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Comment by zeroCalories | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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