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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

    > 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.

If I could trade that wealth for happiness though…

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.

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.

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… :)

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

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

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.

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…

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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