Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

*) 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?

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