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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

There's no "enforced savings" that I know of in Europe.

3.50% in the US sounds extremely low to me. It has fallen a bit recently but the savings rate was about 25% in France in 2020. Common knowledge says to strive to save at the very least 10% of one's revenue around here.

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There is a very large and growing portion of the US that maintains no savings at all. In fact it's the opposite and many are slowly spending their way into perpetual credit card debt.

It's essential to the way the system works. One person's money is another person's debt. Normally the government would take on enough debt to ensure everyone had money, but the USA is a weird case.

Money and debt are just mechanisms to allocate resources. The government can print infinite money like Zimbabwe and it wouldn’t matter if there aren’t enough resources to allocate.

It seems like savings include pension ([1], but it is a bit unclear to me) , and that is a kind of forced saving (as in many places in Europe you can't choose to not get pension and get it as cash to spend instead).

1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Sounds like they don’t count that. They seem to only count disposable income and payments the company does to your retirement aren’t really disposable

It's not clear to me either, but as I understand it it doesn't include pensions because social contributions are not part of "disposable income".

I think that "the net adjustment for change in pension entitlements" is there to take into account the expected reduced future income from pension entitlements dwindling over time (edit: in effect, making pensions count as negative savings) somehow, but it's unclear.

I looked for another perspective but the French national bank doesn't mention pensions in its explanations[0].

[0] https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2024-08/epargne-de...

According to some sources, 1 in 4 Americans don't/can't save at all.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-e...

The UK has "enforced savings" in the form of auto-enrollment pensions for over 10 years. Looks like Ireland is just starting to do it too.

That's mostly to prepare teenagers at the time for having no state pension in 50 years.

I have about seven of the buggers and I'm only in my mid 30s.....

Pensions or teenagers?

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