh food you'll have no fridge to keep in.

I bet you'll not be able even start a 1925 car without proper training.

Jevons paradox. Productivity has increased, but so has consumption because those productivity increases have decreased cost and made many things more affordable and normal.

Sure, if you want to freeze your quality of life at 1980 standards.

I, on the other hand, prefer 2020 standard of life so I’m going to keep working.

1980 standards supported people having more kids than 2020 standards so it's not exactly been an improvement.

Not really…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...

[flagged]

immigration can't be the answer forever. at some point we're going to need alternative solutions.

[flagged]

Why not? It happened over and over in history and will happen again.

Yes ,what has to give is a tiny fraction of the corporate and individual wealth hoarded by the richest and most powerful members of society.

How tiny of a fraction? Can you quantify this for us?

In principle I think some kind of wealth tax on fortunes above a certain level would be a good idea. But there are a lot of practical implementation problems in terms of identifying and valuing illiquid assets. Like for example I have friends who own forestry land (for softwood timber harvesting) in a foreign country. Those assets have some value but trade infrequently so there's no reliable market price. And they probably hold the assets through a foreign corporation rather than directly in their own names. What is a "fair" amount for them to pay in taxes, and how would the government enforce that in a consistent and cost-effective manner?

It's taxation, not brain surgery. If political will is present we can figure out the accounting. The central question is whether we want to drive the economic output of nearly the entire economy into the hands of the 50 richest people in the world, or if we feel that split should be more equitable.

It's always odd to see this dichotomy on HN comments:

1) I'm amazing, I can solve any problem, I'm enlightened by my own intelligence, I'm the mover and shaker who drives all worldly productivity, and I do it by wrangling the newest technologies in the most imaginative creative and intelligent ways, no problem is too great for my superior intelligence!

2) Pay taxes? Ah but, uhh, that's impossible; like ... who decides? There, there's a dealbreaker for you! Hah! And anyway how much? I.. I... there's complexity, don't you know how difficult and complex it is to ... own a forest? Nobody could make a decision, I can see already that the combined might of a nation's experts could not come up with a figure, forget AI, this is just ... give up already, come on, some problems are forever out of reach.

The foreign country must simply nationalize the asset. Problem solved.

Funny how AI will take your job when you're 35 but when you reach the age of 65 it loses the ability to do so.

Bring in more young people via economic opportunity and immigration.

Making kids easier to have really only has two real options:

1. Go back down the development timeline of a nation and remove rights from women (bad).

2. Implement more social programs to incentivize children.

The reason we need to do 2 now and not in the past is we've developed. Women have rights now, and we need real reasons for them to have kids, not fake reasons like we had in the past.

Not having anyone to care for the old isn’t a reason?

If everyone thinks that government will take care of them when they are old, they will prefer spending time on "self actualization" (whatever that means) instead of the boring dull work of raising kids.

Boring, dull, expensive and risky. We need to incentivize people to do it, not just give them vaguely nationalistic reasons to do so.

Pretty much the only people holding up births in the US is young people who accidentally got banged up. That demographic has only been shrinking as access to contraceptives and education goes up.

We don’t want to remove privileges from people, we want to add on incentives. Currently, there’s a million and one incentives not to have kids.

Not for the young people, no. Besides, countries like the US have made elder care a cash cow. We don’t actually want young people to care for the old, because we can’t bleed them dry that way.

They don't all have to work to age 70. Anyone can stop working earlier, and fund their own retirement.

That's true. But I'd argue that everyone is better off when most people can chose to retire early, rather than the select few who are smart and disciplined enough to plan an early retirement.

Everyone is better off except the workers who have to pay higher taxes to support more retirees. That might still be a net positive for society but people are going to have a wide range of opinions on where to draw the line.

No everyone is worse off if their retirement date doesn't match when they want to retire.

the later you retire the less money you need. So if you are not personally ready why did you fund that much while if you sant to go sooner you need to save anyway.

There are multiple pension-related plans to supplement or replace the government pension, and most work in ways so that it's not just "smart and disciplined" people.

Retirement age in Australia is 67. A report from 2024 going on the 2022/23 FY said the average age at retirement (of all retirees) was 56.9 years. People typically plan for 65.

Couldn't find Danish data, but 43% in AU rely on a government pension. 27% on superannuation or similar (I assume this will grow a bit). Those reporting no personal income is down from 24% to 12% over the last 10 years.

Here, companies compulsorily pay 11.5% into super funds for staff.

All that said, I'd rather see more support for people living in their prime rather than being tied to a desk. I don't see the point in purely waiting until retirement.

Or they could build their own wealth/have children to provide for them in old age and retire earlier not rely on what should be government backstop for the most incompetent.

If they're raising the retirement age, then it obviously didn't all go so right,

I feel we've known this was coming years.. and it won't effect until 2040 -- this gives me confidence in the system.

It's not an unfunded mandate running on deficit spending.

So probably it won't be wiped away by a global monetary crisis that forces us to cut deficit spending and reduce pensions.

That depends on what driving it. If it’s because the budget was unsustainable and needs to be cut, that’s bad. If it’s because people are living longer, then it’s just an unfortunate consequence of good things. I suspect it’s the latter.

It's because people are living longer and their government retirement plan savings aren't enough to support living that long. Increasing the retirement age means you spend another five years paying into your retirement fund and have five fewer years to spend it. If you have additional retirement savings of your own, you can still retire earlier.

I don't know if I would so easily conflate necessity to political legislation. Both politics and politicians are very commonly out of touch with average citizens and what they need, and often ignore the policies that would benefit the state the most in favor of pursuing personal ideals and maintaining political positions and power. If a policy is good for a state 20 years down the line, but will cost them political positioning in the meanwhile or challenges their notions on what they are "suppose" to do either ideologically or socially, or results in their often substantial personal investments having lower returns, I wouldn't often bet on them choosing the state over themselves.

> How did it all go so right?

The highest total tax rate in the world perhaps?

The USSR and Yugoslavia and Albania and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam and China pre-2000s have all had far higher tax rates than Denmark during their worst times, so probably not a great correlation.

Denmark is like all the other Nordic countries culturally, except they have much easier direct geographic lines to Central Europe. So it’s basically what you get when you combine the Nordic model (tiny homogenous Lutheran population) with more advantageous geography. Finland is Denmark with extremely unfortunate geography.

Cuba, Vietnam and Albania have way lower tax-to-GDP than Denmark. They are way below OECD average. Care to share your tax statistics on USSR, Yugoslavia, North Korea and pre-2000s China?

The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

But it has all to do with corruption. Croatia has one of the world's highest tax burdens per 1000usd earned (or at least it had from a study done some years ago) and you would think that all is is great but this couldn't be further from the truth in reality. Corruption eats it all.

The heydays of communism in those countries are long gone. Current tax-to-GDP stats are simply correctly reflecting those countries being poor and heavily black market driven.

And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.

> The heydays of communism in those countries are long gone.

Marxist-Leninist countries typically don't have high taxes. Which is kind of obvious as the state doesn't rely on taxes for income. North Korea claims to have eradicated taxes.

> And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.

Shared history sure: they were geographically very close to each other, or even under shared rulers (e.g. Finland under Sweden for half a millenium), Scandinavian languages are essentially dialects of each other, they were all part of the wider European socialist and labor movements etc. The religion and Lutheran churches opposed development if anything.

The Nordic system is not very radically different from the continental Europe in general, more a matter of degree.

Just because you rebrand it as something else (communism) doesn’t mean you aren’t taxing labor at 100%.

If a worker gets paid working for a state owned company are they taxed 100%? 100% tax on labour clearly indicates the worker wouldn't get any remuneration.

Perhaps, with major conceptual gymnastics, state ownership can be seen as "taxing" potential private capital gains. But this is kind of the point of state socialism.

Dane here. It's not a coincidence that Scandinavian countries fare well in most stats. Most Danes point to a cultural bias towards very flat hierarchies in society and work life as the source of wealth, happiness and trust in each other.

Having lived in Denmark for quite a while, I will say that it is the societal coherence, and an attitude of working together for all which must have been influenced with the difficulty of surviving in that landscape in the past.

Societal coherence has been aided by the isolation, and here is the hot take: this cannot exist in "diverse" societies. Not because of bullshit genetic superiority justifications, but because no diverse society has so far demonstrated the capacity to have a shared purpose, coherence and high degrees of trust.

And yes, I do find monoculture societies (including denmark) very boring, and I believe diversity has other great benefits. But societal stability and long term prosperity in that sense? Doesn't look like it.

Before someone mentions the US as a counterexample, do not forget that all the prosperity of the US came from basically seizing an underutilised (in the industrial sense) resource rich continent, and now it is falling apart by internal divide.

The divide is a feature, not a bug. There’s a reason the US is called an experiment, with all the trials, tribulations, failures and successes that come with that. “We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Portraying the largest conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Americas as a deliberate experiment to figure out multiculturalism leaves a bitter taste, I'm not gonna lie.

And if you gave me a choice between a world divided in small Denmarks or between the contemporary re-armament of the west due to the election of a populist buffoon combined with decades of mismanagement of a unipolar world, I wouldn't think twice.

Every culture has sins and skeletons. That’s not to absolve them but if we’re comparing contemporary national cultures, their stability and demographic makeup, it’s obviously a spectrum of stability, progress, etc.

Every empire has sins and skeletons.

> and an attitude of working together for all

I don't know much about Denmark but somehow I doubt that this attitude extends to taxing rich pensioners more (since they didn't contribute enough).

In a coherent, collaborative society, one is willing to endure some personal hardship for the collective benefit or out of necessity.

I would like to point to a topic about extending pilots’ mandatory retirement ages. Most pilots plus or minus retirement age are unable to pass the physical or mental demands of the job, so only 25-30% are able to work and not on short- or long-term disability. Some choose to work privately past retirement age. I don’t have any numbers for pilots who decided to leave, were forced out, or could not pass the training.

Extending the retirement age doesn’t really help the situation much, as you need younger and cheaper pilots to fulfill the roles of pilots who are retiring.

The problem is, becoming a pilot takes a fair amount of time, over $100k in training fees, low pay for a while until fully certified with hours in, a very mobile lifestyle, and now you are subjected to physical as well as mental demands of the job certification standards.

There are quite a few highly paid professions where the main purpose of that profession’s union seems to be to prevent there being an adequate supply of the professionals.

Is that what’s happening here?

It's happening everywhere, and it's completely intentional.

happening everywhere, except Cuba.

Yes, against all odds, Cuba has a great surpous of doctors. How do they do it, I wonder!?!?!?!?!?!

(it has something to do with profit)

I'd call this soft power projection by medical means. Which is absolutely OK IMO, compared to lets say producing AK-47, or meddling in other countries internal affairs, invading and destroying them, and whatnot else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medic...

A recent form of profit seems to be offering cheap treatment/medical tourism

https://www.cubamundomedico.com/en/university-of-medical-sci...

Seems impractical for USians, though.

I think you're overcomplicating things. Castro was very vocal about medical care being a top proority during and after the revolution. There's no coincidence or conspiracy.

When you try to build a society around human needs instead of capital needs, you end up with different priorities. It's that simple.

If anyone thinks they're making the big bucks and accumulating "soft power" by training a bunch of doctors then selling treatments to Americans for cheap, I'm not sure they can be helped.

Yah. Maybe I can't be helped. Shrug. I got aware of this, I don't know exactly when anymore, has to be about 15 years ago now, or even longer.

I wondered about why there were almost always cuban medics, doctors, nurses etc. in action, when there has been some larger catastropic event in the world, and you could see them in the media.

Why is that, I thought? That doesn't fit being sanctioned by the US(and vassals), being poor in general, and so on.

That's how I became aware of ELAM.

And made up my mind the way I described. Can't help it :-)

> Why is that, I thought? That doesn't fit being sanctioned by the US(and vassals), being poor in general, and so on.

I think the word for that is capitalist realism. You cannot imagine a motive beyond calitalist logic, but that doesn't mean nobody else can.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

Maybe I should have written Why is that? According to the picture mainstream media is projecting, this shouldn't be, because they can't afford it?

I'd feel offended if the YOU in "You cannot imagine a motive beyond calitalist logic, but that doesn't mean nobody else can." was addressed to me, personally.

Or was it just meant as a general description of the concept?

>How do they do it, I wonder!

It's easy to have really good health outcomes at really low cost if you just fabricate the data. It's easy to export lots of doctors if you force them to work abroad, force them to pay most of their salary to the government and hold their families hostage to ensure compliance.

https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/23/cuba-repressive-rules-do...

How is there a market for these unskilled slave doctors?

It's difficult to understand your point given how this was written. However, it's worth pointing out that the Cuban doctor export scheme is, in fact, very profitable to the Cuban government.

Much less so to the doctors themselves, which frequently have to work in what amounts to conditions of indentured servitude. And they have no other option, as working as a domestic doctor in Cuba typically pays less than being a taxi driver.

Why is there a market for these slave doctors?

Because impoverished South American nations don't have a lot of other options?

One has to wonder why they don't just copy the Cuban model of having a surplus of their own slave doctors, especially given the supposed immense profit potential!

To be honest, I'm not convinced of your explanation.

Of course, we just aren't doing neoliberalism hard enough yet! Lets get rid of all the unions, that must be the reason everything is falling apart.

no, but why not waste an opportunity for Reagan-era style anti-union drivel?

Like med schools in the US

Yup, limit residents and percentage grading ensure that doctors are in short supply. Compare to the extremely streamline jr Doctor programs in the UK.

The US docotor shortage is a myth. Wait times are the result of beauracratic nonsense has reduced the efficiency of the existing physician workforce [1, 2].

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26132...

[2] https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-problem-with-u-s-health-care-isn...

Do you have evidence for this? Seems plausible, although I would have thought mis allocation also happens across specialties

:. urban areas do not have a physician shortage?

I think it would be more accurate to say that there is no shortage of healthcare providers, because there are many NPs and PAs.

Without NPs and PAs, I'm sure there would be a shortage of healthcare providers.

In my experience a big part of the problem is specialists. I remember many years ago people were saying that we shouldn't go to a Canadian style single-payer system because Canadians had rationed care and they had to wait six months for a hip replacement.

Well, guess what? I now also have rationed care. I have to wait six months just for a colonoscopy, plus I pay twice as much for the privilege!

Part of the specialist problem is they make so much they realize they can work for ten years and retire, instead of working the 20-30 years that used to be common.

Which obviously means we need 2-3x as many.

Has nothing to do with wait times. AMA lobbies the government to keep number of seat at med schools low, number of residencies low, etc. as a result number of licensed doctors is low, and salaries remain high.

The AMA has been arguing for increased medical school seats and increased GME funding for about 20 years now. There have been 27 (!!) new medical schools opened in the last 15 years, in large part driven by the AMA in its capacity as one of the two primary stakeholders in the LCME, which accredits allopathic medical schools.

1 out of every 7 medical schools currently active in the US was founded in the year 2010 or after. That's a veritable bonanza in medical school creation, facilitated by the AMA.

and law

I think this isn't at the behest of a union, but a lack of funding by the government for residency training

Nope. It’s all due to AMA — why would doctors want more doctors?

Because they are overworked? Most of the physicians I talk to want more physicians. My understanding is that the limit on residencies is a huge bottleneck, which receive most of their funding through CMS.

Its just like nationality based employment rights(need to be citizens or have a visa/permit to work) but more granular.

It can have its place, i.e. a way to balance bargaining power with the employer. It’s inherently anti meritocratic though.

In some cases it’s not about merit or about limiting supply however. In some cases it’s impractical to test someones work continuously, so instead it becomes honor based. That is, you are expected to go through an elite track and succeed in an exam once and then you are good for life unless you commit fraud or show gross incompetency.

This is a good listen on the topic:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-professional-licensing-a...

The cost of training is real. 15 ago a colleague did the training slowly while working for some training companies and it costed him just $42,000 to get ATPL, but you need to take trainings and flight hours and that is most of the cost. There are enough people willing to become airline pilots, but most don't have the money and the cost is not an artificial barrier.

Even the cost of PPL, the lowest license on the path, is around $10,000 while the ultralight (European)/sport pilot (US) is over $6,000. From that you need CPL (commercial), multi-engine, complex aircrafts, instrument rating (bad weather or night) etc., that takes time and money most people cannot afford.

What I find interesting is how often casual discussions about unionization on the internet will organically reinvent this concept. Especially on HN, Reddit, and Twitter the banter about unionization always seems to pivot toward using the union to force companies not to hire certain developers.

The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)

It gets interesting when different demographics start imagining that their ideal union would protect them from other demographics: Commonly, older people like to think of unions that will protect them from losing their jobs to young people.

Then when I’m working with college students and they start discussing hypothetical unionization, they come up with ways to think the union will give them more jobs by protecting them from the old people “hoarding” the jobs. (Sorry, that’s the least likely outcome for a union)

What’s most interesting is that the people I know who are in unions (non-tech industries) don’t hide the fact that decreasing labor supply to increase their own demand is exactly what they expect from a union. The first time you hear someone complain that a non-union worker is “taking food off their table” by simply doing their job you realize that it’s not as simple as Unions versus Corporations like we’ve been led to believe. The Unions are advocating for the people in the union, not workers everywhere.

> The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)

Bear in mind it's completely normalised for companies to charge higher prices in one market than another, and put barriers in place to make sure customers in the more expensive market can't just pay the lower price. So all the union is doing here is bringing it closer to a level playing field.

The broken pilot training pipeline is mainly a US problem. Airlines got spoiled because the military trained thousands of pilots every year for "free", then some would go on to get civilian flying jobs. Now the military is smaller and there aren't enough experienced pilots coming out. But there's nothing preventing airlines from hiring pilot candidates with zero experience and paying them to go through flight training. Some other countries do this and it works fine.

For pipeline capacity, it's not even really broken in the US. The airline problem is that they have to whipsaw between "growth is stalling, time to furlough our junior pilots" and "growth is now, time to hire all junior pilots with ATP minimums". But there's enough pilots being trained to handle the average.

This is because of their low birth rate primarily right?

I think the system has failed at this point, when you are expected to work that long.

It is.

And this is the case in all western countries.

It is just being realized in different ways.

Fundamentalle there are 3 ways to cope

1. reduce pensions

2. Raise taxes

3. Decrease amount of benefit receivers.

Denmark choose number 3

The trap is the worse the imbalance gets, the harder (1) gets electorally

Number 1 is likely the outcome of passivity - inflation will eat away the value of the pension.

In many countries pensions are indexed on inflation… so there is no natural erosion unfortunately

Wouldn't the fourth way be via increasing either birth rate or immigration?

That’s collecting more taxes, 2, isn’t it?

technically true but people usually associate that with rate increases

I’m not sure that’s always true.

The centre right often argue for less taxation ‘to grow businesses’. The argument being that the economy grows and that’s how the money is recouped. At least that’s what’s happened here in New Zealand.

Looking past ones next pay day does seem universally difficult.

The people who would actually benefit from that the most are the people who are too old to have children and are strongly opposed to immigration.

You have to grow your economy at a rate that allows you to pay for the additional pensioners.

Birthrates seem very hard to change and even if change would happen it is much too slow.

Germany did the experiment on immigration and has not seen GDP growth for half a decade. There the system is failing far worse in some ways, but in Germany employees are paying directly for the pension plans, so the state just raises the employee contributions.

Because Germany does nothing to attract and keep employable immigrants. They only want to keep immigrants which completely tow the line of only speaking German, which inevitably attracts mostly bottom of the barrel. Significant portion of highly qualified workforce in Germany is umemployable because of refusal to conduct business in anything other than German.

Also, the beaurcracy is the real culprit for growth.

Raising immigration rates to solve an aging population is a Ponzi solution.

The pension system has always been a ponzi. Only now we are faced to realise it because the pyramid was flipped violently.

In the modern economy system there is no way around it.

The more old people there is the more taxes you need.

More taxes - economy must grow. And it can’t grow if working population is shrinking

[flagged]

Getting immigrants who work is a non-issue. I never heard of immigrants from India, China, Africa or Latin America who don't work so long as they entered the country legally. The issue you are alluding to has to do with genuine refugees and illegal economic migrants, who are not filtered at the border depending on their employability within the local market. But the cultural shift is still inevitable. A foreigner is not a local, and it is neither fair nor ethical to expect a foreigner to transform themselves into a local.

I think, if you are concerned with the cultural shift, you can give immigrants temporary term VISAs and make it clear their stay is going to be strictly temporary. That was supposed to be how the Gastarbeiter system works. Thing is, when you have already on boarded a foreign worker and have had them working for you for 2 years already, you don't want to let them go and replace them with a fresh foreign worker who you have to retrain.

Assimilation as most people understand it does not necessitate an immigrant become completely indistinguishable from a native citizen. There are some baseline expectations that are not always met right now, such as learning the official language of one's host country, and sometimes its social standards. Most countries simply lack the necessary coercive incentives to make that happen systematically. I would argue that most Western cultures have become too individualistic at the expense of societal health, fueling the notion that assimilation is inherently unethical.

Without establishing a hermetic environment a la the Amish, assimilation happens automatically in the next generation if a nation has basic structures in place like public education to some minimum standard and basic anti-discrimination laws to allow economic advancement. Children absorb the culture that surrounds them, often to their parents' dismay.

Mhm, the current generation of kids of Turkish immigrants in Germany all seem to believe they are actually displaced Turks. I suppose thats what you encourage with double passport and voting for authoritarians at "home". (of course they are totally out of place in Turkey, that part of assimilation is unavoidable)

If only that were true.

You can look at any country in western europe to see how it's not.

This is not borne out by the anecdata I have collected over the last 22 years as a foreign invader living in and observing Europe. Moroccans in the Netherlands, Albanians in Switzerland, even Irish Travellers in Ireland-- despite being integrated from primary school onward, all seem to be somewhat apart from the host culture even after several generations.

Travellers aren't foreign.

And yet they remain a distinct cultural group with different traditions and modes of living, despite integration at a school level. Apparently they've even diverged genetically[1] from the main population.

[1] https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/35314239/sre...

The data I saw is that by the third generation, only a few percent speak the language of their grandparents' country, and most marry outside their nationality.

In the US, Italians, Irish, and Germans, as just a few examples, all were treated as unassmilated aliens. People say the same things, generation after generation about newcomers. If you moved to a country with a different language and culture, you might make an effort to learn the language but you would still think, read, etc. in your native language. Your kids would know both languages; their kids would of course speak the language of their surroundings.

What solves these problems is a fundamental belief in freedom for all. People don't need to speak your language to be your equal and be just as human, with the same rights as you.

This was certainly true of my Polish ancestors. My great grandfather arrived at age 19. He never really became fluent in English but could get by when he needed to. My grandfather spoke both Polish and English but only spoke English at home once he had school aged children. My father really only knew the Polish swear words and I know a handful of Polish phrases that only get used amongst family at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Don’t ask me to write them down. I’ve only ever heard them verbally.

Italians, Irish, Germans in US are bad examples, because Americans and Western Europeans are basically one and the same culture, the only significant difference being the language spoken. I suppose integrating Chinese or Indian people might take much longer.

In fact, they were seen as very different cultures and the exact same things were said about them. Only in hindsight do people say what you are saying (and in hindsight they will say the same about today's immigrants). In fact, the world has never been smaller or more homogenous - people in countries all over the world dress like us, are exposed to our culture a great many already speak English. Before you spread damaging misinformation - there are few evils inflicted by and on humanity than those based on these prejudices - shouldn't you know what you are saying? Shouldn't we talk great care?

Here's Benjamin Franklin (Palatine refers to the Holy Roman Empire or Germanic regions, depending on the source):

"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy...

It often takes three generations. The first generation came willingly and thus have an incentive to put up with shit; the second generation did not, find people hating on them anyway, and understandably react by pulling back and doubling down on their heritage.

I fundamentally agree with your comment. But for Denmark, it is very difficult to learn Danish. I lived there 3 years, took courses and was at end able to do my daily stuff in English, but a part of the society simply does not want a foreigner to speak Danish. You are forced to use English.

My girlfriend asked me once in a Restaurant (Cafe Norden in Kopenhagen) why I was ordering in English. Then, I spent the complete evening ordering everything in Danish, to always receive answers in English. And this nearly everywhere (not my bakery, the girls there could not speak a word of English, this was an exception). This was in the early 2000's. This never happened to me in all the other countries I have been living in. A Danish colleague simply told me that he does not like to listen to broken Danish, better switch to English.

Still have a lot of friends in Denmark, integration there is not easy, even for highly qualified people from the EU.

Danes are by and large all English speakers, probably the last generation who would have much difficulty with conversational English are all 70+ years old now. And while Danes are generally very polite and friendly with foreigners, there is a level of personal closeness (part of the "hygge" concept) that you will rarely penetrate if you are not a lifelong close friend or family member. This is another part of why real integration into Danish culture is nearly impossible for a foreigner.

I observed over my 11 years in the Netherlands that the friendliness and quality of service I received was greater when I spoke English and much diminished when I spoke Dutch. The Netherlands is, similar to Denmark, a place where people would seemingly prefer to speak English than listen to an accent on their native language.

I had a similar experience in the Netherlands. We could have a 30 second exchange in their perfect English or a laboured 2 minute conversation in my abysmal Dutch. I struggled to improve because everyone would immediately switch to English.

I commend you for your efforts and I'm sure they were appreciated even by those who switched to English with you. It sounds like you were in the infamous long awkward intermediate stage of language learning. Depending on the cadence of your language classes, three years may not be a long time. Intensive language programs with daily lessons and drills are exponentially more effective than typical language-learning programs spread out across short sessions sprinkled throughout the week/month. In my opinion, it makes a lot more sense to place newcomers in intensive learning programs on arrival than to accept they will not be functional outside of ethnic enclaves, and wait decades for their children and grandchildren to finally integrate, as other commenters suggest. It's not an easy process and we can't expect everyone to have the intrinsic motivation to do it all on their own, which is why incentives are needed.

> you can give immigrants temporary term VISAs and make it clear their stay is going to be strictly temporary

In practice that rarely goes as intended. The first political party to say, "We changed our minds, you can all have citizenship," gets to secure power with an influx of loyal voters.

Maybe I misunderstand your point but... if these people are not citizens (i.e. they need a VISA) how could they actually vote for whatever party proposing this?

He says the party will lock in a loyal block after doing such an act.

Before: 5 million illegals or immigrants.

Party A passes law making them all citizens.

After: Party A always wins because large portion of the new 5 million vote for Party A

Well, if a party has enough votes to pass such a law, it means that the majority of the society has no problems with that.

Conversely, if this hypothetical party had a secret agenda to pass the law when they get elected, but they kept this a secret until then... first of all they will probably lose of voters in the next election. Also, they might find out that former immigrants do not automatically reward this behaviour in terms of votes.

I do not find this scenario particularly realistic.

Have you any figures that indicate that is an issue?

Integration is the job of the state as much as it is the job of the immigrant.

In America, we discovered basically by accident[0] how to bring in large groups of people and have them be economically and socially productive. Specifically, we had very generous family reunification programs, which outsourced the question of "what immigrants do we admit" to immigrants who had already successfully integrated. Effectively America became an invite system. The end result is that, for basically any background, every American city has a large and established immigrant population from that country for new immigrants to fall back on.

Other Western countries (e.g. western Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, and Japan) didn't do this. Instead, they treated immigration as a transaction: you can't come in unless you have some immediately beneficial purpose, and permanent residency is going to be an even higher bar still. What this gives you is immigration systems that select entirely for disaffected, college-educated workaholic youths with no connections to the local city. To put it in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney:

"America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic. In the United States, they don't recognize differences[1]. They don't recognize First Nations. And there will never be the right to the French language."

These words are telling, in ways Carney probably didn't intend. He is proudly admitting that the thing that sets Canada apart from America - the thing that they should fight with military force against a wannabe dictator with annexation dreams - is the fact that they can't integrate people worth a damn.

[0] Family reunification visas were originally intended to deliberately preserve racist prejudices in the US immigration system. This backfired comically.

[1] ...has this guy never heard the phrase 'African-American' before?

Improve the birth rate, yes, but you probably can't do that unless you deal with the resource situation as well.

So you can reduce pensions, improve the situation for the youth, take efforts to get an improved birth rate, making use of the resources lost to pensioners, and then maybe you can raise the pension later on once you realize things are stable.

The total fertility rate (number of children per woman) seems stubborn against attempts to raise it.

I suggest instead altering the male/female ratio, so a stable or growing population can be maintained at lower TFR. Technically, filter sperm to remove those with Y chromosomes before artificial insemination.

As Jan and Dean put it in Surf City: "two girls for every boy".

Or more. The prevalence of males seems to be an unfortunate consequence of evolution. There's an evolutionary equilibrium of nearly an equal chance of a male or female offspring, even though the ability of the species to reproduce would be higher with mostly female offspring.

I wouldn’t be surprised if historically there were more women than men due to accidents involving mammoths or clubs meeting skulls.

Without a major and unrealistic cultural change, 2 girls to share one boy (polygamy) is not going to happen.

No no, not like that. Well, maybe, but no. Most men are useless from a reproductive standpoint because they're not the bottleneck. Women are the bottleneck. More women means no more bottleneck, means more children per person.

Also sexual selection is a thing and I think we were really never meant to have this many men. Men seem good for being really successful or otherwise dying, not much in the middle.

But also, all this talk is purely from a reproductive standpoint. Human societies also need to consider fairness and rights.

All you said is correct, but all you said points towards polygamy.

If TFR stays well below 2, there's going to be major change sooner or later. The question becomes which change. Maybe the Amish will take over the world? Or maybe some solution we find really weird will be adopted by some other minority and they'll dominate.

I feel like there really hasn't been sincere data-backed methods with proper resources behind them, for example governments giving out minor cash benefits to parents of a few thousand dollars when that's a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of raising a kid and is not going to convince anyone who wasn't already going to have kids.

Also, that's a wild solution. You'd have to do away with monogamy which would cause some pretty insane societal shifts. However, as a straight guy I can see the appeal lol.

The issue with low TFR seems to be difficulty of forming relationships, not failure to have children once relationships are formed.

I'm imagining it becoming a social norm for single women to have (at least) a single child. Perhaps they'd team up to make raising them easier, forming loose family-like units. Romantic attachments would be optional.

One consequence of such a situation would be an incentive toward private positive eugenics. Women would prefer semen from top quality donors.

At least in the UK the cost of childcare is a major factor putting people off.

People simply can't afford to send a kid to pre-school childcare because it's 2 or 3 thousand GBP per month. So you have to stay at home to look after them, but then you can't afford the rent/mortgage and/or food because you're not working. Woe betide you if you earn over 1 penny over 100K GBP because then you get zero help with costs.

They need to provide more government funded (i.e. universally free non-means-tested) pre-schooling like they do for 5-18 year olds.

I love this as a science fiction thought experiment but altering the male/ female ratio will never happen.

If someone tried to implement it- aside from the obvious problem of authoritarianism- the resulting male minority would live life in romantic "easy mode" so people who want the best for their kids would want male children and rebel against a system more likely to give them female children who would find romantic prospects difficult.

I suppose if someone invented a way to alter sexuality to allow straight women to opt into becoming gay the romance problem could be mitigated, but I'm guessing that this is impossible given the human brain is only so neuroplastic in adult years.

Raising the birth rate is extremely difficult and immigration will destroy a country's culture if not managed properly.

For an interesting case study, compare Japan (who refuses to allow mass immigration and is at risk of going extinct) and the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority). It'll be interesting to see in 50 years which one has had better outcomes.

In 50 years, Japan will have a Chinese majority, so…

it is 6% muslim majority?

According to Wikipedia[1] you are quite off base as Muslims form only 6.5% of the population as opposed to Christians (46.2%) and a-religious (37.2%).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom

I said "on the way to".

> Between 2001 and 2009, the Muslim population increased almost 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_Kingdom?wp...

Granted 2009 was a while ago but they're still the fastest growing population in the UK by a lot.

You are not making your point any favour. It is right that everyone is calling you out for your xenophonbic BS.

If it grew 10x between 2001 and 2009 (starting from a very small base), then between 2009 and 2023 it grew by only 0.3x (see graph below).

So rate of growth went from 10x to 0.3x in around a decade, this is a hugely significant deceleration. It actually implies muslim community as portion of population is heading lower.

https://new.islamchannel.tv/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/63860...

You're not comparing the same stats. The original stat was growth rate compared to the rest of the country. Islam's overall growth rate has been fairly steady for decades, although admittedly it has slowed, but at a rate that could conceivably stop above Christianity, which your chart shows is decreasing about as rapidly as Islam is rising. I think it's reasonable to project that it may settle below Islam eventually. Realistically, there will be continued backlash by native English and that may temper immigration, though even if immigration stops, the birth rate of Muslims in the UK is still much higher than native population.

However - if we're including atheist then clearly that'll be the majority position.

This is using the same flawed logic that has had people shouting about overpopulation since the 70's: assuming current* population growth rate will continue indefinitely

* well, not even current. 15+ year old

The difference is that this is a change in the demographics of a population, not the overall growth, which is limited by resources available. The growth of Islam isn't constrained by anything other than the cultural practices that lead to them having more children than the rest of the population and the tolerance of the country for immigration. These things could definitely shift to balance the scales but there's no guarantee that happens and there have absolutely been many times in history where a native population has been displaced by the growth of an immigrant group.

Stepping back a bit, Pew expects Islam to overtake Christianity as the dominant world religion in a few decades: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...

Nicholas, is it clear that at any point in the near future, let's say two generations (30-40 years) the Muslim population will not be a majority in the UK? I don't understand why you continue arguing.

Ah, it's the same argument that my mum uses to say that if we don't do something about "the gays" then straight people will disappear, after all "there are a lot more of them than there used to be".

He said "on its way" so you'd want to be looking at the rate of change in the ratio, not the current ratio.

Any data on the birthrates of the younger generations being born today?

Yes, I'm sure those 6.5% can out breed the rest of the UK tens of times over. Please stop trying to justify misinformation.

Actually, OP has given information that proves exactly that. Maybe not in one generation, but Lebanon was in a similar situation where the Muslim population, which was firmly a minority in the 1940s, outbred the Christian population and is currently more than the latter.

I don't have a horse in this game - I'm Muslim after all. But I've experienced London pre-immigration boom and post-immigration boom and I definitely prefer the former, like some of my Muslim peers. The fabric of London has already been destroyed, especially when given the fact that London natives have been priced out of their own homes. Given what I've seen firsthand, and what's preached in the mosques of the UK by unleashed and unhinged Imams, the UK is on track to become a Muslim country in 2 or 3 generations.

I found this article from 2017:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...

The most recent birth rate stats I can find is 2005-2010 where Muslims have a birth rate of 3.0 while the rest of the country is at 1.8. Estimates say it's more like 2.5 now, but the current overall UK birth rate is only 1.57 from a quick Google.

https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2...

The same article also states that the average age for Muslims is much lower than non-Muslims as of 2016, 28 vs 41 for the UK.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/...

Yes I know the stats hover around roughly that, which is why I requested you to post those numbers as proof for anyone questioning it. There's also the very concerning fact that the last census conducted was before the immigration boom period (2010 or 2011 iirc), so literally everyone is working on outdated data.

Maybe not in one generation, but in 2-3 generations, the UK will definitely turn Islamic, especially given the exodus of other communities. The irony is that the well-off British are settling in the UAE en masse, a distinctly Islamic country, and driving property prices up there. It's not that much of a concern since local housing is distinctly separated from expat housing.

How many children were born in Muslim families in 2024 and how many children were born in Christian families in UK?

UK is in no conceivable way “on the way to becoming Muslim-majority”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom

Way to undermine your point by using a completely made up statistic.

> Raising the birth rate is extremely difficult

> the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority)

.. Seems like we've found a fix for ;) I wonder what's the difference between Muslims in the UK vs Japanese folks.

There's not enough immigrants that actually are of financial benefit to Denmark. Only European immigrants are a large financial benefit throughout their lifespan, and Middle Eastern immigrants are a financial detriment even in their prime working years[0]. That is apart from the cultural effects of having a large portion of your population consist of non-Danish, and especially non-European immigrants, which might have its own detrimental effect on the birth rate.

[0] Figure 2.7 of the Danish Government report "Økonomisk Analyse: Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser i 2018" - https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-ind...

It turns out that economic productivity is not tied to ethnicity or where you are from - fundamentally racist notions - but to how productive you are.

It's not about race, it's about culture and education. For instance, Chinese immigrants are usually an economic boost anywhere they go, due to the can-do attitude and respect for education and business activity in the Chinese culture in general.

Also the Chinese immigrants in question, like many others, usually immigrate seeking a better life, it's a strong self-selection filter. Middle Eastern immigrants of last 10-15 years in Europe are refugees, displaced by wars; they did not choose Denmark (or other Western European countries) because they planned to integrate and to prosper there, they ran there to merely stay alive. They need a lot of help adapting. Even if they are very willing to work, they may lack the knowledge required for gainful employment, and there are only so many dish-washing and trash-disposal jobs.

Those who adapt can make it big; consider people like Freddie Mercury or Nassim Taleb.

Freddie Mercury wasn't of Middle Eastern background.

And Taleb is a Christian Arab, which are genetically distinct from the majority Muslim Arab population.

Citation needed, this might not be true for non-Maronites (like Taleb) and outside Lebanon.

The sultanate of Zanzibar is technically closer to Africa than to the Arabian peninsula, it was a remnant of the Omani empire, with very thick Middle Eastern influence, and obviously Muslim culture.

His parents were of Indian Parsi background.

> It's not about race

It is about race, and here is a commenter saying it explicitly, while you know others resort to dog whistles and other workarounds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44091194

The problem with immigration isn't immigrants, it's racists. Immigration has never caused me any problem at all - it's added a lot to my life and my communities, in fact - and I've lived around many immigrants.

> Chinese immigrants are usually an economic boost

Chinese immigrants were hated and discriminated against for much of US history, going back over a century. You could hardly pick a worse example for your claim.

The US is built by uneducated immigrants - including from China - who came to the land of freedom and opportunity. China was a land of extreme poverty and illiteracy for much of US history (something Western countries had a hand in causing, and I'm very glad for people there that they have so much more prosperity now).

(However, the most prosperous Chinese people are in the democratic areas, Taiwan and, until recently, Hong Kong. It's freedom and democracy, not culture and language that matter. Give people freedom and they prosper.)

It's all just stuff fabricated by racists to rationalize their prejudices. Look at the horrors Europe has inflicted on itself and the world due to these prejudices and rationalizations - the most destructive events in human history. Enough.

no white person of means in europe EVER lives around muslim "refugees".

More racism on their part - that's the problem, as I said. I also very much doubt that is true, but generally people do generally segregate by economic means, and first generation immigrants understandably tend to live in their own communities, everywhere. Where else do you find people to talk to, who understand you; where else do you even find dinner or some decent proper tea?

Racism is the problem.

Middle Eastern immigrants are not (usually, relatively, on average) unproductive because of their skin color. They're unproductive because they suffer from a large language barrier, tend to have large families that use more government subsidies, are often traumatized by the conditions they escaped, have qualifications that are not recognized in Denmark and have to work menial jobs instead, face racism when they apply for jobs they are qualified for, etc.

You mean, like any/many immigrant waves?

And then their children turn out to be some of the most productive and contributory to a nation (in my experience), even despite some of the headwinds.

Perhaps in the US due to pre-selection, but in Europe the 2nd generation of those MENA migrants frequently becomes an even bigger burden to the host countries due to the former turning to criminal activities or radicalization.

"frequently" ... about as useful as my "in my experience", lol

Sorry, I don't buy that argument re: second generation. I've lived and seen it. Perhaps my lived experience isn't representative but I don't see second generation citizens turning to crime or radicalisation in huge numbers. I see them at work, and looking after their families. I fear the brush you are using is so broad as to, sorry, be useless.

https://portal.research.lu.se/en/activities/nearly-two-third...

https://archive.ph/rQAVF#selection-3415.8-3439.190

"The study has faced criticism over its methodology, as it only studied rape convictions in Sweden. Experts point to the fact that just a small proportion of rapes in the country are reported to the authorities. Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminologist at Stockholm University, dismissed the study as “meaningless” as it only examined figures for convicted rape. “They’ve only looked at convicted people, and they make up a fraction of all rapists,” he told Swedish broadcaster SVT."

Even ignoring the above, I can think of many reasons, statistical and otherwise for the apparent difference. Perhaps you should try using your brain matter to do the same rather than just posting random links.

I repeat: I don't see second generation citizens turning to crime or radicalisation in huge numbers.

Agreed. And the idea that you can call people criminals based on their ethnic heritage is plain racism - they are individuals who will themselves succeed or fail, be good or bad, just like individuals whose parents already lived in the country. Some of those people do bad things like promote hate and racial discrimination, but we can't say that about all of them; it's their individual choice and action.

> They're unproductive because they suffer from a large language barrier,

Immigrants everywhere come with a language barrier. If you live in the US, very probably your ancestors did. It's the same with every first generation from everywhere.

The barriers are not all the same. Somebody moving from Norway or Sweden will have a much easier time picking up Danish. And European immigrants are highly likely to speak English, meaning they can communicate with Danes who speak English (virtually all of them) from day one.

You're really struggling to find problems. English is spoken all over the world - people all over the world learn it, in China, India ... places with completely unrelated languages.

It's because the ME immigrants that make it to Denmark are traumatized refugees from war zones, with education that isn't recognized so they can often only do minimum wage work if they work at all. That's not racist, that's a result of laws and treaties.

There are no refugees coming from ME to Denmark. Refugees go to nearby countries, people who travel halfway around the world are economic migrants.

Syrians are the second largest group of asylum seekers in Denmark, after Ukrainians. They're almost exclusively war refugees.

> Refugees go to nearby countries

They actually go lots of places. How are there so many refugees in the US (a good thing)? Canada and Mexico aren't places producing a lot of them.

It's a major issue of international law, as people who are anti-immigrants try to insist refugees stay in nearby countries.

I can only give you the rundown for Germany, but I guess it’s similar in Denmark:

Basically the state spends to much money on humans in general. A young qualified immigrant might have a less negative impact than a slightly older German person, but both of them will be money sinks in the long run.

Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.

The only valid solution is to reduce the spending per person, both birthrate and immigration will only delay the problem.

Denmark should be in a slightly better position than Germany since their health system is cheaper.

> Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.

I need to see some data backing this. Also regardless of stats, many war refugees(the net negatives as told by media) are actually highly qualified but the asylum process and qualification recognition process is eternal. On top of the trauma and uncertainty, they also need to learn a new language, find a new community, patiently go through all the dystopian meetings, cope with their loss of loved ones.

In reality, it is possible for them to be net positive because if things were faster, they would often out qualify the average locals and this also has some effects on wage and market(over supply, constant demand and all the economics).

Most immigrants are not war refugees but economical refugees.

> they would often out qualify the average locals

That's definitely not true, which is why they want to immigrate to those countries in the first place.

You are right regarding the insufficient opportunities for highly qualified people.

Regarding your other point: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/publications/oec...

The liked pdf there gives a good overview.

"refugees" from syria or iraq or wherever would quickly out qualify danes???

No one knows how to increase the birth rate. And all the studies show that immigration increases the budget deficit, not reduces it (at least in that way in which it is being implemented now).

Actually the factors inhibiting birth rate are well known, but the actions to take are not something states wants to take. In Europe you cannot even talk about it, usually, unless you talk to younger family members and ask them why they don't want kids at or or just 1 or 2 max. There are economic, education and legal aspects that are clear for anyone that looked not farther than 50 years ago when having 3-4 kids was not exceptional.

Everyone knows. Stop contraception, stop woman education, stop abortions, reduce woman rights to 1800. Remove children rights, make environment where children are productive and bring profits to their parents, so they have financial incentive to create children.

No one wants to implement it.

Right, if anyone here has taken a human geography course this is the obvious answer. This is why birthrate was so high for so long. As nations developed and gained rights for women, it went lower and lower and lower.

And it makes complete sense. The reality is having a child kind of sucks for a woman, and I, nor anyone else, can blame a large portion of women for just saying "eh... no". I would probably say no, too, although it's hard to tell, because I'm not a woman.

Having children was once a boon, because conditions were shit. Now it's a burden. So, people will treat it as a burden.

Either make it less burdensome or revert women. Nobody wants to do the latter, so we must do the former. We have to invest in children, because children are a Nation's investment.

You are right. Since that is not happening the next best thing is to juice the oldies. At least more countries have started doing that.

Here is a chart of Saudi Arabia's fertility rate, which has dropped from 7 to 2 over the past 40 years: https://www.consultancy-me.com/illustrations/news/detail/202...

Not having to work as much to live seems like a decent way to increase birthrates. Having kids is/would be much easier if parents were at home more often and able to care for kids instead of contracting out childcare to daycare centers because you cannot afford to not have both parents working full time. But it comes at the cost of not growing as fast and being less attractive to capital investors/owners who are reaping by far the highest percentage of profits currently.

Yes and no.

The elephant in the room that is getting some attention is demographic collapse. It’s been politicized, unfortunately, and seized on by strange people, but the fact remains that we’ve stuck our heads in the sand here. The seriousness of demographic collapse cannot be overstated. Social and economic collapse are inevitable unless something (morally licit, of course) is done to boost birth rates to above replacement rates, or kept at replacement levels. Once we reach a point of no return, it will be impossible to reverse course.

There’s a lot working against healthy demographics. We have decades of alarmist, misanthropic, Malthusian propaganda from types like Paul Ehrlich. We have now a hyperindividualistic culture - politically, socially, and economically - that is hostile both functionally as well as in sentiment toward the healthy function of family, and secondarily the community life it produces, as well as mental health). The logic of consumerism does not sit well with family life, because family life is not something that can be monetized. Consumerism relies on maximizing spending of the atomized individual, and in order for that to work, one must maximize the work done by that individual. Family life interferes with the regime of constant spending and the reign of total work. (Ironically, this makes the celebrated careerism of feminism an expression of this all consuming capitalist drive. It stigmatizes motherhood with demeaning labels like “stay-at-home mom” and celebrates the very office jobs that are the stuff of comedies.) Today, we understand everything with reference to the individual, even anachronistically reinterpreting history according to its alienating categories. Some governments have enacted pro-natalist policies, but they’re typically weak, superficial, and ineffective. We’re addicted to patterns of life formed over the last 70 years that we don’t want to let go of. Governments need to take much more serious measures that drastically favor, prioritize, and protect the family, through and through. Good luck doing that in our democratic societies. Addicts typically change only after they’ve experienced a crisis and hit rock bottom, and by then, it may be too late.

Immigration, of course, is no solution. The belief that immigration can fix the problem is itself rooted in the logic of hyperindividualism, where atomized individuals can be replaced by other atomized individuals to achieve net conservation or even gain according to the numbers. Cultural realities are totally ignored. The rate of immigration that a country can successfully absorb is not enough to outpace demographic decline. Exceeding that rate undermines the whole point of using immigration to compensate for demographic decline in the first place, since mass migrations are always harmful to host populations. You’re basically talking the collapse of the host populace and the formation of new ones in its place. Furthermore, immigration drains the populations of other countries, ones that are likely also facing demographic issues, which basically makes richer countries parasitic and callous about the continuity and futures of other peoples, until there are no more populations to drain of people anymore.

Please only educated immigrants who will need to assimilate to the culture.

I’m an immigrant, and I think at least where I live in USA we need to stop immigration from any random place or of people who refuse to assimilate.

You are missing the most important one:

- increase productivity more than how much the workforce/receivers grow.

And if AI/robots eventually deliver, we're soon going to need a discussion about lowering the retirement age to 55 or even 50 if we don't want 30% unemployment anyway.

That would be raising taxes.

- indifferent to how much automation you have, people still need to pay for it, for money they don't earn.

When people refer to “raise taxes” they usually talk about raising the rates, but you don't need to raise rates, if the GDP increase then the amount collected through taxes increases even if you don't change the rate.

And as such, it feels like labelling that “raise taxes” is disingenuous.

Exactly, another way to increase taxes is also by increasing gdp.

Indeed the normal Understanding is not only about increasing rates - look at Switzerland eg.

I'd you really wanted to fit this square peg into your artificial triangle hole, I'd argue that in practice this is closer to “lowering benefits” than to “raise taxes” since the purchasing power of the retired would decline compare to the population average.

But again, there's no basis to chose just your three items in particular.

This is not fitting anything into anywhere. This is how economists think about.

Economists working on pensions think about productivity a lot, and they don't bundle that in your “raise taxes” category.

Automation and increased productivity can also lower the cost of necessities such as food and health care, meaning retired people could theoretically get by with less.

No.

A part of necessities are access to assets.

In the model you propose, inequality in itself will make those more expensive.

The money made and saved isn’t going to go to governments and the population though. As it stands, a couple of billionaires will become richer.

That's a political decision though, and they try to hide it behind this kind of false trilemma.

Productivity has already increased several times over while the working age population has decreased. Working the young population into extermination is the current paradigm and is giving the current results, which is all according to plan.

2 has some options. Increase the number of (young) immigrants. Increase the birthrate (has anywhere managed this?).

Birthrates are problematic as it usually take 20 to 25 years before they pay taxes. And in that time they require a lot of expenses.

They talk abiut the squeeze, if Birthrates increase too suddenly - workers would both have to pay for the elderly and the kids.

This is the real demographic death trap, and why Taiwan and South Korea are probably past the point of no return.

If one generation has a fertility rate of 1 child per woman, the next must have 4 children per woman to undo the demographic change.

The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.

> The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.

The country and the individual has the same problem. But it also goes a generation further.

There was a link on HN recently which I can’t find. It discussed how we are in an unusual time, where kids can often meet their great grandparents. Previously people died younger, so couldn’t. Now people are having kids at an age where it will be unlikely for them to meet their great grandchildren.

>>Previously people died younger, so couldn’t

I'm not sure that's true - people died younger, sure, but they also had kids much earlier. Even assuming 18 for first child(and it often was earlier than 18), you'd be a great grandparent at the age of 54 - and people have commonly lived that long even in antiquity.

Have a look at the graph here - ‘Life expectancy by world region, from 1770 to 2018’

The average lifespans was only 40-something until the 1850-1950 range.

I’m sure plenty lived longer, but the average was terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Those figures are heavily skewed by high infant mortality rates.

Read the "other measures" part of the article.

"While the most common age of death in adulthood among modern hunter-gatherers (often taken as a guide to the likely most favourable Paleolithic demographic experience) is estimated to average 72 years,[169] the number dying at that age is dwarfed by those (over a fifth of all infants) dying in the first year of life, and only around a quarter usually survive to the higher age."

Etc.

Yeah, I don’t know why people actually believe everyone died at 40 clearly that that’s not true. You’ve met a 40-year-old, right? Here’s a popular one include all the abortions as deaths and you’ll see that the average age that we live now is also 40

Why would you include abortions too? My wife had a miscarriage at 3 months in, should we include that in stats too?

Getting to a fertility rate of 2.1 will at least mean the problem will end at some point and the population will be stable, altough it will take the better half of a century.

This is a nice explanation from Kurzgesagt showing precisely why South Korea is completely screwed long term, and why it's impossible to course correct through birth rate alone:

https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk?si=3mMFke_Rj6b3jWld

Israel is the only developed country which has a sustained positive fertility rate.

But that’s not an example of a solution - the birth rate is driven by orthodox citizens who don’t participate in mainstream society, so they aren’t going to pay taxes or care for the elderly (outside their own family).

Yeah it’s a pessimistic data point because it’s challenging to replicate Israel’s unique circumstances and also it’s not clear this solution is even good for Israel.

Seems like the US taxpayer should subsidize all countries as much as they subsidize Israel. That would fix it.

US economic aid to Israel ended in 2007 (18 years ago).

The US since then only provides Israel with military aid (most of which is only allowed to be spent buying US-made goods). It’s more of a subsidy for the US military-industrial complex.

Also despite the military aid Israel still spends a much greater share of GDP on its military than most or all other developed countries (so the US isn't subsidising Israel’s unusually high birth rate).

> It’s more of a subsidy for the US military-industrial complex.

That's a funny way to twist it. US is providing aid to Israel. Billions a year.

US also provides indirect aid, through protection or aid to neighbouring countries (e.g Jordan and Egypt) as bribes so they play nice with Israel.

And who knows, with the way the Iran thing is panning out, you might be paying a lot more if US decides to bomb Iran on Israel's request

And how does this explain Israel's abnormal birth rate (what ImHereToVote suggested in the parent comment)? I claim it's unrelated and is mostly to do with cultural and religious norms.

If the US starts sending proportional military aid to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.75 vs Israel's 2.83) it will not "fix it".

I went a bit off-topic, just wanted to comment on the extra aid they receive. I do agree that it's not because of the US aid.

I agree my reply was flippant because I was annoyed by the original comment, and I apologise for that.

The US provides and provided a ton of assistance to Israel but there’s a tendency online for people (probably mostly Americans?) to assign credit to literally everything that happens in Israel to US aid.

Israel exists outside of US-Israel politics and not everything (like birthrates) that happens there is because of the US. The US also supported/aided a lot of other countries that didn’t experience the same economic/industrial/technological development that Israel has in the last 30-40 years - some of it really is because of Israelis’ efforts and not just because of Americans’.

> US economic aid to Israel ended in 2007 (18 years ago). The US since then only provides Israel with military aid (most of which is only allowed to be spent buying US-made goods).

That’s one hell of a disclaimer on the statement.

Mormons and Amish have above replacement fertility rates. Millionaires in western countries also have above replacement fertility rates.

To me it seems rather obvious: you need both the will and the means to raise 3+ children.

Shouldn't it be the will or the means, not the will and the means, giving how relatively poor the Amish are in financial terms?

The Amish have the means because their means are not measured in normal dollar amounts. Most of what they have is traded and transacted outside of the dollar economy.

In fact, they may majority be of subsistence in which case the entire dollar value of all of their stuff is simply the land.

I’m not sure it’s about having the “means”, since birth rates were far higher in the past when everybody was much poorer.

You can solve the means problem by making everyone wealthier or by lowering everyone's expectations. The problem is that "how much it costs to raise children" is dependent on your environment. One group's normal is another's neglectful parenting.

The catch-22 is that the people you presumably want to be having more children— educated working professionals— have some of the highest social standards for child rearing.

> Increase the number of (young) immigrants

Increase the number of (young female) immigrants

4. Stop spending 90% of healthcare costs on 5% of chronic problem beneficiaries.

That is increasing tax.

How? Less tax but 5% of people get worse healthcare.

Typically EU countries implement the 3 options together - option 1. btw is meant to make the pension irrelevant. It can't happen from one day to the next, but there is a shift happening where people contribute more and more towards private pension funds. It's easy to see that at some point, there will be the equivalent of the US 401K in Europe.

> It's easy to see that at some point, there will be the equivalent of the US 401K in Europe.

* In some European countries. Many countries, however, have no meaningful avenues whatsoever for tax efficient pension saving. My own "pension fund" is just a regular broker account where I invest after income taxes, and where I have to pay capital gains as usual.

Denmark does have ratepension, which is exactly that.

People with good private pensions can decide to retire 5 years before they officially retire.

What does "reduce pensions" mean? Pensions are people's property. You can take pensions like you can confiscate property, a la communism.

So close! Pensions are actually property taken from the younger generation and given to retirees.

I think this is just the word "pension" being overloaded, meaning both

1. A state provided welfare benefit Or 2. A privately held long term savings/investment account

Isn't it essentially a thanks/appreciation for what the people built once they retire ? Without theire work, there would be nothing for the younger people to use and benefit from.

Would not be very motivational if you work hard your whole life and then you are considered a useless burden once you retire.

I’ll take the thanks/appreciation in the form of wages instead, thanks!

Those retirees have been paying into the pension system their whole life.

So have younger people too, just their life has not been as long (yet).

The way it usually works is taxation from the current working generation pays for the current retirees. You are not paying into your own account for later (that is a private pension)

FWIW in the UK there are more children in poverty (so their parents too) than retirees who are in poverty. Kids don't vote though...

IMHO it's a matter of basic justice. If you're forced to pay an amount for pension funds that you cannot even chose and have no control over for your whole work life, then you better should get a an adequate pension when it's time. As for the example from the UK (not comparable to Denmark), I don't see why someone who worked their ass off their whole life should be poor because some parents are too poor to have children. That seems to be a different problem.

What's annoying about these debates is that the people who'd e.g. like to see pension cuts are either young and will change their mind later, or they are so rich that none of this matters to them anyway and the latter shouldn't even have a voice in this debate.

> I don't see why someone who worked their ass off their whole life should be poor because some parents are too poor to have children.

The issue is the "triple lock" (state pension rises by whichever is higher of either rate of inflation, average earnings increases, or 2.5%).

While laudable in intent, recently this has led to situations where pensioners are getting bumper increases linked to high inflation, while the younger working age people are getting stagnant wages while inflation shoots up.

This is is why pensioners are on average getting wealthier than the working population. Let that settle in for a moment: year after year pensioners are getting more wealthy than the working population that is financing the pensioner's increase in wealth.

This is universally accepted as unsustainable and deeply unfair on an intergenerational basis as the pensioners - who generally tend to own their own homes and also get various benefits like free transport and extra money for heating costs etc as well as benefiting from more generous policies/working conditions of the past like free university education and final-salary private pensions or purchasing government-built social housing at steeply-discounted rates, lower tax burden - continue to get more and more well-off while the people financing their retirement are struggling with soaring costs, expensive childcare, high education costs, zero-hour contracts, stagnant wages and all the rest.

Yet pensioners complain that they paid their taxes "all their lives" so they deserve to continue getting a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that they deserve to get wealthier and wealthier than the working population, all at the cost of pushing more children below the poverty line and financially crippling the current workers who have also paid their taxes all their lives (so far).

Eventually with policies like these, you run out of other people's money.

Trouble is that it is a political landmine since pensioners are a big part of the vote so no one has the balls to abolish (or at least reform) the triple lock.

Yeah, but they paid a vastly lower percentage of their paycheck than people nowadays do (at least here in western EU)

Another reason not to repeat their mistake.

It's not a choice. You're forced to pay for the pension system in Denmark and most other countries if you're employed. The only thing governments have to do is to use that money for actual pension funds instead of embezzling it, and to calculate the contributions on a reasonable basis with reasonable extrapolations about inflation, i.e., to properly finance these funds now and not abuse them for other purposes.

It's mysterious why they haven't done that despite the fact that the demographic problems were known to occur up to 40 years ago. But you see the same thing with housing prices and rents, forthcoming problems were already obvious 20 years ago in every country, yet only few have tried to deal with them in time. Maybe someone else can explain where this inertia comes from, I always found it strange.

>It's mysterious why they haven't done that despite the fact that the demographic problems were known to occur up to 40 years ago.

Because it goes against their personal interests.

It's much worse than that, it is indebted servitude being done to the younger generation.

Its not "so close" - the pensions that I'm familiar with are exactly what I described. They're basically a special tax treatment for my assets.

And capital gains are actually property taken from the workers and given to capitalists. In both cases, the recipients have magic tokens that legally entitle them to some of the value created by other people.

I don't know how this works in other countries. In Finland, it was established decades ago that pensions based on past contributions are constitutionally protected private property. Because people made explicit pension contributions and because the government promised that the future pension would be based on the individual contributions, the government can't alter the deal substantially without a constitutional amendment. If the contributions had been general taxes, or if the promised pension had been independent of the actual contributions, ordinary legislative process would have been enough.

In this case you're talking about state pensions, which are a form of social welfare.

Can also just raise taxes on the super rich

A 99.9% wealth tax on US billionaires would cover the annual deficit for about 1.5 years.

The scale of the problem is absolutely mind-blowing.

US annual deficit/debt is a meaningless number since it just prints as much money as it needs being the world reserve currency. It's a looney toons number.

This really isn't true. I am not deficit doomer, but you can't say its meaningless. The US paid $881 billion on interest on its debt last year. This is on par with the DoD. Yes, it's still only around a tenth of the US's total budget, but it is not hard to imagine the debt going up by 10 times. With the same interest rates, we then the US will pay as much in interest as the rest of the budget combined. If the US just needs to "print as much money as it needs", there is a certain point at which it will become hyperinflationary.

It's worth noting that it pays that interest back to itself. The risk of becoming hyperinflationary is real, but US can continue ignoring the problem pretty much indefinitely as long as other countries do their trading in US dollar.

Other countries dump the dollar as soon the US makes credible plans to print money in order to sustain the deficit.

I’d say that “super rich” starts well below billionaires.

Not saying that the math would work out without problems then.

My grandpa went to prison (in Romania) in the 1950-es for being part of bourgeoise class because he fixed and ran a broken mill. He was a war refugee (from Romania to Romania) without any money, land or any other resources, but in Communist Romania running a mill would tag you as "super rich". I guess this is what you wanted to say there, correct?

I consider myself reasonably well-off but am unlikely to become even a millionaire in my life (inflation-adjusted). I’d say millionaire = rich, 10-20 million or more = super rich. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual.

10% of Americans are millionaires you just need to own a home

Then 10% of Americans are rich, I guess.

If we assume the wealthy own the stock market, it’s $52 trillion - enough to pay off the debt and leave $16 trillion left over - which would cover about ten years (assuming the debt service has been removed by the payoff).

Whether nationalizing the entire US market would be worth it is left to the reader.

No 4 - do like Norway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Not everyone sits on a bazillion tons of natural gas and oil. Also, there are 5.5 million people in Norway. Though, Denmark is almost the same population, they have no bazillion tons of oil and natural gas. See the problem?

You forgot step -1: Use time machine constructed in step 3.5 to seed nearby oceans with phytoplankton and other organic carbon reservoirs

It turns out you won't have a problem funding your pension system if you literally pump out millions of dollars' worth of oil per person.

Norway is also going to raise the retirement age.

That omits the essential fact that economies tend to grow - quite a bit over your lifetime. 2% compounded annual growth over 50 years will result in the economy being 2.7x its starting size.

Economic growth in the abstract doesn't help much, because a retiree is only on the consumer side of the equation. 2% compounded annual growth over 50 years will result in the average worker consuming a lot more stuff, and they're not going to be happy if they have to throw that all out and embrace a 1970s-era standard of living when they retire.

> Economic growth in the abstract doesn't help much

True, but economic growth is very real.

Why?

And established elsewhere is this post, people apparently don't want to live like we did 50 years ago, so economic growth has merely been translated into inflated expectations.

> economic growth has merely been translated into inflated expectations

It's been translated into far better services too.

4. They must attract skilled immigrants in significant numbers.

Most don't want to so they have to compensate via taxes and higher pension age.

The social pension system always was a Ponzi scheme where the ones who got in first(boomers) get the biggest share of the pie(10-20 years of life left after retirement), while those coming into the system last(millennials+) and pay for the current retirees will get rug-pulled(5-10 years of life left after retirement).

Sustainable population and economic growth at that rate can't happen indefinitely.

Some people have been vocally saying this system in unsustainable long term, just that Europeans governments never wanted to publicly admit this due to fears of loosing elections, so they kept kicking the can down the road.

The boomers definitely weren’t the first getting in, the original pensions were paid to their own parents

It’s not really a Ponzi scheme, it is completely possible for the system to be balanced, it’s just very very hard to get people to vote for you if you say they’ll have less tomorrow

> It’s not really a Ponzi scheme, it is completely possible for the system to be balanced, it’s just very very hard to get people to vote for you if you say they’ll have less tomorrow

This is exactly what happens in Denmark - a balancing of the pension system.

Also,rgis has been planned since 2006 - so it is nothing new.

A real balancing would entail cutting pensions for existing pensioners. Which is electoral suicide. So what you always end up doing is shafting future pensioners, either by pushing back the retirement age, or by doing nothing and waiting for it to explode

I reckon the presumption is that current pensioners don't live as long as future pensioners.

Hence only doing this for future pensioners will give equal time as reitred.

(at least, this is the core reasoning)

Also, that people who have twenty years to plan for their retirement to happen under these conditions will not be as screwed as someone told that their plans for next week are off.

But those people retiring from 2040 are still getting screwed by a policy. How is more time to prepare gonna help? Are you gonna magic some more money out of thin air by then?

You don’t need more money to continue working.

Why is that way of balancing this more real than the others?

maybe you don't like it to be called a Ponzi scheme, but the reality is that it is one.

Definition of a Ponzi scheme: A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investor. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves.

https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...

That's exactly how pensions work in Europe. Replace "Ponzi scheme organizers" by "legally elected governments" and here you have it - you have a whole continent of people believing that their pension is a given. Not everybody may like it, but that's the hard truth.

In the US, people contribute towards a 401K, and choose how to invest, but typically pick up just the S&P 500 - anyway and at least that money is somehow what they have saved for themselves.

But I agree with your statement "it is completely possible for the system to be balanced" - yes a Ponzi scheme can be absolutely balanced, you just need enough participants ...

i disagree. this is not at all a ponzi scheme. as you have pointed out the ponzi scheme has no value outside of the system and relies on deception to convince people to buy in to it. crucially the investment scheme provides no "value".

pensions on the other hand don't have the quality of deception and the value is straightforward - it redistributes wealth from the younger population to the older ones. this reduces the need for individuals to plan their retirements as the state takes care of it. as pointed by another post, you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side.

wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme? unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?

but i do agree that one should not think of pensions as a given. its worth pointing out that there are two types of pensions - defined benefits and defined contributions.

> wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme?

No, not exactly, that's different.

> unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?

That's certainly contributions I don't like either, because of how this system is abused. But to be fair, unemployment benefits or healthcare aren't a pyramid scheme, because you aren't paying for the previous "investors" - you might get back what you contributed (with a lots of caveats). In the case of the pension system, you clearly pay the previous "investors".

> pensions on the other hand don't have the quality of deception

Writing this in an article about how a country rug-pulled it's young citizens is quite amusing.

If that's not deception, I don't know what is.

> you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side

Which hasn't been the case in how many years already?

It's not a fraud. How can you say so? Also, the first pensioners didn't invest in the system. There isn't even a concept of investment in old-age social welfare, unlike other pensions. It's also not a pyramid scheme, since the structure is upside down, and there is no recruitment.

Calling it something else than it is, only to taint the system and its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith, if not worse.

I just quoted the definition of a Ponzi scheme, hence the word "fraud". The definition of a fraud is "... fraud is intentional deception ... to gain from a victim ... unfairly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud - maybe this gives another perspective what a fraud can be?..

> the first pensioners didn't invest in the system

I agree with you .. I suppose you're making my point here?

> It's also not a pyramid scheme, since the structure is upside down

The structure would be upside down if the demography was growing as expected - and that's the core of the issue, why governments have to extend the age of the retirement: the burden of the pensions is becoming unbearable relative to the amount of active people.

> there is no recruitment.

No indeed, though if you decide to live in Denmark, you are not recruited, you're forcefully enrolled in this scheme.

> ... to taint ... its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith

There is no "criminal undertaking" here, the system is simply broken and you're saying things I didn't - I certainly don't blame the current pensioners, nor the active generation working for these pensioners - they are all victims of this system.

My boomer parents are already pushing being retired for 20 years, neither did anything more than the bare minimum in life.

They could have easily worked 10 years longer instead of doing nothing but drinking wine all day and/or going out to restaurants in retirement. That is in between traveling to go out to restaurants and/or drink wine.

The boomers scammed us all and aren't done yet. They are going to make sure to bankrupt the entire system with healthcare cost before they go.

why not because of increased life expectancy?

That actually makes the problem worse unless retirement ages tick up at the same rate.

I think that’s what parent comment is saying: if life expectancy goes up, shouldn’t retirement age?

Thanks, I misunderstood.

I suppose increased life expectancy and fewer young people both contribute to worse dependency ratios.

yes. life expectancy going up is a good thing - it means people can keep working even when they are older. but fewer young people is not a desirable outcome, some of the pension funds could be redirected to more benefits for child care etc.

While some can continue to work longer, most adults I’ve known simply can’t work, at least in their chosen field, much past 67. Physical pain and loss of mental acuity take their toll. Pushing the retirement age out to 70 might prevent the whole system from collapsing but we need to make sure younger people save with the understanding that working until age 70 might simply not be possible.

Living longer doesn’t necessarily mean having more productive years than in the past. We simply have the medical tools to keep people alive even if they can’t much get out of bed.

No. It is about how the system is funded.

If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic.

But the pension system in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now. This can only work with a steadily growing economy which continually generates more revenue when more people retire. In some sense it is a literal Pyramid scheme, in which the obligations are continually pushed to younger generations, which have to contribute based on how many pensioners there are.

Especially now as EU economies become weaker this issue becomes bigger and bigger.

Chile had this and, while technocratically sound, was so unpopular it led to a new constitution.

This is about public pensions.

Denmark has private pensions like the 401k system in the US.

People can start tapping into these up to 5 years before they are 70.

In reality most people will go down in time and partially tap into private pensions and saving long before they turn 70.

This is opposed to other European countries, like Germany, that does not have these private pensions, but only retirement insurance.

Germany has private pensions.

Just as in Germany Denmark funds it's pensions through taxes, Germany additionally funds them through employee contributions.

But these are organized as insurances, right?

In Denmark you have ratepension, which truly is an investment account and not an insurance product.

Fundamentally any retirement plan that doesn't involve canned food in a celler is pay-go because the retirees will be consuming resources from the economy they retired into rather than the one they were workers in.

Their retirement savings can be in public company stocks instead of government guarantees but that only works if there are people willing to buy those stocks (ex: younger people saving for retirement).

That's only true if the economy doesn't grow i.e. productivity doesn't improve. If retirements are funded from returns on assets they scale with productivity. If they're funded by current workers they're bounded by the limits of population and wage growth.

There is a production side of the equation but also a demand side. Through robotics and AI, Toyota might get really good at making cars really fast with minimal human labor. But if the demand for cars drops every year, the value of Toyota will be like a melting ice cube. This will be true for all stocks actually, (except perhaps the firms that sell adult diapers) but not only stocks, but property as well. And probably bonds. Do we really think Japan is good for their 2060 bonds, assuming no debasement?

In a world with forever imploding consumer aggregate demand, there is no safe asset.

It breaks down if you think about individual firms like Toyota. But the macro picture is that humans are consuming less goods and services and due to that consumer demand drops. And that means the non-working population's needs can still be fulfilled by the proportionately-smaller working population.

Yes but my comment was about asset prices

Asset prices are just numbers. A retirement fund that invests in broad-based stock and bond indices will have returns that track the productivity of the entire economy. If the economy is producing more it means people are consuming more. If it produces less, people are consuming less. It balances out.

An extremely productive economy with 1/5 the number of consumers (and dropping) will have a cheaper stock index, even with improved productivity. Asset prices over the long-term are driven by cashflows. Hollowing out revenue while improving productivity still results in a lower asset price because your cashflows are smaller.

Productivity gains will also be swimming against the stream because scale advantage will deteriorate in all sectors.

> Hollowing out revenue while improving productivity still results in a lower asset price because your cashflows are smaller

And that's fine because it means consumption is lower too.

Ok but good luck saving for retirement when your investments are basically guaranteed a 2% decline every year.

Exactly. A world where aggregate consumer demand shrinks year after year is a world where all asset prices slide forever. Retirement is simply not possible on any large scale.

No, fundamentally it doesn't really matter. Retired people consume but don't produce. They are fed by the economy of today, not by economy of the past.

Whatever you accumulate for retirement (cash, stocks, gold, state pension points) it only represents coupons for your share of the economy of the future. Details may differ but fundamentals are the same: it a promise that the future generation will share some of their yield with you.

Retirement migration will be common in the future, either to lower-cost parts of the country or to different countries altogether. It's happening right now with Spain or Florida, but it will get even more common.

Let the hurricanes wipe out the current batch and then move your hovel in to be the next, o happy retirement!

> If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic.

You're talking about a system of pension by capitalization, like in US, which comes with its own problems.

Namely that if you reach retirement age during a crash like in 2008, you're screwed. You have to work 5 more years hoping the market recovers in the meantime, or retire anyway and get way less than you put in.

> in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now

Hopefully US people realize that this is also how US public pensions (social security) actually works.

But people are living longer, in better health (I think but didn’t verify with data) and entering the workforce later (due to more secondary schooling).

Setting aside the issues of declining birth rate for a minute, this seems like a reasonable adjustment to the other factors?

It's rising, but much slower than before - and plateaud in the 2010's for a good few years, UK stats - https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

So since 1950, lifespan has gone up ~14 years in UK.

Retirement age has not gone up since it was created in 1940s. Not crazy to raise it a little.

Quickly looking at Denmark articles, it seems they’re raising the age to adjust to life expectancy increases as well.

I don’t see this a sign of the system failing.

We are not living longer, fewer infants / kids are dying.

True. The interesting stat would be expected lifetime at retirement age.

You can find the info here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

There was a steady rise in life expectancy at retirement age in the UK until 2020, then something happened and it's fallen significantly. My guess is that it will rise rapidly over the next 15 years and this will be regarded as some sort of triumph for the public health system (unless there is another pandemic of course).

It’s both.

That's simply untrue.

Since 2010, the retirement age for women has raised from 60 to 65. Bringing it in line with the male retirement age.

See https://www.thetimes.com/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/st...

The age (for both) is gradually rising to 68.

Source https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-...

I didnt have time to write a whole treatise. Yes women’s was brought in line with men’s. I should have said, men’s retirement age has not gone up but said retirement age bc it’s an HN comment, not a published paper.

The raise to 68 will happen, but it has not happened yet. So, I think to frame my comment as “simply untrue” is disingenuous at best.

People are living longer (but not really in the US), but the health span is not seeing the same increase unfortunately.

The metric of “living longer” isn’t the same as “life expectancy once you reach the age of 65”, for example. In the US, when someone cites a statistic that our average life span decreased, it’s due to the effects of early-life mortality on the mean. If you make it past 65, it’s a different statistic.

there is not one USA with respect to these things.. "all people" did not stop living more than 65 years recently

So what do we do with all the productivity gains we’ve had?

Give them to the wealthy.

Take on and service more debt (e.g. larger mortgages). The productivity gains are claimed by creditors (i.e. those with existing capital). At least, that's a possible explanation.

Find jobs we like, with more flexibility and a better work-life balance.

Commercialize GLP1s.

Spend it on wars.

Personally, I'm not sure that they are living in better health in the way that I care about. I.e. my goal is to retire when I'm still healthy enough to do things (i.e. travel). Although they are likely healthier than previous generations, most of the 70 years olds I see still aren't healthy enough to travel.

Average healthy life years was 71 years in Denmark (source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthy-life-expectancy-a... ). By looking at the map it varies a lot between countries, and I assume between regions and occupations.

The policy for retirement age is related to when society sees fit to sustain someone that does not work. I think it has more to do with how the society sees the elders and what it can afford than to the goals of specific individuals.

I had a great grandparent live to 102. 3 of my 4 grandparents lived into their late 80s with the oldest passing a month shy of 90. Even my grandparent who smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day lived to 78. For all of them, their last good year was about year 80.

My dad just turned 78 and has really slowed the last 5 years. Longer life says little about quality of life.

why wait for travel until you are retired? Retirement should not be "the" goal in life.

I've been traveling for holidays every year since I was 25 for at least 3 weeks every year, loving it so much. First it was backpacking, now it transitioned into a bit more luxury as I got older.

You don't know if you'll be hit by a bus next year, retirement is a silly milestone to focus on.

True but no matter how healthy one is in their 60s and 70s people's health degrade significantly in their 80s. So, you have then 10 year of healthy life after retirement.

There's the flip side if the coin though: old people are healthier in Denmark (vs US for example [1]) due to the social welfare system. Well, that system needs to be funded. With the aging population, the costs are rising but contributions are (relatively) declining. That's why there's a push for higher retirement age. It's either this, or defunding the social welfare programs, or immigration. That last one isn't a viable political option in Denmark at the moment.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/02/05/older-people-are-...

I think what's happening though is that current generations are taking it easier in a lot of ways as a result of having to work more. For example, avoiding senior promotions into management etc.

The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life expectancies were so low. A popular policy delivered at low cost to the state.

That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.

I'm in the US, but I'd be happy if social security ages were pushed out to 75 or 80 but benefits preserved. I'm saving heavily for retirement, but the biggest challenge is figuring out how long you're going to live. If you have sort of a defined and horizon, it's much easier to calculate.

Yeah, probably 90 here in the EU is a good cut off. People I know seem to make 80 quite easily, but at 85 it goes down quite a bit and after that even the best seem to be done. For me that's 35 years ago at least but I am planning to not get to 90 and if I do, I won't be interested (or know it) anyway.

Of course it failed when it was created in completely different circumstances.

Or some may say it got outdated.

It was started at times when the life expentancy was low. And it was given at age above the life expentancy. And in the beginning not to everyone. The retirement age got lower and given to broader set of population gradually. These moves made governments popular, so it was no brainer to introduce, on the expense of future generations.

Birth rates that can maintain the economics of relatively low retirement age could not be sustained without destroying the planet. Actually has to be reversed still as it went too far already and deteriorating as we speak, especialy with the ongoing large increase in the overall life quality - causing decreasing birth rate alone - and healt. The system was destined to fail. But how to take away rights? It is much harder than giving, especiallly when the adverse effects are for current voters, not future generations?

So the necessary steps are postponed, postponed, postponed yet again, for many decades, taking about necessity in many forms, meanwhile filling bigger and bigger holes in the budgets, through borrowing, making the problem worse, again for future generations. Very few countries do tiny adjustments, and even those are met with huge protests mostly.

I wonder what the future holds. Painful adjustments or more painful collapse later in some form.

Having a 68 year old paediatrician, PE teacher will surely help.

No it isn't because of their birth rate, or at least, birth rates are an issue orthogonal to it.

In some rich countries people spend now more years of their life out of work than in work because of much longer education and much longer lifespans. If you want to keep the same social standards, all other things being equal, you need to raise the retirement age.

It's not that you are expected to work that long. It is a case of not being expected to work longer than that. You are always welcome to retire earlier if you have the financial means to do so. You are also welcome to work longer than that should you have the desire to do so.

Of course, those last two sentences are tongue in cheek.

The real problem is that certain segments of society are not compensated for their labor at a rate that would allow them to retire early, and may even have to work beyond retirement age in order to supplement their stipend. Worse yet, these people often work in sectors that offer few affordances for them to maintain their health into old age and may even push them into living conditions that are detrimental to their health (assuming their job isn't detrimental to their health in the first place).

Ideally, people would be able to retire when they want (within reason). The reality is that some people can retire at a relatively young age while others don't really have that option.

The system has effectively failed most everywhere on the West. The post-WWII generations are numerous and have a long life expectancy, apparently longer than the pension systems planned for. Generations that came after them are less numerous, and, in a way, somehow less prosperous. They cannot pay enough to keep the pension systems afloat.

The Japanese faced this earlier and harder than Europe, with about 30% of their population being past the retirement age. They increased their productivity very significantly, but it's still not enough, and a lot of older folks in Japan keep working well past the retirement age, sometimes even re-hired by the companies from which they had retired.

Do you have a sense of how you see it playing out?

It'll keep getting worse, as more and more people concentrate into large cities. And large cities are family-hostile. The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.

What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/

How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.

> The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size.

This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.

Everything in social sciences has plenty of reasons and exceptions.

The thing is, there is not much you can change in peoples' behavior. So your only option is to stimulate the behaviors that you want.

Do you envision we will see any forced egalitarian land/wealth distribution?

Why? The land for habitation is not scarce. The entire US urban footprint is around 2% of the land area.

The unaffordable housing cost is entirely an artifact of urbanism gone wrong.

Well in my country all the land is owned, either by the crown or by land owners, so at least in my country, the government would have to just...give away land? (Canada, The West)

You can buy an area in Canada the size of a European country for less than a condo in Manhattan.

If you go outside of big cities, land price is not an issue. At all.

To build a house and live sustainably it needs to be somewhat near other community surly? For access to grocery, education and health care, and then also modern opportunities. Barrie is probably the most reasonable area outside of Toronto and land out there is still very expensive. How do you see it working for someone who just graduated from college and has $200k in student debt? I know a lot of people who are stuck, I don't know the solution. If I was them and society wanted me to have a kid for the good of society, I'd say sure, give me a house and $3MM, other wise, why bother...?? Nobody wants to continue this miserable cycle.

Of course, building a new community from scratch is hard and is probably not worth it. But there are plenty of small cities that can act as "seeds".

Barrie is still in the general Toronto area, so it's expensive. Sudbury further north that is definitely not a part of Toronto anymore, has very reasonable houses for ~$400k, or 5 years of average household income in Ontario. This is well within the normal "affordable" range, so a 20-years mortgage will be around 30% of income.

The problem is, people _can't_ live in Sudbury because there are no jobs there!

My plan at some point is to do a big tech start-up in Winnipeg. Bit of other stuff still to do first, but I have an eye on Winnipeg (good flight times!!)

Hah. When I was working at Amazon, my team acquired a startup in Winnipeg. Apparently, there are quite a few software companies out there

This is a very sensible comment. One thing that could explain why I see (subjectively) a lot more bigger families in Switzerland where I live compared to other places in Europe is that cities‘ size is „just right“, so having a family to start with is much easier than in large, urban areas.

> The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Or people in big cities have plenty of opportunities and interests than just to have children.

People often want to live in big cities due to social reasons, not just due to employment opportunities.

Wait, but NotJustBikes keeps telling us that density is good.

Dense is good. You'll notice that the drop in fertility matches up with the generation that grew up in the suburbs.

Not quite. Baby boomers are mostly explained by delayed births due to the Great Depression, and then by greatly improved living condition in the newly settled suburbs: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-baby-boom-saw-a...

But the current drop below the replacement rate is all due to increased density. If you look at the stats, the urbanization percent stayed flat. However, more and more people are moving into a smaller and smaller set of large cities.

That's why suburbs are (relatively) full of kids, but dense urban areas look like vasectomy sanctuaries.

> People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries. It was only when the postwar regime of making new housing illegal took hold, and housing prices inevitably spiralled out of control, that they stopped.

> Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.

Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

> Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.

Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.

The causes of the population decline are a) women marrying later, or not marrying at all, because they have the option of a career and prefer that b) families that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education. Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.

> Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries.

London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.

> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.

Oh, I agree. However, for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.

> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!

> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.

It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.

> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.

Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.

> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.

Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?

> London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people

And its population in the 1930s, with a healthy fertility rate, was 11 million.

> for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.

Maybe - bear in mind that building costs are much higher out in the country. But assuming you build a big house, what would you do with it? I guess all the cleaning will help make life less boring.

> It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.

The pandemic did a lot of economic damage, and many jobs stayed in the cities or are rushing to return there now.

> Europe has free (or cheap) education.

But much stronger womens' rights and correspondingly low marriage rates.

> Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?

In Japan? Maybe because of all the cash subsidies for moving out with children.

> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

How practical is raising kids in a 20m2 studio? Especially if you've got multiple. I'd bet not nearly as practical as in a house. Plus the recent trend of building lots of smaller apartments instead of a bit bigger and way more practical ones.

20 is maybe going too far, but a bigger space is often just harder to keep clean, especially with kids. Of course if you're raising kids in a city apartment you'll want them spending a lot of time out of the house (whether that's parks, community centers, just shopping, ...) but that's a good healthy practice anyway.

How do you know that this is separated from other factors, like woman being more educated and have more access to birth control in urban area ? How can we be sure that housing size is the single deciding factor as you said ?

You can't know that for certain, but you can look at evidence: the household size increases when people move away from dense cities.

The other way around is more difficult to quantify, and a lot of demographic studies look at immigrants from poor countries.

To tell you the truth I only ever see poor people (immigrants, mostly) that carry around like 3-4 kids in cities (I am in SF) while everyone else either has 1 or no kids.

They don’t speak English and I’m not sure if they will assimilate well. I already see street vendors, trash everywhere, and other 3rd world behavior in some parts of SF.

I’m an immigrant from 3rd world. It’s pretty sad to see here.

I feel, generally, with an aging population + rising unemployment due to AI, we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare. The most optimistic, utopian, solution would be UBI and an artisan economy, but I think we all know that capitalism isn't kind enough for that to play out so we'll probably end up with something much more dystopian.

> we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare.

I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.

The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.

Generations after the boomers create more, with less energy, but the boomers rigged the system and captured the increases.

The spend like crazy on nothing, cruises, trinkets and inflated healthcare. All that spending yields nothing of substance except for experienced and critical doctors.

Higher life expectancy more like, the state can't afford for people to spend 20 years unproductive. This is a much less acute issue in the USA and Russia where health is poor and life expectancy low.

It is simple mathematics. European pension systems are not a saving system, but a pay as you go system, where pensions are paid from the people who work now. What you get in taxes this month you pay as pensions this month, as a state. This is the Bismarck model and it was invented at a time when the average lifespan was lower than the pension age, so many people were contributing very little as a percentage for very few people to get pensions. Today the situation is the opposite, with less and less people paying (not too many people start working at 16 years like in 1860), retirement age was lowered in most countries, the percentage of salary you pay as pension tax can be 25%, growing that is not too easy as this is just part of the taxes workers pay.

This system was working back in 1860, but it is a Ponzi scheme in decline for the past 50 years. And there is no way out, most people rely on state pensions to live after retirement; it is the perfect trap.

Maybe the system needs a rethink; an expectation that everyone able to will pretty much work their whole lives, but making work much less miserable and time-consuming so that's just fine.

Ha. Total pipedream. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of our current economic system.

What system would work?

You don’t need higher birth rates if the productivity rises and the created wealth is fairly distributed.

How would you fix it? Note that even Scandinavian nations with very generous healthcare and childcare policies can't raise their rates, it simply seems that as people get wealthier, they have fewer kids, regardless of the status of their country's systems.

My take is that saying the problem is birth rates is misguided. Surely we have enough labor to provide for the elderly, why can’t our economy be structured to get this labor to the people who need it?

Do we have enough labor? At least in the US there has been a shortage of elderly care workers. And even if we didn't, what does it mean, concretely, to structure the economy to get the labor to those who mean it?

> least in the US there has been a shortage of elderly care workers

Well yeah, because it's difficult, taxing, often traumatic work that pays the same as any other nursing job with a higher QoL and social status. And even then they're pushing out all the actual nursing staff that pays well in favor of MAs/CNAs who get paid like shit.

But at current unemployment rates, raising pay to get more workers into elderly care is just poaching them creating shortages in other places. I always say that the demographic challenges ahead of us are not about a shortage of dollars but about a shortage of humans.

I don’t ever expect everything to be perfectly efficient or even close to it, but how many jobs are there that really truly matter? A job “mattering” is binary either, a doctor is probably essential, and an artist isn’t, but it still matters.

I personally don’t think wages always correspond to how essential a job is, but for the sake of the argument let’s pretend that wages match the necessity of a job, its difficulty, educational requirements, etc.. In this case, I’d expect that we would see people move to jobs that are more essential than their prior job. I think this is more complex that just “poaching”.

Correction to myself, I believe we have more than enough people to provide the labor.

I really don't mean to get into the nitty gritty details - I'm not an economist and I'm not providing solutions, just stating what I see as the problem. I believe that we have enough resources, and there are issues getting those resources to where they need to go.

Example: Assume we do have a shortage of elderly care workers. Why is this the case? Could this be fixed by increasing their wages? Then that implores the question of who is paying for these increased wages, which is the question I'm not answering and I don't know enough to answer.

I just don't really believe that keeping the birth rates high is the answer to this economic problem. It might be a solution, but it's more of a band-aid than truly facing the issue. If you have a inefficient engine you can either figure out how to produce more gasoline (babies), or you can figure out how to produce a more efficient engine.

The US's problem with healthcare workers isn't because nobody wants to do it, its because of not the great wages for a career that many don't just inherently enjoy doing on top of high educational costs and limited positions for trainees. The not great wages cuts prospective workers, caring for old people in general is not super attractive and cuts potential workers, the limited spots for residency cuts many qualified people who had the drive and intelligence and the money to become healthcare workers, and the high educational costs kills even more potential workers before they even try putting a step into the healthcare industry.

A truthful ad for working in an old folks home in the US would be, "slightly over median wages, but with inflexible and unreliable schedules, rampant industry wide exploitation of workers and their rights, likely multiple ownership changes of your place of business, caring for potentially deranged and violent individuals, high non-refundable monetary investment up-front, no guarantee of residency availability"

We don’t. That really is the answer. Look at unemployment rates. They basically can’t go much lower.

Yeah, people keep trying to find a purely economic reason for why folks are having less kids. I think I'm satisfied with the very simple reason that raising kids is hard work. Most people feel like 1 kid already gets their hands full. That's really it IMO. Whenever it was that joint families split up into disparate nuclear families, obviously the load of raising say 5 kids that was being shared among 20 people, suddenly fell on just 2 people.

In the places with high fertility rate, you will almost surely observe joint families. I'm from India where we have such demographic variety that you can see adjacent areas with completely different fertility rates. In one, you will see old-style large houses with courtyards and 15+ people in them living as a joint family. Invariably these people have more kids. But in the next town with more nuclear families and modernish apartments, you will be lucky to see 2 kids per family. [1]

This is what births the secondary economic incentives which are mentioned a lot in popular discourse. For example, if you're already living in a house with 15 people your financial realities will require a similar number of people in the next generation to continue the same lifestyle.

[1] Wealth is not a confounding factor here. The specific two areas I have in mind are both more or less equally wealthy, one has folks running a coconut business primarily and the other is a small town with the usual assortment of office jobs.

Best simple and obvious explanation I’ve seen for the root cause.

So … probably most straightforward solution is to update local zoning laws to encourage a more communal style of living. Not communes but more along the lines of suburbs-as-village.

Or better child care provided by the government.

Having a child has a significant impact on your professional career (women in particular). Even in countries with great parental leave, like Denmark, the absence still reduces the years of experience you would otherwise get. Once they are "ready" for a child, they are in their late 30's and barely have time to birth one or two babies and would probably not have the stamina required to take on more.

The social pressure of raising the perfect kid with multiple activities in their "spare" time is much higher today and require more from the parent.

Ideally, people should get children in their early 20's, when they are physically more fit to handle the pressure. Unfortunately the current education system does not combine well with young parents. The government would need to integrate child care in colleges so that the parents have somewhere to place the children while studying.

Some people really can't have kids or need extra help, but aside from that, social security sets up the wrong incentives.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m based in the Nordics and my estimated retirement age at the moment (where I can get my state pension) is 67y 4m. Whilst I understand the burden the aging population is having on society (lifespan) it doesn’t seem like there’s much proactive government input into people’s healthspan.

Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.

Are you really claiming there is some big health issue in the nordic countries suppressing life span?

No. I am suggesting that governments invest more into ensuring their aging population is healthy instead of draining every bit of life from them by making them work later and later.

no one is being drained doing nordic office work in their 70s.

It’s not just about expanding lifespans. The cratering birth rates are a huge reason why societies are going to need people to work until they’re older.

It’s the other way around: a few decades ago people retired only a few years earlier, had 5-10 years of retirement and then died.

Now people live way longer, but the retirement age never got adjusted properly to the new reality. So 15-20 years of retirement is the new normal.

In addition, way fewer young payers for the now old.

Sure. But is that the society we want to live in. Do we not have ambitions to have people work less, enjoy what little life they have more? I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.

I would love to see a model That supports this.

I think it is possible, but we need to raise (corporate) taxes a lot, and this needs to happen globally, as companies move.

As a star I would love to see global minimum corporate taxes, and then take it from there.

No one is preventing you from saving more now and retiring earlier. Why must it be the government’s job?

Most people prefer it to be the government’s job, and that’s how they vote.

> Do we not have ambitions to have people work less, enjoy what little life they have more

Spend less, save more. Vote for governments that do likewise.

> Do we not have ambitions to have people work less, enjoy what little life they have more?

Isn't that something for the individual to decide, not the collective? Many derive from work a lot of meaning in life. If working is what makes some people happy, it would be nice to not punish people for working until they die.

> I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.

Absolutely!

Drugs make people happy. It's not the state's job to define happiness for its people, it s there to manage the economy so they can find the happiness they like.

Also the actual pension payments have gone up massively. Almost doubled in the last 30 years in the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pensioners-incomes-...

So has inflation, and the cost of living.

That graph is inflation adjusted.

People live longer but not necessarily healthier.

They'll go directly from factory line to care home.

Economically, old people are a burden on society. If you want to have a long and easy retirement for your elderly, you need a growing population, forever. Like a ponzi scheme. The alternative is that you break young people's back by burdening them with providing for the elderly. No amount of redistribution will help a country with poor productivity. 60 was a reasonable retirement age years ago, because most people would be dead soon after retirement, but with people regularly reaching 80+, 70 for retirement seems very reasonable. It wouldn't surprise me if the average gen Z reaches 90+, so maybe they should be working until they're in their 80s.

> Economically, old people are a burden on society

Only if they are poor. If they're rich, they can continue "producing wealth" from interest and investments even after they're dead.

It's a silly thing to say, of course, but it's built into most people's assumptions who are discussing it.

A rich person doing nothing is not productive. They produce by giving their money to someone that is productive and getting rent on it. If billionaires and aristocrats were actually a sizable amount of a country's wealth it might make sense to redistribute their wealth to the actually productive people. But they're not.

> If billionaires and aristocrats were actually a sizable amount of a country's wealth

I might be misunderstanding your point, but I think they might be? E.g. in the UK:

> By 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 34.1 million people

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/

If you had to pick an age for societal burden, it'd be the average "young" person who isn't making a net-positive contribution until around the age of 25. Most people don't receive a corresponding 25 years of retirement, and the retirement they do receive is a product of contributing to it for 40 years.

But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real problem is not about how the pie is split across generations, but about the realities of lifespans, economic production, and expenses. If you're responsible for funding the entirety of your retirement, all of this is abundantly clear. When you nationalize retirement, all sorts of budgeting tricks start happening, like "borrowing" to fund other programs, papering shortfalls via population growth, etc. Then you start getting age warfare when the govt has to eventually cut back.

You could dissolve the national retirement plan, but that seems like a bad idea for similar reasons as entirely dissolving national welfare and insurance programs. It will always be the case that some people, need some help, some of the time. I guess in my ideal world, it's reduced to a much smaller safety net, because the government is managing the economy well enough that the populace has the wherewithal to save appropriately, and they are educated enough to do so.

Young people are an investment. Old people are purley a liability. This is true regardless of how they're cared for, when looking at it from a macro perspective. How the pie is split matters when talking about the sustainability of the system. Could you survive if 90% of your value is in investments? Maybe. 90% in liabilities? Probably not.

Having people fund their own retirement would be ideal from a economic standpoint, but given the histories and complexities of existing systems, it is probably not acceptable politically, or morally, in any country. Honestly it's a distraction.

At the end of the day, a country cannot tolerate too many freeloaders. It doesn't matter if they're pensioners or retired at 50, living to 100 hedge fund managers. Productivity is really the only thing that matters for a countrie's economic destiny.

> If you want to have a long and easy retirement for your elderly, you need a growing population

Or a population that can produce the same amount of stuff and services with fewer and fewer workers. Fortunately that's what capitalism excels at.

That's a nice way to restate that young people will have to produce more, and receive less. But tell me, what incentive do you have to produce more when you'll just have it snatched away to be given to someone else? Why not move to the U.S where your productivity will be rewarded, or just put in minimal effort?

Young workers will produce more regardless because people don't stop being innovative. The incentive to produce more is that economic surpluses improve the standard of living for everyone, including young workers.

Is it better that retirements are funded by this surplus from the increased productivity, or by direct taxation on the income of young workers? Income growth doesn't keep pace with productivity so it's an easy answer.

Taxing the income of current workers to directly fund current retirees is the real "snatching away what you produced". If more national pension plans invested in broad-based stock indexes instead they wouldn't need to take more and more money out of young people's pockets.

Capital ownership entitles you to its returns. Young workers typically don't own a lot of capital. So it comes down to either retirement plans owning it, which means young workers also get its returns when they retire. Or a small wealthy elite could own it all, and everyone else gets left out, reduced to moving a dollar from an youngsters pocket to a retiree.

I am Gen X and fully expect to be working until 70, hopefully.

I knew a guy who worked full time at a bank at 85. He said all the time he didn't have to work but what else was he going to do all day? A big reason he was able bodied at 85 was from working and not sitting home all day.

I think we have confused retirement fund/planning marketing with reality.

The retired people I know are physical mess from retirement. Alcohol and restaurant food all the time, will be needing long term care much sooner than if they had worked longer.

As an American, I’m often that countries like Denmark are in fact constantly investing in health and entitlements, and so everyone is healthier and happier. Is that not the case?

Denmark has a lot of social services, and commensurate taxes to support them. This is reaching a breaking point. You can't get more blood out of a body that has already been drained to near the point of death.

In my part of the Nordics (Finland) they are cutting investment and sending people to private institutions. In rural areas private providers have entirely replaced public sector healthcare centers. This is seen as quite controversial across the board.

Self paid?

No, the taxes we pay are going to private institutions driven by profit instead of into funding public institutions that don't have this self-interest. This is not a model I support.

I see.

I think it is a balance.

Auctioning this work to private companies should theoretically make it more cost efficient - and I think it is.

At least I hear that workers a much more stressed than they were historically, so I don't hope this comes with no benefit...

I can only speak for the two countries I've lived in (Finland & UK) and society is not amenable to privatisation in either. In the UK pretty much everything that has been privatised has been ruined (water, energy, transport) with high prices and poor service.

Whereas in the US, where I live, everything that has been mostly socialized (housing, health & education) has become wildly unaffordable.

I honestly didn't think anyone in the US considered healthcare socialized (same for housing and a big chunk of university-level education), so I've learned something today.

I personally find it hard to reconcile the concept of socialized healthcare with UnitedHealth Group being apparently the 7th company by revenue in the world, at least I don't think that's what Europeans would mean by "socialized".

As someone from the US, I consider all those industries to be almost fully for profit. Our k-12 education is public, but constantly under fire to move those public funds to private providers via various voucher programs. I would say that each of those industries have various regulations around them, so maybe that's why the commenter thinks it's socialized.

Live in the US and don’t understand why OP is saying those sectors are public. Everything mentioned is NOT socialized.

You're wrong about this.

Average lifespan is 81 in Denmark and 78 in USA. During the pandemic, average USA lifespan dropped to 76, while in Denmark it didn't drop below 81. So yes, it seems they are in fact healthier.

https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/denmark/usa?sc=...

We have the same problem as every other western country. Sweden has lowered the taxes by about 500 billion SEK (corrected for inflation and population growth) since I was born close to 40 years ago. That is about a third of the annual budget.

How these tax cuts are distributed over the population is... not very evenly. There was even an article yesterday in the NYT (iirc) that warned about wealth accumulation patterns in Sweden.

It is the same neoiberal experiment that the US has had since Reagan, just with some more social democracy.

Denmark is not constantly investing in health and entitlements at all. On the contrary unemployment benefits and such has been slashed. Over the last two decades there has been many broad cuts to public services. The health sector had to do percentage fixed cuts every year for several years in a row.

Building on that, instead of viewing retirement (age) from a cost perspective (i.e. we have x budget and y lifespan, hence retirement age is z), it would be refreshing to see a high-quality and long retirement as starting point, and then figure out how to organize for that. One way would be to reduce burden on services indeed. A low retirement age (for those who want it) is a sign of a wealthy nation and something to strive for.

> Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services)

This doesn't require any investment or technological development; it just requires making rational-but-politically-nuclear policy changes reducing the infinite tap of publicly-funded extremely-low-ROI medical expenditures on old people.

An absurd fraction of medical spending goes to protracting the suffering of old people just a bit longer. We can simply stop doing that, given the political will to do so.

Extending people's lifespans won't do much to alleviate these expenditures, except perhaps to slightly dilute the amortization schedule.

Previous older generations were leas independent. They lived with their extended families, contributed to the household and spent nearly nothing.

The best phrase I read by someone. "Retirement is a financial goal - it has nothing to do with age". And this makes huge sense...

well in this context it generally means the age someone starts to receive state pension.

And in many countries it defines the age you can withdraw money from your own retirement savings without paying full income tax.

Yes. But the wider meaning is - you are in control

But you're not because the country decides how much they take out of your wage for pension and at what age you can access it.

I’d encourage thinking not just about yourself or your immediate circle when it comes to policy like retirement age. State run pension systems affect nearly everyone, not just the extremely fortunate few who can become financially independent at a younger age. And that is also largely an American phenomenon anyway. Salaries are much lower on average than in Europe and there is far less differential between minimum wage and what senior employees get paid. There’s also not the same culture of investing because European companies don’t have the same performance as the US stock market. Lower yield real estate investment is much more common in many European countries. And with strong social safety nets Europeans are generally less pressured to save a huge nest egg.

So this raising of the retirement age will affect a huge portion of workers and 70 is OLD to be working full time for all but the most relaxed jobs. Most older folks I know have know being dealing with multiple chronic age related illnesses well before 70.

How does this make huge sense?

It's a financial goal that is literally based on how long you plan to live, aka, your age.

Let's say I have €100.000 in the bank and that's two years of expenses based on my budget. Can I retire tomorrow? Well, what's my age? and what X do I plan to add to my age to determine if that amount of money is sufficient to retire?

This is perfectly reasonable.

People are living and staying healthy for longer than they used to, while the overall population is aging disproportionally due to low birth rates. If they hadn't raised the retirement age, they would have to raise taxes very significantly.

People should remember that retirement is about making sure the people who are too old to work can still live respectably. It's not an end-of-life vacation.

Of course, it's still going to be massively unpopular. But the alternative is fiscal armageddon.

> But the alternative is fiscal armageddon

Or possibly making a trade off on any number of other areas the government spends money on, or raising taxes.

No wait I forgot, either pushing the burden onto labor or Armageddon, no alternatives

> Or possibly making a trade off on any number of other areas the government spends money on, or raising taxes.

A lot of heavy lifting was done here.

Yea, no shit. It’s called sarcasm.

Oh. Well, carry on then.

Peope are living and staying healthy for longer than they used to --> mostly impactful for middle/upper class and above. There is a correlation between life expectancy and job level/wealth: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7792745/ .

With retirement at 70, manual labours can already stop dreaming of taking a rest before dying.

Recipe to fail:

- force your women to work 9-5 (sell it under "liberation" label)

- force young people into crammed cities with $4k rent

- be relaxed on crime, don't prosecute or enforce anything where victim is another person

- observe that people don't replicate anymore

- import people from other (primarily 3rd world) countries

- become a 3rd world country

What happens to the West is insane to me, it's literally a case of social suicide in slow motion.

I think it’s important to remember that you don’t have to wait until you retire to live your life. Finding a balance between your work and personal life is the most important thing to get sorted as early as you can. This looks different for everyone.

Sure you can climb a mountain, or cram in life experiences at 60+ if you’re in good health, but I think it’s better to do it as you go and enjoy your entire life.

UK-based here and despite it being one of the lowest state pensions in Europe, there are still complaints that it's too high. I fully expect to never receive a State Pension, and so contribute the maximum to my private pension. But even then it wouldn't surprise me if soon even those contributions got taxed too.

It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system.

In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future.

And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing?

Graeber's thesis of bullshit jobs becomes increasingly more convincing: work isn't about production, it's about social control².

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

[2] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

If you wanted to live to a 1930s standard of education, healthcare, food, entertainment, interior decorarion, transportation, savings etc etc you could most definitely do it on very few hours of work. Lots of people associated with homesteading, tiny houses etc do so.

That said I agree we should be further ahead in paving a way to paradise.

It's not necessarily about the standard of living, but about production going into the zero or negative sum status consumption. Or as Keynes puts it:

> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes -- those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs -- a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

That's not what Keynes meant.

It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else?

How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or proles being able to afford intercontinental flights more than once in a lifetime?

He postulated eightfold increse in economy, though not clear at what working hours. If he assumed 40 hours then and eightfold productivity increse, with 15 hours that would still be threefold increase in living standards. The productivity has increased even more than eightfold.

Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

> He postulated eightfold increse in economy

Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.

> Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.

> In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week.

Couldn't they, having the same standard of living as in 1930?

It’s not insane. People are living longer than before, unfortunately when initially set up, people didn’t take increasing longevity into account as well as lower fertility rates. Quite a few people never got to retirement when initially instituted. Where is money supposed to come from? Historically, in multigenerational households of yore elders were productive till they could no more.

People live longer but the threshold is still the same when the age reduces your physical and mental capability to the same level.

Retirement started as ”you’re too old and frail to work”, but morphed into ”now that you’ve worked for a number of decades, you can relax and enjoy life for 20+ years before your health starts to deteriorate”

Personally I think we should revert to the earlier system, where you are free to retire as soon as you want on your own money, but if you want the state (=other regular people) to fund your lifestyle, you need to be no longer fit for work

Yes, that's what strikes me as well. Where is the productivity gains going? Why are we still working 40 hour weeks, and possibly even for many more years?

If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well.

That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.

> Where is the productivity gains going?

Reinvested to increase future productivity

lmao

> Where is the productivity gains going?

I wonder what a good answer would be here. Intuitively we are increasing productivity in activities that does not increase social welfare. Take corporate lawyering, marketing as an example.

https://preview.redd.it/wealth-distribution-in-the-us-by-wea...

https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/

Etc etc

The rising wealth inequality is a blunt answer. Similarly saying that we are increasing productivity in activities that protect interest of the rich.

It seems that significant amount of productivity gains are lost because of activities that profit from deception and counter activities that accounts for them.

> Where is the productivity gains going?

Debt servicing.

I have no specific figures to back this up, but my assumption is that as we become more productive, more credit is made available, which leads to bigger debts and asset price inflation. Because of the asset price inflation, the debt is not necessarily used for productive purchases but, for example, to pay more for existing things - the obvious one being a home. The productivity gains are therefore claimed by creditors.

It would be interesting to see how well productivity increases and debt growth (esp. private) correlate.

Capitalism isnt about amassing 'enough'

Its an intrinsically anti-human system thats starting to need less and less people. How these surplus people are dealt with isn't going to be pretty... Hopefully it results in the actors, being human and all, having a social revolution and pivoting away from it.

> Where is the productivity gains going?

Those who own the capital. The top 10%-1%. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Never a bad time to link this:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> Where is the productivity gains going?

To the top 1%. Technology advances rapidly, but work hours don't decrease.

> In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week

This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage. However, nobody wants to live at a 1930s living standard. It turns out that in aggregate people prefer to spend productivity gains on conveniences and higher standards of living than on working fewer hours.

> This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage.

Maybe not if you want to own a home. Asset price inflation is real. If you already own a home, sure.

- Asset inflation can be tackled with flexibility. The level of flexibility my acquaintance showed is not required. He bought a fixer-upper two apartment building with a garden in a livable small walkable eurozone city for 5k€.

- The productivity growth really has had incredibly strong deflationary effects. So much more, more diverse, tastier and healthier food for example, for so much less money.

- The growing affluence has really created incredible opportunities for scavenging from the waste stream. A practical example. About half of the food I eat is leftovers from a nearby school. I'm proud to be saving good food from going to waste _and_ it lowers our expenses quite significantly.

Keynes did not say that the living standard would remain static.

Lol no you cannot Having 1 wage result in an owned home and enough to feed a family! What a joke...

It's not insane if you consider that people neglect to raise the next generation to fund their retirement. Fund in the real sense: by doing work and ceding part of the yield to people who retired from work but keep consuming.

Whatever people save for retirement, cash or stocks or points, it only facilitates the said exchange, it doesn't somehow replace or alleviate it. It only works if the next generation exists and is prosperous enough to share their income.

> How much of even current work really increases wellbeing?

If you think about it, there are fewer and fewer jobs that are genuinely useful.

I know it's a difficult topic, but I can't shake the feeling that we need some sort of government intervention in order to reorient the economy towards activities that actually benefit us.

> It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity.

Productivity gains are kept by the owners of the institutions as profits that made that productivity possible. Do you think YOU will work less once LLM tech is deployed at scale? Of course not, your company will pay you the same and expect the same work. Every company out there will do the same. They will reap the productivity gains.

> It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system.

Keynes was almost right. He underestimated the ability of future generations to consume conspicuously. Also, the need for many to fit in by working, but I digress.

Many don't _have_ to work more and longer. I'm speaking of a large class, very much overrepresented on HN, of smart, healthy westerners with no dependents to care for. We have only one major problem. We live in this bubble nudging us towards conspicuous consumption - gently or less so.

My job closely resembles Keynes' 1930's prediction. Sometimes I work (much) more. Not because I need money, but because the job is interesting. Interesting as in, me learning, contributing something positive to other people's lives, growing my family's financial resilience and robustness, or just enjoying the flow.

We need a revolution already, it's overdue. Fuck this shit.

We don’t live with 1930s standards of housing, education, welfare, material wealth, services, etc, etc, etc. Compare the taxes you pay now with the taxes people paid in the 1930s.

Without discarding the issue of the moving goalpost, I do wonder what the quality of life contrast looks like between a 70-year old in 2025 and a 70-year old in 1925. Note: I arbitrarily picked the latter date, as I wasn't able to (with a quick search) locate the year in which the original retirement age was established in Denmark.

I also wonder what it would look like for the government to encourage (or even facilitate) "jobs for seniors" that only become available to you after you turn 60. They could be jobs that are, by design, low-risk, low-physicality, but medium-high mental stimulation.

around 1900 more than a quarter of the population of Denmark emigrated to the USA IIR

Around 140k emigrated to USA in 1900-1930 (https://danishvoices.ku.dk/danish-in-north-america/)

Denmark’s population was 2.4m-3.5m in that period (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark)

my sources : "a History of the Lutheran Church in America", and a personal history written at that time. If your records are accurate and unbiased, I would accept that answer completely and admit it.. but I am not convinced both of those are true. It is interesting and more clarity is welcome. Also your estimate of the population varies by 40% so the accuracy is in question.

ku.dk is Copenhagen University, which I would regard as accurate and unbiased.

Wikipedia cites Danmarks Statistik for the population numbers, the official government statistics.

The 2.4m is in 1900, 3.5m in 1930.

That's a horrible source. You really rather go with an old book about church history instead of official data?

Seems the US will have to do this soon. Just very very unpopular. Not sure which party will actually pull the trigger.

My guess - they'll just gut the benefits to anemic levels for everyone slowly rather than some big easy to point to maneuver like this.

What is the political incentive to do this ever?

My thinking was, cutting taxes via budget reconciliation (which is the only process the currently paralyzed legislature can do) requires some hand waving deference to the notion of being revenue neutral by the Byrd rule, so cuts to social programs or rollbacks of government spending have been increasingly included as a way to get tax cuts. Tax cuts fund your donors who fund your reelection campaign.

But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.

The income part of SS is more or less subsistence level, which arguably was its intention to keep the elderly from begging in the streets. But in the dystopian US healthcare system, Medicare is arguably the more important part of the social net. Without it, you are not going to afford any healthcare in old age.

If this budget hits the PAYGO limits, which is basically guaranteed, that will trigger automatic cuts to Medicare, so they can backdoor cut the program without anybody voting for that.

Where is the political incentive not to do this ever? If you reduce spending on social safety nets, you can reduce taxes on the wealthy, and as a bonus the poor die. win/win.

You can reduce taxes on the wealthy without reducing spending, which is what the Republicans just did, kicking the can down the road to a future administration while getting the political benefit of the current spending.

Whoever does that will get voted out.

Voters over 62 make up >25% of the midterm vote.

By 2030 - that number could easily be >30%.

Not sure about the US, but from what I have seen in Europe the questionnaires show that older people are actually for these policies more so than young people, especially when they are already retired and thus not affected. In Germany, two thirds of retirees answered for abandoning a public holiday while everyone else was by majority obviously against it.

Trump is priming to con the Republicans into touching the third rail, and they'll all lose their seats. They're already warming up by chopping Medicaid. It's stupid, unnecessary, and cruel.

that's easily "solved" by setting the cutoff date to benefit the older generation. I believe that kind of ladder kicking is exactly what's happening in the article on Denmark, and how several other European countries squared that circle.

"Not retiring" in the US will be more dictated by inability to purchase a home than Social Security.

Look at all these people around you in their forties who are still renting. They are basically too late to buy. They will be "forever renters". This means they will have to work until death, as their rents continue to rise when their peers who owned homes took their downsizing premium and lived off of it for a few years.

What's crazy is the number of grown adults who think their 401ks will magically grow to fill the gap.

I hear this sentiment frequently but it doesn't pencil out. Renting an equivalent unit will typically, month-to-month, be cheaper than buying. Of course a significant portion of the monthly mortgage payment goes to principal which increases your net worth, but there are many cases where the money you save monthly by renting will actually exceed the principal you accumulate from your mortgage payment. In fact, there are plenty of helpful calculators to help you figure out what makes the most sense if you don't have a love affair with Excel [1].

You may argue that the the value of the house will appreciate well in a good market, but there is nothing stopping you from taking the money you saved by renting and putting it in an appreciating asset.

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/calculator/rent-vs-buy-calculator

The only real financial benefit to home ownership is it enforces savings.

Where do I input the yearly growth of the property's value? Property prices where I live in Sydney have grown ~7% on average over the last ten years. That's higher than the average loan interest rate over the last ten years of ~4.5%. It's possible to find some other investment that earns more than ~7% profit, but in order to really be more profitable it would also need to cover the amount you spent in rent over that period.

the rent vs buy calculator does not tell me what to do when I am in my 60s and cannot find work

a homeowner in that scenario can sell their home; a renter is in trouble

You can still find plenty of reasonable housing in the US. As for young people on the coasts, yea I don't know how they will own a house within the next 10 years.

Housing in the US isn't anywhere near as cost prohibitive as a vocal minority of people like to make it sound like it is.

You just have to give up on the Santa Monicas, San Franciscos, and Manhattans of the nation. There's plenty of affordable housing outside the top tier cities, and modern tech has made it easier than ever to work from practically anywhere on the planet.

The only people in their 40s I know of who are still renting that I would consider "forever renters" are being extraordinarily undisciplined with their finances and spend what they could be saving towards a down payment on credit card debt they self-inflicted.

There's absolutely no reason to other than to line the pockets of the wealthy.

From my uninformed perspective this seem like a rather big and sensible lever toward rebalancing US national finances. The actuarial math must have changed significantly since the inception of the program, no?

Not significantly compared to other changes. SS taxes are at a much higher rate than when the program started. The workforce is also vastly more productive enabling a much higher standard of living.

What ended up happening is we rebalanced the program based on a lot of positive changes and used a huge ‘surplus’ to subsidize government borrowing, and nobody wants to adjust for any negatives ever.

The US may have to raise the retirement age eventually but it could put off needing to do so for a long time by making the payroll tax flat instead of regressive. Currently here is the percent various workers pay:

  Income     Tax
    $10k     6.2%
    $50k     6.2%
    $100k    6.2%
    $150k    6.2%
    $200k    5.4%
    $300k    3.6%
    $700k    1.6%
   $1000k    1.1%
   $5000k    0.22%
  $10000k    0.11%

This comes about because it is structured as a two bracket tax rate:

         Bracket     Marginal Rate
       $0 - $176100    6.2%
  $176101 - ∞          0%

Just make it 6.2% across the board and it will push off the need for further major reforms far enough to largely get past the peak in Boomer retirements which are happening now. Maybe gradually raise the rate from 6.2% (which has not changed since 1990) to 7.2% to be safe.

Once Boomers pass through the system and start dying off in significant numbers over the next 10-30 years there won't be any size differences between successive generations nearly as large. Gen X is smaller than Millennials, then Gen Z is between Gen X and Millennials in size, and the current generation is projected to be around the same size is Gen Z. This should make it considerably easier to keep the system working.

Polls show [1][2] that this approach (flat rate + 1% gradual rate increase) is the solution voters prefer by a large majority regardless of party affiliation when presented with all the solutions that have been proposed by politicians and experts.

Generally whenever Democrats in Congress introduce bills to address the problem this is the approach they go for, although sometimes they talk about keeping a lower marginal rate for people making between $176100 and $400000, like this:

         Bracket     Marginal Rate
       $0 - $176100    6.2%
  $176101 - $400000     0%
  $400001 - ∞          6.2%

Republicans in Congress do not really have a coherent approach to this. There's a powerful group in the House called the Republican Study Committee, which is a large conservative caucus of around 190 members (~85% of House Republicans). They are the ones setting Republican policy in Congress on this issue.

According to them there are only three ways to fix Social Security: some combination of (1) raise the money it takes in, (2) reduce the amount it pays out, and (3) make up for any shortfall by paying some benefits out of the general budget.

They also say that #1 and #3 are off the table. Their proposals generally go for #2 via raising the retirement age. That does buy some time but not much, and runs into the problem that the Republican Party Platform says (caps in original) "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE", and Trump also keeps saying that which doesn't leave them any options.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/

[2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...

Why not just subsume it into the other income taxes?

Because politics. Americans like to delude themselves that their taxes are low by splitting them up into various buckets (Social security, Medicare, Federal Income tax, State income tax, even city income tax some places, property tax, sales tax, and now tariffs). Like selling a computer then charging for the keyboard and the power supply separately. Makes people feel like they're paying less.

The numbers only work if you assume the program exists in a total vacuum. You can expect Congress will borrow any social security surplus as they start running short in other places, like Medicare.

https://archive.ph/xe4rC

It is important to keep in mind how these pension schemes are funded. Already now over 40% of Danish government expenses go towards social security a large part of that is pensions.

With a growing population of pensioners and a declining population of taxpayers many EU countries are walking towards a future where it is abundantly clear that the state can not finance pensions. Especially when at the same time their companies loose their economic competitiveness.

I do not believe that raising the retirement age in 15 years will be of any major help here. And it seems especially outrageous for the younger generation.

There is an obvious solution to the problem of ageing population and declining birth rates. Furthermore, it's a solution everybody's secret soul wants very much: keep people younger for longer. Invent rejuvenation. But politicians would never dare go in front of cameras and say that they will put a dollar into R&D for such an outcome, because the wall of insults and disdain we would hurl, for no rational reason, at them, would be higher than a tsunami. There is something seriously broken in our collective psyche.

I'm pretty sure that "lack of market opportunity" isn't the reason that nobody has yet managed to invent eternal youth

Get disdainin’!:

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/adding-years-to-life-...

Ha! Sweet! That's very much a (lot of) step(s) in the right direction.

> keep people younger for longer.

Is a lot easier than "rejuvenation", and a lot more attainable. And also something we do throw R&D money at.

And while we're at it, can we do teleportation too? Think of all the parking hassles, the car accidents, the carbon emissions we could save! And yet, just try to convince those funding agencies...

You're equating teleportation...something that violates our current understanding of physics..with rejuvenation, which does have some promising peripheral research, such as studies on telomeres.

It might be the obvious solution but is it the right one?

People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?

I am no economist but it is my understanding that all this extra money goes to the rich because they've entrenched themselves in positions where they can extract a portion of a person's income with no recourse.

It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.

I recall danluu blogging about how multiple times he made code fixes that saved the company more than his salary just in electricity. What I see is an incredible technical achievement but also I see how he's being exploited - the money saved is value he directly provided to society, yet he sees none of it. Where does it go? To people who are already rich.

> People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?

People have far better lives considering all the things available to them compared to 50 years ago. Most people would not want to live life like how people lived it 50 years ago.

> It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.

This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.

Plenty of people would want to live life how people lived before 2008 though, or even 2015.

Over the past decade life expectancy in developed countries first plateaued, then declined.

Yes, largely due to the pandemic, but that plateau was also the beginning of decline in some places.

> This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.

Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.

Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.

You only get paid because someone pays you. More outputs do not mean you will get paid more if everyone does so

Exactly. The amount of cost savings produced does not determine their value if everyone can perform them.

So why is compensation zero-sum when the economy is positive-sum and to whom does the difference, the extra value produced, go?

Because it certainly does not go to the people doing actual work producing it.

The obvious solution that also worked in the past is rising productivity and participation on the created wealth.

There are tons of companies researching methods to increase life expectancy and rejuvenation. There is not much controversial about it yet.

It is not that it is hard because it is a controversial subject. It is hard because it is not one problem. To develop rejuvenation you would need to tackle hundreds of very difficult problems, both physiological and neurological, which individually, would represent solutions to critical conditions today (diabetes, dementia, ataxia, arthritis, many types of cancers etc etc).

>Invent rejuvenation

I definitely don't think we have succeeded in "invented" this, but it surely has happened slowly over time. People in theirs 60s today are surely sharper than they used to be, with less chronic physical ailments.

But the end results is people living longer, and the solution still ends up being pushing back the retirement age.

That's because it has no guaranteed outcomes and it's just a big bet. It's not a "solution" until it's proven to work. If you bet on some unproven tech to save you in the future and that never materialises then as a country you're fucked. So the disdain and contempt would be 100% earned towards towards anyone who would seriously suggest betting the future of society on some unproven technology. Only techbros would ever suggest something so profoundly out of touch with reality.

All this kind of decisions never come up with the answers on how to get a job, when everything is getting replaced by robots (see supermarkerts and gas stations for example for decreasing low wage jobs), and the health issues related to old age.

Thus one is not able to collect retirement, because they are "young", while they keep trying to find a job, because "they are too old".

Meanwhile the politicians that decide these laws are enjoying their comfy life.

Do people save their own money in Europe for retirement or do most people expect to rely entirely on pension? I honestly don't know, just curious.

Also curious… in the US I don’t know any working professionals in my generation (millennial) that are counting on social security as part of their retirement planning. If it’s there, great - but if it’s not, not going to let it keep me from clocking out at 65.

In the UK, there is the basic state pension. The pension age depends on when you're born. For young people now, it's 68.

However, the state pension pay is so low that almost everyone gets a commercial pension. Usually, it's a salary deduction and employer match contribution scheme, so you can choose how much to save. At the moment, you can start drawing your commercial pension at age 57 (increased from 55).

See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/increasing-normal...

It's different in every country. In Denmark it is a mix: everyone receives a state pension (the Nordic model of universal welfare), but almost everyone also has a private pension account that they out money into.

This is the problem with retirement systems built on Ponzi schemes. The low birth rate has accelerated the inevitable crash.

If my understanding is correct, Norway has a system based on investment in the country's economy, in particular oil production in the North Sea. And they are not needing the same austerity measures to retirement benefits.

I assume you are unfamiliar with how pensions in Denmark work. While there is an unfunded social security part that is paid for through taxes, >90% of Danish workers have "occupational pension plans" that they contribute about 15% of their salary to. By the time they retire, they have saved on average 2 million DKK [https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/fo...], so about 300,000 USD. At that time, life expectancy is about 20 years, so that is about 15,000 USD per year from individual capital-backed schemes alone. For the 60% of Danes that are home owners, this alone could probably cover all basic living expenses outside of very HCOL areas. In that way, Denmark already strikes a good balance between purely tax-based schemes (that you are probably referring to as "Ponzi") and socially detrimental schemes like a pure Austrian backpack approach (which would leave people that cannot work in deep poverty).

In many EU countries, retirement age increase while the value of the pension itself decreases. It's about demographic of course but it's also the signs of a failed system. People understands this and are contribution more and more towards private funds which are meant to offset the loss - slowly shifting to a US system.

The current system is just not broken but unfair. In many EU countries, people are not contributing for themselves, but for the previous generation being currently retired. In turn, it's supposed that babies born today will work for the pension of the currently active generation. This pension system is nothing else but a pyramide scheme and that scheme is now breaking due to a demographic issue - just like a traditional pyramide scheme would break because there are not enough participants to that scheme ...

While the increase is not too bad, they should invest in having babies instead of making the old people work.

Just saying, that will not have any positive effect until 2050. We are far to far in the incoming crash. And that is not even talking about the strain that will hit the health care sector, no matter what we raise the retirement age too.

I think that the long term consequences of cases of CFS/ME that are induced by Covid (and thus Long Covid) are going to take out a large amount of the top of the population pyramid well before their time, myself included.

The increased medical costs as we go, however, might actually make it worse, faster.

Screw that. No matter how healthy you are, you're significantly limited both physically and mentally at 70. "Enjoy your last 11.7 doddering years!"

It's not so hard to save some money, do whatever you want in your 30s, then work until you're dead.

Why is this generating so much discussion? Implicitly, retirement age is not a constant but a function of several factors. This was inevitable and of course, it will increase several times over our lifespan.

because it seems like at 70 people won't be productive, hence the assumptions that humans are made of steel and retirement can stretch like rubber fail.

I'm 29 and honestly skeptical that life expectancy will keep on rising as it's assumed. With all the toxins, stress, rising heat deaths and crap in our environment, will most of us even be healthy enough to work till 70? Could it be 75 when I approach retirement? I think it's important to keep up some positive prospects for our generation - otherwise I can think e.g. of a higher suicide rate which then also shrinks the workforce

This comes about due to incompetent politicians running things. Australia is spending billions on nuclear subs it doesn’t need, and even paying France $300 million for not buying their subs.

Australia doesn’t have enough money for that? No problem, just make everyone work longer.

As an individual if I don’t earn enough to cover my spending I have two choices.

1. work more

2. Spend less

In all these discussions we never see politicians do anything about spending less, they just throw us under the bus to work more, while of course exempting themselves.

How did you get from Denmark to Australia?

It’s happening all over the world

Fun facts in some parts of the world professors have flexible retirement age and they can work until they choose not too work anymore for examples in US and Canada.

Don't worry, the concept of people working is slipping into oblivion. Retirement age will be 18 for everyone.

Yes,people were living longer, but let's see how that looks in 10 years time. Who wants to be working in their late 60s anyway? And by working I mean having to work. If you are not working to feed and house yourself and dependents then you are not working you are choosing to work which is not work as far as I am concerned.

It's obvious, that there is no pension in Europe in 20 years anyway. Demographics are super ugly everywhere. Investing individually is the single way, that works if one does not want to retire in under the bridge. Sadly Germany does not help me caring about my retirement taking 18.6% away and heavily taxing the rest.

The math for pensions is fine as long as the maxes payout isn’t excessive and you don’t start too early. There’s a huge cost difference between a 30k/year pension at 70 and a 45k per year pension at 60.

People also focus on a fixed percentage being returned while ignoring the long term increase in productivity and people’s standards of living. In real terms people in 2025 get way more out of pension systems than people did in 1925, that’s as central to the problem as any changes in lifespan.

I will pay more than €600000 for this “retirement insurance” over my entire career. So with 30k/year pension and living under the bridge at 70 I must have superior health to break even at 90 and benefit from the “insurance” afterwards. Ok, it’s not that bad, there is some disability insurance included. Better than nothing.

The value you get is as an inflation and lifespan hedge. There’s no investment built into the system but the money being paid in by younger workers for people who are 100 is adjusted for inflation that year not whatever the currency was worth 75 years ago when they started. Similarly if you die at 55 you don’t benefit from retirement savings either.

Historically payouts also benefited from rising productivity and populations but those assumptions are breaking down.

> I will pay more than €600000 for this “retirement insurance” over my entire career. So with 30k/year pension and living under the bridge at 70 I must have superior health to break even at 90

Let's see. If you pay 15000 euros per year for 40 years, and get 5% interest, that's 1,800,000 euros at retirement. Even if you held that in cash, a 30,000 euro/year withdrawal would last you to 130.

Not sure how your system works but US SS also covers spouses, widows, disabled workers etc which limit the average benefit.

Assuming full employment every year is a mistake. Also, 5% interest above inflation is an unpredictability good return, especially if you’re assuming it’s a safe investment. The stock market has mostly done well over the last century but start in 1969 and the 40 year return on the S&P 500 was 4.2% after inflation. Things could be far worse over the next 40 years, the 20 year S&P returns have been as low as 0.6% over inflation.

Running the numbers assuming zero taxes and fees is a separate issue.

There must be full employment every year with a mortgage. And I will work 6-7 years of my career just for this mandatory insurance. Sounds stupid and absurd when I read what I wrote. The widow might get something from that. But let me invest half of that in stocks and another half in 2 rental apartments and I will do much better that state. Plus it stays in the family after I die.

At an average of say 4% unemployment rate over your lifetime means the average person is unemployed ~1.6 years out of a 40 year working career. That’s not all in one chunk, but any time not spent working is time not funding a pension or retirement account.

In US SS your spouse can collect benefits when you died at 22 if you had a kid together, you also can collect benefits if your disabled. There’s obviously not 1.8 million in your retirement account to fund such things at 22. Similarly the payout for a married couple is 1.5x if only one of them have ever worked because it’s not a requirement account it’s a social security program, and then 75% if the worker dies. No idea how your system works, but it’s common worldwide for pension programs to do such things.

Turns out not having kids has consequences.

As someone who is having kids, I am both curious and anxious about the world they will become adults into. I am not sure if it will be a world of economic opportunities due to the inevitable labor shortage, or a world of suffering due to widespread economic collapse.

What is the real point you're trying to make here?

The solution is pretty simple for the society. Either have three kids or you work till you are 70.

The society first has to provide for its citizens instead of giving socialism to billionaires instead of a proper social safety net, or they won't want to or can't have kids.

Most people would say Denmark has a proper social safety net. People aren't having kids because they don't want kids. And no amount of parental leave or childcare subsidies flips the switch when flights to *popular tourist destination* are a couple hundred euro.

This.Not even cash handouts have increased TFRs across Europe and East Asia.

I think the solution might be in taxes. No kid;you are taxed at 60% , one kid 50% two kids 40 % and three kids 30 % . 20 % for anyone with more than four kids.

VAT on people with kids 12.5 %

you are being disengenous. you know that nordic taxes are quite high.

If Denmark wanted to fund the same number of retired years per person as the US did when Social Security was established, the retirement age would be about 68, based on the 1935 and 2025 actuarial life tables for the USA and Denmark respectively.

But you also need to account for the changing ratio of contributors to beneficiaries, how many workers are supporting each retiree.

What would the age be to keep the same "ratio"?

On the one hand, we will all be replaced by AI, so jobs are lost. On the other hand, we have to work till we die or the system will crumble. Thus, the system will crumble, it’s just about who will end up with the hot potato.

If AI takes most jobs, the system won't crumble. If anything, the system will probably work much better.

It's the transition period that I am worried about, when large percentages of the population are jobless, but safety nets aren't yet in place.

So the system will not crumble after it crumbles in transition.

That's the big question. Depends on what policies are implemented and how quickly.

What if we changed how retirement works with just two clear options:

Option A: Take your well-earned pension and enjoy traditional retirement.

Option B: Choose a dignified exit when life no longer feels fulfilling.

I've been thinking about this because retirement scares me. What's the point of reaching old age if your body and mind won't let you enjoy the freedom you've worked decades for? Between health problems, limited mobility, and sometimes poverty, many seniors seem to just... exist.

Not saying everyone feels this way! Plenty of people have amazing retirements. But shouldn't we have more control over our final chapter? Other countries already have compassionate end-of-life options.

What do you all think? Is having this choice reasonable, or am I missing something important about the value of those later years?

The majority of retirees I know, retired around 50. They’ve been retired longer than they ever worked, on pensions which are similar to their original wages.

It’s hard not to feel like we’re all being shafted in comparison.

This is what happens when your population isn't mathematically educated enough to be able to figure out how to plan a defined benefit pension, and there are politicians who are actively trying to destroy a social safety net.

A bit of playing with chatgpt will dump the formulas required and even solve them for a given set of constraints. Basically one takes the average inflation adjusted of an investment vehicle, then solves for what percentage of income for a given timeframe, in order to return a portion of a persons income for another timeframe. Ex: given say the US stock market average return for the past 100 years, one wants to work for 30 years and retire for 30 years with a 70% of the final income, it works out to 8-9% of a persons income. Then shift the numbers to 40/20 years, cap the maximum payout at say the median income, and wow a pension system that grows faster than the rate of inflation, provides for a retirement age of ~60 and the percentage drops to ~5% or less.

People complaining about demographic trends are buying into the idea that the input dollars have to equal the output dollars, and its dumb, and isn't even the way the social security trust fund in the USA works. Which shows that its possible to ride out population bubbles, much less actually providing a long term savings vehicle that if it were run correctly would eventually be indefinitely solvent. But at least in the USA one party has consistently stood in the way for the past 40 years of solving some of these financial problems, and in fact seems to make them worse by flattening the progressive nature of the federal taxes through tax cuts which overwhelmingly target the groups most able to absorb higher tax rates. And the result are cases where single individuals single handily hold 2% of the wealth of their entire generation and the country looks like its falling apart and there is artificial scarcity everywhere.

PS: Now there are a number of ways this breaks, mostly around cases where inflation is eating up most of the compounding growth, but most sovereign governments are fully capable of solving these problems if they choose to.

So this means that eventually Danes will not be able to draw from their government pensions until the age of seventy? Is there a mechanism where people can stop working before age seventy if they save privately?

Denmark has both private and public pension schemes.

Well, I guess you're not required to have a private pension scheme. But most jobs come with one, most unions enforce it.

I had one when I was sweeping the factory floor once a week at age 15 -- that was ridiculously because it all disappeared into administration fees.

But the answer is yes, of course you can. It's a free country -- assuming we're not annexed by the orange monkey.

The real truth is that politicians promised that refugees would help fill jobs. Raising the retirement age makes no sense if that was really the goal. Now their lies are obvious.

It's worse than that; most middle eastern immigrants qualify for early retirement. Not only do they not contribute as much in taxes, but they then access retirement funds earlier than everyone else.

*) by 2040. I hate it when titles are incomplete.

How will this work realistically? How will you convince employers to keep workers employed till 70? Especially in fast changing fields like IT where a lot of old knowledge and experience gets considered obsolete by those screening resumes. Sure, people might survive longer, but that doesn't mean all workers will be equally mentally or physically fit to still perform well at some jobs at 70 as well as a 30 year old, especially if they're mentally or physically challenging jobs.

I'm not talking about government paper pushing jobs, but private industry jobs with international competition where you need to be agile and up to speed to survive as a business. This system worked for the boomer generation in slow moving highly regulated industries like steel, rail and automotive, where you'd spend all your life at one company who'd promote you and invest in your training till retirement, but this isn't as common anymore. International companies now want things done faster and cheaper and can't be competitive keeping 70-year-olds on the payroll idling around waiting for retirement.

For example, here in Austria, if you're laid off at the age of 50, the chances of getting another job at that age for many professions are already next to zero due to rampant ageism, so workers in some professions end up on long term unemployment till retirement, yet the government agencies are not talking about this major issue and just tell the 50 year olds on long term unemployment to "make a more colorful resume to stand out"(I shit you not). You're also not allowed to take your contributions out of that pot early or all at once to fuck off out of the system and be on your own if you want, proving it is Ponzi scheme in disguise.

I'm not sure this really changes the information?

Ok, so if you're near retirement now you're fine

But if you're younger, you can look forward to not retiring until 70, as if the younger generation hasn't been shit on enough

Amazing stuff. One last ladder for the older generation to pull up behind them before they die, I guess

In all fairness.

the housing market in Denmark is approachable - you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.

Social security, you can go unemployed for years and still pay your bills.

Government provided education with stipend - having masters degrees are common.

And the economy is strong.

Most Danes understand that this is inevitable - the big issue is that the politicians have given themselves more favorable terms.

Living in Copenhagen for the last 7 years.

- housing for 80k USD is 525k DKK: no way you can find anything at that price anywhere close to cph. Not sure for other "major" cities, but in cph you can expect to pay 4mil DKK (600K USD) for a ~60 sqmt apartment, prices will fall outside the cities, but nowhere close to 80k USD. Where did you get that number?

- you pay for your unemployment benefit, thought an a-kasse. Its not forever and it might barely cover your bills depending on where you live/your mortgage. If you have family its probably not enough and you need to add an insurance on your salary on top of that.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents.

That is why I explicitly said major cities and not Copenhagen.

Look 20 minutes out of Odense, Aalborg, Randers, etc.

Don't let yourself believe that a country is nothing but its capital - it is correct, that if you decide to live in a 4mil DKK apartment in the Copenhagen area, then you have also opted out of public help, and you are on your own.

I think it's worth remembering that Hacker News is a global platform and if someone refers to "major cities" in Denmark, for many (most?) readers, the only name that would come to mind is Copenhagen.

Copenhagen: ~1.4M people

Odense: ~190K people

Aalborg: ~120K people

Randers: ~64K people

I've actually spent a week in Copenhagen relatively recently and I literally couldn't have named another city in the country. My bad, I know, but I'm pretty well-traveled and that's the truth.

Again: That is why I wrote major cities - I wouldn't expect anybody to know.

Again - why this extreme focus on the specifics? I merely argued that the housing market in the broader Denmark is reasonable, and you can usually easily commute to jobs in a city while living cheaply - something that is strictly more difficult in the US.

Because from the point of view of the rest of the world, there aren't any major cities in Denmark other than Copenhagen...

Saying that there is cheap housing 20 minutes outside of a town with 64K people doesn't really make the point that it's inexpensive and accessible to live in / near major cities.

Cph is one of the major cities, and the biggest one. It's also the area with most population density and opportunities. I won't say that you are wrong because I'm not familiar with what you can find 20 min of Aalborg, etc, but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services. It's not that people "decide" to live in cph or in a major city, they are basically forced to if they need to have a job and do stuff. Sure, if you work remote and like being in the countryside alone you have a lot of options, most people don't have that luxury.

If I say that you can get a house for 80K in the US, do you then automatically assume I mean San Fransisco or New York?

> but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services

The point is exactly the opposite. You can get a house at a reasonable cost, 20 minutes away from a city you can likely get a job in - Even well paid tech jobs (They exists in both Odense and Aalborg).

I fint it disingenuous to pick pick out a very specific situation like this instead of looking at the broader argument.

>Even well paid tech jobs (They exists in both Odense and Aalborg

Can you share what well paid tech jobs exist in such cities? I mean jobs open to foreigners not just Danish citizens.

Yeah, no. Most homes are in the range of 1.500.000 to 2.500.000 kroner. There are some homes closer to 1.000.000 kroner that need repairs or remodeling. You are not buying anything livable for 500.000 kroner, sorry. Those days are in the past. And mind you, these numbers are for medium-sized cities. Not any of the desirable cities, like Copenhagen, Odense, or Aarhus.

> you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.

There are 53706 homes for sale today. 2784 of those are actual homes, not empty lots, costing less than 600K DKK.

I would not expect to live a healthy, comfortable life in most homes at that price range. Draft, mold, poor insulation and high energy bills.

I don't hope I expressed that you can check in on 6 stars with a concierge for 80k?

Won't be a long wait till it gets raised to 80. The demographics of many nations are pretty grim.

For most of history, care for the elders was a family responsibility first and a local community one second.

Only for a short period were western population growing so fast relative to small number of retirees that transferring that responsibility to government was a no brainer.

With diminishing demographics anywhere except maybe Africa, we'll need to be more creative once again. Raising retirement age is just one of many hard but inevitable policies.

> How will this work realistically?

A new category of jobs will be created: retirement jobs. People unable to work till their retirement age, will be given simple low paid jobs to earn enough work hours to hit their retirement. Think of all the simple jobs currently outsourced: content moderation for social media websites, training data tweaking, LLM training, teaching assistants, street cleaning assistants, etc.

But employees are not just pure net gains. If you hire a bunch of "retirement jobbers" you will still have to manage them. It sounds logical at first that you simply hire a few older people for lesser pay but in Europe the question is also why a 65 year old would accept a far lower paid job if he can simply go back on welfare and get paid the same? The reality will probably be that most old people will be unemployed so long that nobody wants to hire them even if they could hire them for a very low amount. People at that age will have a lot of pride built up, they are not going to want to stand in a supermarket for 3h a day either. Is society really going to force them? So far they are barely even willing to force young people to get jobs.

Just because you can hire a 68 year old to do content moderation or be an assistant teacher... does not mean that anybody actually wants him around at that age and that he will be a net gain to the environment. His speed and ability at work is inherently going to limit other people's speed in some way or form,not even just that. Even his vibe, his impact on the team. These things are all things that people consider during hiring. It's the concept of "the chain is only as strong as its weakest link" I suppose.

The government itself could hire many of them at a lower price point. Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population. Low wages, social corpo cred and government support (see subsidies) are things they could get for using this. And this would be cheaper than outright paying for the full needs of an ever growing elderly population and an ever shrinking working population.

Sure, no will force to take up the jobs but when the choice is heating up your home in winter or working a couple of hours per day, the decision will be obvious

>The government itself could hire many of them at a lower price point.

To do what?

>Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population.

Why would they do that when AI or foreign labor is cheaper? And this is happening right now, let alone in 2040 when there will be more automation and more offshoring. There no room for low-skill repetitive jobs in developed western economies unless you go full communism where the government employs everyone.

>A new category of jobs will be created: retirement jobs.

Who will create these job? Especially given the push towards more Automation in the west or at least outsourcing these easy repetitive jobs to countries in with lower wages as it is the case right now. When you call tech support, does an elderly US person answer or a person from India/Asia/LatAm? Do you think they'll hold back technological development just to give meaningless work to unemployed old people in the west?

But say such jobs are created, given how many youths are unemployed(in Europe at least), why would they hire people close to retirement instead?

The west has built itself into in a pickle with needing to work longer till retirement but has fewer easy jobs left due to automation, high labor costs, and outsourcing. What are you gonna do then, go back to uni and study another Masters' degree at the ripe age of 60 so you can retrain for another specialized job?

The birth rates have been low for a decade. I wonder if the change is triggered by US stock market downturn where majority of EU pensions are invested and expectation of a doom.

This is a global trend in order to keep pension and retirement systems fiscally stable. Same reason you will probably see the Social Security System raise their age too.

If it’s like The Netherlands, it’s the age when you HAVE to stop working. Like, you can’t be a professor after the retirement age.

I'm not entirely opposed to raising the retirement age, however what's unfortunate here is the money is needed primarily to cover for spending on immigration. 2/3rd of muslim immigrants have qualified for early immigration (starting at 50), and this has put strain on the system, forcing the retirement age up. There are problems in Denmark but the retirement age isn't the issue in this case

In Canada, the standard age for retirement is currently 65...

I've been paying into pension since I was 20, and I have health conditions where I might not even live to 50, let alone 60 or 65...

The arbitrary rules that prevent me from cashing in on the money I worked hard for is truly disgusting.

AI & robotics is a primary hope here, honestly, but it will be a bumpy road.

the boomers were so exceptional that their exceptionality should not be ignored in public discourse. We will never have such a big generation ever again, so all their dreams about endless welfare will go away with them. I dont know if anyone is planning the post-boomer world, it all seems to happen-as-you-go.

The most hilarious policies are the ones aiming to force people to have more kids, by paying them or by attacking feminism and lgbt. Making the society unfree will make people less willing to put more kids in it.

The idea since the early 80's was to prepare for the big boomer retirement wave by saving up in special retirement funds, aa demographic prohections were clear. In Belgium e.g. this was called the 'Zilverfonds'.

But no politician throughout the decades could keep their hands out of the coockie jar, so now al those accounts are empty.

Funny how when 'defence' creates fake emergencies there is no limit to how money can be found. But money for retirement? Oh no, we can't have that!

What's stopping people from just saving up money and stop working before 70?

Nothing, 'retirement age' is typically when people qualify for a state pension. Sometimes it's used for mandatory retirement when that exists.

From the bit of research I did on the Danish pension system, workers pay heavy taxes during their working years, and some of that is paid back to them in the form of a universal pension. In addition, almost all workers are covered by mandatory occupational pensions, with contributions of 9-17% of annual earnings.

That probably eats up the available savings for most workers. This change locks that money away until age 70.

Contrast that with the US, where Social Security is designed to replace an average of only 30% of a worker's income (much more at the lowest income levels), and you can take it as early as age 62. The most common retirement plans are 401k, 403b, 457b, and IRA. You can pull from any of them without penalty at age 59.5, and from the retirement plan of the company you're working for if you retire at 55 or later.

As I understand it, those ages would all be 70 in Denmark, and yeah it would be terrible. Not many people in the US are still working at age 70. Almost nobody doing serious physical work is still working at age 70.

* My information about Denmark's system may be wrong.

There are several early retirement systems in place in Denmark for people who are unable to work.

Sure, but disability programs are different from what most people think of when they think of retirement. Forcing the majority of people to work until 70 means they burn through most of their healthy years.

On the other hand, people in Denmark work on average 410 fewer hours per year versus the US. In terms of total hours, working from 22 to 70 in Denmark is the equivalent of working from 22 to 59 in the US, or from 22 to 52 in Mexico.

2 reasons. First, the ratio of salary to expenses is so high that they don't have a meaningful amount to save towards retirement. Savings go towards rainy days and when those come they drain what little you have amassed. Second, if you haven't hit a minimum number of working years you just don't get a pension.

Absolute shameful to see western societies regress like this.

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but it makes sense. People live much longer than in the past. Advancements in fitness and the decline in birthrates only make it fair for us to work a little longer. Ultimately, what I hope for is AI to take care of most of the heavy work and allow us more leasiurely time, but we are still decades away from getting their.

I mean, makes sense? I live in Norway, so quite similar socioeconomics. People become older, so makes sense they have to work longer.

Imagine 50 years down the road, and the life expectancy is 90+ years. If people retired at age 65, that would mean you'd spend almost one third of your life as a retiree, living off a system which you paid into for 40-45 years.

But with that said, you can't expect a plumber, roofer, kindergarten teacher, etc. to work until they're 70. Your body will likely be shot years before that.

Chill office work, though? A senior colleague of mine just recently retired. He's 68, and wanted to work even longer - but had promised his wife that he'd retire for the past 5 years.

What is the point of having so huge government investment fund if it can't subsidise the retirement age?

Retirement started as state charity for the very oldest and most infirm and grew into unsustainable pyramid scheme bribery operation. Nineteenth century unwillingness to let uncared-for metuselahs die in squalor doomed us all.

"In 1881,[3][4] the conservative German chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, in a maneuver against Marxists who were burgeoning in power and popularity, announced that anyone over 70 years old would be forced to retire and that he would pay a pension to them.[1]"

Ah.

Technology is supposed to have made us more productive than ever.

And yet, most people are having to work longer than ever. Why? Because all the productivity gains are being captured by the top ~10%.

And now we're continuing to pour billions into AI that is going to boost our productivity even more! Hurrah! Progress!!

Who do you think is going to capture those gains?

We can argues over some of the details, but there's no question that Piketty is being proven right.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Don't they know AGI soon?

Burn everything down

Do you want infinity biomass or a sovereign country?

I'm 48 now, in Latvia, and expect that my retirement age will be 73+.

6451937099

Someone’s got to pay for the billionaires.

The last great country in Europe, may their salvation come in their easy going friday afternoons and the general well being of the nation.

The only real solution to this is world-wide wealth taxing. We have enough productivity to support old age, even as said old age cohorts grow ever larger.

This is why it's important to contribute as little as possible to others, especially the state. They will gladly take everything from you and then tell you you should be happy about it.

Seventy might feel like fifty in Scandinavian cities where cycling is part of daily life—but try that in the U.S., and the idea of retirement quickly becomes a parody.

70 is already the “optimal” age to take social security (depending on various factors).

The US already has a retirement age of 70 depending upon how you figure it. As noted in sibling comment, depending upon various factors, that's the age it's generally recommended to start receiving social security benefits unless you want/need smaller payouts sooner. Medicare starts at 65 however. IRAs don't require you to take distributions until you're 73.

Why do people owe me a nice retirement? I never really got the idea of state-funded retirement. Perhaps I should feel I'm owed something if I'm too fragile/disabled to work, but I don't know why age alone should grant me anything?

Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.

The state pension in most countries is simply a collective pension fund that you pay for during your working life (or your employer does on your behalf). The state owes you retirement because you paid for it. It's not a handout that others are paying for you; you actually paid for it your entire working life.

So, Denmark raising the retirement age is kind of a big deal. I imagine the Danish might be less than thrilled about that.

Open a history book. Read upon why state pensions were introduced - by people who thought like you actually. (Spoiler: because alternative doesn't end well even for the wealthy.)

Isn't 19th century covered by history classes anymore? :/

At least in Europe, you pay a percentage of your wage into the state’s pension fund. Details vary by country, but it’s not uncommon that you contribute automatically 10% of your gross salary. For your entire working life.

The state then being kind enough to give you something back after 35-40 years of contributions is expected.

Just to throw out one reason - it's valuable to working people because they don't have to take care of their parents in old age. Can't speak to Europe, but Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement". It may help a frugal person in a low cost of living area cover their basic expenses.

> Social Security in the US is definitely not enough for a "nice retirement".

A two-retiree couple who contributed at the tax limit for long enough would get $122,592 in Social Security benefits in 2025. Not beachfront living in the Hamptons, perhaps, but not cat food eating money either.

The state isn't paying for it, you're paying for it, through your taxes. (Technically you're paying for the next generation's retirement, but it's the same principle.)

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