> If we live two dozen more years that means someone will have to pay for those retirements.
You're assuming that we'd just extend life rather than slow or partially reverse ageing as the article describes. You would assume that people would work for longer if this was the case. You may even get a "better" (from an economics point of view) ratio of working life to retirement time.
There is no 'we', people act individually. If people will have enough savings, they will retire earlier, if they don't they keep working. The increase in life expectancy would be doubled with an increase in health and fitness at these older ages. So people can and would keep working.
The alternative interpretation is more insidious: "we should not allow people to live longer because it will bankrupt the pension system". Well, if the pension system is one casualty of longer, healthier and more productive lives then so be it.
Maybe not what the OP had in mind, but the more you work after a certain age (I’d say 60) the sooner you die because of that work, especially if we’re talking non-office work.
So, in a way, what the OP suggests will have a double “advantage”: people working longer, i.e. less pensions to pay, and people dieing sooner as they retire, so, again, less pensions to pay. Of course, it would suck massively for the common man, but that’s not an issue anymore, as nobody seems to care for the common man any longer.
This article seems to be about the economic value gained by reduced health care or something.
If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets. This study doesn't seem to think about how those things could actually negatively impact economics.
Eventually if you're intelligent and you're trying to self-fund your retirement you build up assets that are growing at a sufficient rate that you can live off the growth without touching your principal. Once you hit that, work becomes unnecessary.
If everyone goes from retiring for 20-30 years to suddenly possibly retiring for 120-140 years things get all kinds of strange things happening, the percentage of the population working would diminish. But then that would negatively impact companies due to increasing difficulty in finding workers, which would negatively impact markets, which would then feedback into ruining the investments allowing all these retirees to live off investments & savings. The current system couldn't work without room to greatly expand the population of living people to ensure growth of the workforce.
I have seen these ideas explored in Science Fiction occasionally, but not many other places.
There is another aspect as well, if you lived 200 years, what if you ended up having multiple successive families? Raise a family, your kids grow up, then you raise another family 50 years later?
"It's silly to think that these people are going to work until they are 75."
That's how it worked for my grandparent's generation, and likely most others before that. So not really that silly (but still sad). It'd be great to adjust the work so it's not as destructive. I don't think adjusting to earlier retirement isn't really an option based on history (retirement is a recent thing).
Yeah, modern capatism may not be great for society in general. But how does it compare with the prior models, like monarchy? Or even things like socialism? Seems like corruption and human nature ruins even the best theoretical systems.
What's annoying to me is that for the same amount of work, we won't experience what they are experiencing (unless lifespan seriously increases, or somehow retirement age does not increase and pensions do not decrease).
They are benefiting from an exceptionally long retirement period because the retirement age has not yet been adjusted to account for both the increase of lifespan and the lack of population growth.
The younger you are, the more screwed you are going to be compared to them. At least that's the case in my home country! Not sure how retirement is computed in the US.
This isn't a push against your overall point, but I think a larger systemic view is necessary. E.g., maybe the idea of retirement after 20 years is outdated. Or maybe the system needs to be re-thought in terms of how to keep that paradigm funded, particularly in economies with declining birth rates.
I appreciate your post and your pain. However, one thing that I will point out is that one data point is not something one can draw conclusions from. A friend of mine's father (Ph.D. and desk job) died in his early 50s too.
Looking at data, it seems that the sedentary-jobbed have a life expectancy of 79.3 while the manual workers have a life expectancy of 75 years. So, there is a difference of 4.3 years (males, UK 2002-2005). It should also be noted that life expectancy for the manual group has gone up about 7 years since 1972-1976 (the sedentary saw a similar 7 year increase).
Governments aren't looking to increase the retirement age to dangle some carrot in front of people they consider too stupid to know better. If life expectancy is going up by 7 years, that means that a pension needs to provide income for more years. That means higher taxes, raising the retirement age, or putting more onus on the individual to save for retirement. There's a genuine question: where would the money come from to give someone a retirement at 50? To provide the average 50 year old male a $50,000 salary for the rest of their life costs over $1M - and that isn't $50,000 adjusted for inflation. What does that come out to per year? Assuming the kind of conservative planning that the government does, over $20,000 pear year. Essentially, we would need a tax of 40% for people to be able to retire at 50 and replace their income for life. Now, maybe 75% income replacement is ok and a 33% tax would do it. But then you have to think about providing inflation adjustments and healthcare for that period and it's just not good. Health costs are rising substantially faster than inflation. Should we lock people into the standard of care at the year of their retirement with newer, more expensive treatments unavailable to them?
There's just a big money issue when it comes to retirement age that's hard to ignore. Ideally, none of us would ever have to work. Unfortunately, that isn't our reality. Not to become too weird, but it's really tragic when you think about it. We're these biological beings trying to strive against what would happen to us if we stopped working to survive. And we've created some awesomeness to make our existence a lot better (medicine, for instance), but it's a thin veil over the harshness of what happens to us in the absence of working to survive. To come back down to earth, it's really crappy that we can't have the same retirement age that we used to have. However, I'm not sure how to go about talking about retirement ages without talking about the money we need to support it. Maybe it's time we raised social security taxes realizing that we don't care as much about iPhones as we do about our retirement. Ultimately, it isn't about governments trying to hurt people, but governments not having the money to offer it.
It should also be noted that a lot of these jobs pay better than similarly skilled jobs that are more sedentary. Construction salaries average $44,630. Office and administrative work averages $34,120. Sales $37,520. Personal Care $24,620. Part of the higher salary might be because of the nature of the work you speak of. The additional money per year could go toward providing an earlier retirement via individual means. I know that most people won't save and that's why I like social security. Maybe we should have a lower retirement age for certain professions along with higher social security and medicare taxes on jobs in those professions.
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I can't imagine how hard it is to lose a parent so young. I'm sorry.
I'm pretty sure that would just worsen our budget problem unless we focus on lengthening the period of time when people can work so that we can raise the retirement age. If we have people retire at 65 and live until 120, they will only have spent 40-45 of those years working. That is unsustainable.
I don't think that's a problem in their scenario, since the situation is leveraging life extension to work past retirement age. Working until age 80 and living out retirement until 120 would mean a vastly expanded labor pool, unless you're assuming everyone stops having kids.
The punchline, of course, is that retirement won't be a realistic option for our generation at 60. 25-75 leaves 50 working years, and that's what it'll probably take so we can pay for the boomer generation to retire and also save for our own. And I don't think it's a bad thing. It's patently ridiculous for a person to spend half their life not working, why should it involve less than an unreasonable savings rate to do?
the link proposed is not not clear to me. Wouldn’t requiring people retire later keep them in jobs near the end of their career, giving them even more money to “push up prices”?
> We're essentially paying out of pocket for the current retirees and by the time we retire there will be nobody to pay our pension. Or at least there will not be enough somebodies.
This comes up again and again (not just in Slovenia, but in any country that has an inter-generational pension system).
There are two points to make here:
One is that as long as a country produces enough goods and services, money is "just" a tool for allocating these goods and services. How money is being saved and spent has already changed massively; countries have a different tax structure, require people to spend vastly more on health insurance than a century ago, families are smaller compared to a century ago and parents are less dependent on their children in old age (and thus the way our retirement works now is already vastly different from back then). There's little reason to think that the system cannot adapt. This is not to say that it "will" (because, well, predictions are hard, especially about the future), but it would also be unrealistic to assume that what we are going to have 30-50 years from now will be like what we have now. Heck, we don't even know if the "lump of labor fallacy" will still be a fallacy in a future of rising automation or whether part-time work will become the norm. At which point all bets are off, anyway.
As a simple example, we could just implement a basic level of pensions through taxes (in lieu of existing pension schemes) that people could increase through private pension schemes. This is essentially basic income minus the moral hazard (because you don't have to worry about creating a disincentive to work for people outside the labor force).
The second point is that investing privately in your retirement does not fundamentally change anything. When a society ages and has a disproportionate amount of young people, these young people still need to generate enough economic output, regardless of whether the income for those too old to contribute comes out of interest payments, an inter-generational scheme, taxes, or something else.
The point is they'd compensate for working till later. I believe this should be more politically doable than raising retirement age, in agreement with the post. Under your argument all we can do is raise the retirement age to compensate the older demographic.
Until we reverse aging this just pushes people who should have been able to retire into the labor market longer and longer while their bodies fail. That is a terrible punishment to inflict on people who expected to be able to live their later years without suffering.
You're assuming that we'd just extend life rather than slow or partially reverse ageing as the article describes. You would assume that people would work for longer if this was the case. You may even get a "better" (from an economics point of view) ratio of working life to retirement time.
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