I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m based in the Nordics and my estimated retirement age at the moment (where I can get my state pension) is 67y 4m. Whilst I understand the burden the aging population is having on society (lifespan) it doesn’t seem like there’s much proactive government input into people’s healthspan.
Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.
Sure. But is that the society we want to live in. Do we not have ambitions to have people work less, enjoy what little life they have more? I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.
> Do we not have ambitions to have people work less, enjoy what little life they have more?
Isn't that something for the individual to decide, not the collective? Many derive from work a lot of meaning in life. If working is what makes some people happy, it would be nice to not punish people for working until they die.
> I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.
Drugs make people happy. It's not the state's job to define happiness for its people, it s there to manage the economy so they can find the happiness they like.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services)
This doesn't require any investment or technological development; it just requires making rational-but-politically-nuclear policy changes reducing the infinite tap of publicly-funded extremely-low-ROI medical expenditures on old people.
An absurd fraction of medical spending goes to protracting the suffering of old people just a bit longer. We can simply stop doing that, given the political will to do so.
Extending people's lifespans won't do much to alleviate these expenditures, except perhaps to slightly dilute the amortization schedule.
As an American, I’m often that countries like Denmark are in fact constantly investing in health and entitlements, and so everyone is healthier and happier. Is that not the case?
We have the same problem as every other western country. Sweden has lowered the taxes by about 500 billion SEK (corrected for inflation and population growth) since I was born close to 40 years ago. That is about a third of the annual budget.
How these tax cuts are distributed over the population is... not very evenly. There was even an article yesterday in the NYT (iirc) that warned about wealth accumulation patterns in Sweden.
It is the same neoiberal experiment that the US has had since Reagan, just with some more social democracy.
In my part of the Nordics (Finland) they are cutting investment and sending people to private institutions. In rural areas private providers have entirely replaced public sector healthcare centers. This is seen as quite controversial across the board.
No, the taxes we pay are going to private institutions driven by profit instead of into funding public institutions that don't have this self-interest. This is not a model I support.
I can only speak for the two countries I've lived in (Finland & UK) and society is not amenable to privatisation in either. In the UK pretty much everything that has been privatised has been ruined (water, energy, transport) with high prices and poor service.
I honestly didn't think anyone in the US considered healthcare socialized (same for housing and a big chunk of university-level education), so I've learned something today.
I personally find it hard to reconcile the concept of socialized healthcare with UnitedHealth Group being apparently the 7th company by revenue in the world, at least I don't think that's what Europeans would mean by "socialized".
As someone from the US, I consider all those industries to be almost fully for profit. Our k-12 education is public, but constantly under fire to move those public funds to private providers via various voucher programs. I would say that each of those industries have various regulations around them, so maybe that's why the commenter thinks it's socialized.
Denmark has a lot of social services, and commensurate taxes to support them. This is reaching a breaking point. You can't get more blood out of a body that has already been drained to near the point of death.
Average lifespan is 81 in Denmark and 78 in USA. During the pandemic, average USA lifespan dropped to 76, while in Denmark it didn't drop below 81. So yes, it seems they are in fact healthier.
Denmark is not constantly investing in health and entitlements at all. On the contrary unemployment benefits and such has been slashed. Over the last two decades there has been many broad cuts to public services. The health sector had to do percentage fixed cuts every year for several years in a row.
Building on that, instead of viewing retirement (age) from a cost perspective (i.e. we have x budget and y lifespan, hence retirement age is z), it would be refreshing to see a high-quality and long retirement as starting point, and then figure out how to organize for that. One way would be to reduce burden on services indeed. A low retirement age (for those who want it) is a sign of a wealthy nation and something to strive for.
It’s not just about expanding lifespans. The cratering birth rates are a huge reason why societies are going to need people to work until they’re older.
No. I am suggesting that governments invest more into ensuring their aging population is healthy instead of draining every bit of life from them by making them work later and later.
Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.