There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.
If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.
You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.
Who says that? Because that’s not the prevailing opinion among me (soon 40), my friends snd my family.
Benefits from «stuff» caps off ar a certain level. After that you want to work less so you have more time to, among other things, actually enjoy your stuff. The exception to this are wealth chasers with multiple yachts etc., but that isn’t «we», that’s a tiny tiny sliver of the elite.
1) Unions say it when they always demand increased salary (= focus on private spending) rather than reduced working hours
2) Voters say it when the right and far right is polling high. Lower taxes = wish for higher private spending, if people are going to work less then tax rate must up for society to function as public expenditure will increase, not decrease, with lots of elderly needing care and fewer workers available.
3) Lots of people have the ability to reduce working hours by working fewer hours (in Norway, if you have kids you can always get 20% unpaid leave by law). And most could do so economically if they reduced their consumption and spending. But people do not seem to consider reducing their salary as an option. The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
PS: You talk about getting more stuff, but to meet the future labor problems we are talking about reductions being needed to peoples consumption, not staying at the 2025 level.
>The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
They're not taking it because living costs are up across the board. The laws allows you to work part time, but your expenses don't so you have to work 40h week to keep up in the rat race with everyone else.
1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.
2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.
3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.
Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".
On 3), sorry, I should have been more specific -- I was talking about Norway specifically and also specifically about the middle class segment.
I was a bit clumsy -- I just meant that if people wanted to prioritize time over luxuries then SOME people, who are in a position to, not all, could have sent that signal. Because luxuries (vacations, cabins, boats) are still getting prioritized in the scandinavian middle class, and those specifically could have sent the signal they wanted more free time instead.
I agree with your points outside of that context and I should have specified it.
People who believe that consumerism was something that the general population opted into willingly rather than a result of a torrent of post WW2 psyops campaigns designed to deal with the "problem" of industrial overproduction.
My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings.
I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay.
My salary (and my friends') in IT is 2-3 times more than the average pay, and 60/80% is more than enough to live comfortably
I don't think time worked linearly correlates with profitability, especially when talking about long timeframes. E.g. working 120 hours per week for a year is extremely unlikely to result in 3x the productivity as 40 hours a week. Same with working 3/5ths as much, it's unlikely to linearly scale down to 3/5ths the value (not that "it can't ever", just not as a typical expectation).
That aside, plenty of places offer a 4x10, or are fine with it when asked, and I think that's a more productive way to put in 40 hours each week while also being more convenient for yourself (before even getting into wanting to lower total hours).
4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.
You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.
We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.
If you're already time constrained to the point working 2 extra hours means you can't get through the day without caffeine and skipping meals then of course it's a bad idea, but that's not an inherent fault of a 4x10 in itself.
A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.
Those don't exist because of unintended (but obvious) consequences of government regulation. For all sorts of reasons the risk and cost profile is pretty similar per employee whether they are 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week (non exhaustive examples: health insurance costs me the same to provide no matter how many hours an employee works. Depending on your regulatory regime certain payments like pensions/unemployment are capped so more workers earning less can actually cost more than less workers earning more, firing regulations makes more employees riskier because the probability you hire junk you can't get rid of or an employee turns to junk and you can't fire is higher with more employees, etc.) Since there is a very real cost with what you want your skill set has to be scarce enough to make the added cost worth incurring. As long as I can hire someone that will work full time for similar hourly equivalent pay, the part timers will not be seriously considered.
Health insurance being dependent on your employment, is a whole problem on its own. Of course these things need to be arranged differently, ajd with more freedom for the people themselves.
That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.
Health insurance is complicated and I think it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying). I think it's more accurate to say the cost for service is way too high in general, and we are missing out on network effects and efficiency gains by not providing healthcare to some and/or no not providing enough healthcare soon enough to some (and by providing too much healthcare to some too soon).
Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.
I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.
> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)
These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.
The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).
They are not different. They are linked. Who is paying only matters because the item is arbitrarily too expensive for the person to just pay on their own.
Of course they are different. It's easy to lose your job. From what I understand, there are even countries where you can be fired while sick. And then you lose your health insurance exactly when you need it most.
Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.
It's definitely possible, and my current company were very happy to agree to 4/5 of the time for 4/5 of the salary and it's working out well for everyone. However, I've also found some organisations - that are otherwise good - to be hostile to working less than full hours. Since we work on interesting problems and they were happy to go with 80% it made it an easy task deciding which job to accept!
I should add that's it's a start-up so some weeks I work more and others less. But I still have the day my kids that I wanted.
Perhaps try quietly asking your current company? They might surprise you and start a trend.
If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day.
The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.
Depends on what they do with those 30 and 50 hours. If they're burnt out, even 100 hours chained to an in-person desk, they aren't going to accomplish much, so that's just not true. The right software engineer can come in, have a pointed discussion, have some coffee, go look at some code, have a few conversations, and have a bigger impact in an hour in terms of setting future direction and avoiding pitfalls than a different engineer could do in a week.
> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.
Hold on. That's what tech is for right?
certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less.
What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?
Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.
That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?
Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.
With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.
Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.
A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.
Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer.
And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.
> Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States.
I have seen it go one of several ways.
- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)
- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.
- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
"Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.
Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.
It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.
There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"
On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.
From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
> It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries"
In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things:
convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)
Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.
Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.
Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years.
It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."
In almost no country those taxes work like a normal pension. They are an as is fund where people pay now for those pensions now. You do not save for your own retirement, you pay for the retirement of the current generation.
You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more working people than retired people, which is no longer the case, so pensions have to be reduced.
Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share some of their income with you.
Exactly. Saving is not a thing for an economy. The future economy needs to actually create all those goods and services for which you saved up. If the future economy doesn’t have enough labor because of demographics then some major price adjustments need to happen in favor of the future workers.
It's fundamentally different in any society with strong private property rights. A private pension is a set of investments, i.e. something that ultimately is owned by you. How much those investments pay off, if at all, is unknown, but if they do pay off then it's yours.
A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.
> […] allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension.
As someone who frequents personal finance sub-reddits, this does not work. The number of people who would save for their long-term needs is generally small.
And for some folks it is a 'personality problem' in that they are short-sited, in numerous cases it's a matter of not having any available funds. Forced savings are an absolute necessity.
Further it is also necessary for the funds to be away from people's hands so they don't fiddle with the money.
Canada went through this debate in the 1990s when it reformed its government pension system, and between fees and behaviour issues, the general consensus was that have a pool of money separate from private retirement accounts (RRSPs in Canada) was absolutely essential. A history of the reforms:
If what you say is even remotely true, wealth would have never been passed from generation to generation and people would have never invested in stuff useful for the future.
What you actually mean is that there is a non-negligible portion of the population who act like children and won't ever be able to plan for the future, so we have to force them.
But not only them, everyone into the same basket, regardless of their qualities and wants/needs.
Sure, a non-collectivist system would break a few more eggs, but isn't it the point? Rewarding the best/most useful behaviors seems like a fundamental need of a lasting society.
The curent system is problematic because it has pushed the equality ideology at the expense of personal freedom.
The irony is that people who could benefit from better environment/luck/opportunities, will still get ahead at the end of the day. You are disproportionately impacting those who could have had better outcomes to "save" the ones who will have bad outcomes regardless.
It's all very cynical, and the peoples in power don't have to care, they are fundamentally not at risk...
That's how it works in Sweden though: part of your pension is your own private investments, they aren't taxed as normal investments since you can only withdraw after reaching retirement age, the other part of it is a state pension. Even with this scheme we still got our retirement age risen.
So it seems it doesn't matter if it's public or private, the benefits of improved productivity is not trickling down to workers, a lot more is produced, generating a lot more wealth, and even with private funds we still get shafted because the capital class wants more and more of the pie.
But how much do workers pay towards pensions? In Austria, 20% of personel costs go directly towards pensions, and almost 30% of the entire state budget also goes to pensions on top of that, which is insane.
Does the younger generation have a choice about buying into this? I don't think they have another option. They can emigrate but all of the other countries with a decent quality of life are facing similar demographic problems.
This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it.
So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.
This was exactly my complaint when the Dutch retirement age was raised from 65 to 67. Baby boomers, the largest generation, were about to retire, and the argument was that the younger generations weren't large enough to provide for them, so they'd have to continue working longer.
But it wasn't the baby boomers who had to work longer, it was the younger generations who had to work longer for the baby boomers to be able to retire.
At the very least tax the generous pensions of the wealthier baby boomers to provide for the poorer baby boomers.
You can't say they did nothing about it.
They actually did: make sure to restrain access to well-paying jobs with long and costly studies; make sure to regulate any way the young could get ahead by creating rules for things they never had to suffer through and make sure to increase the age of retirement as well as increase the ratio of contributions from salary.
It's all very cynical, and it's based on fundamental egoistic human behavior. Most boomers I know are proud to be egoist and very often stingy.
They all think that they can make the difference by helping their own children, but this is flawed "thinking" in a system that is profoundly collectivist.
And all this comes from the massive flaw of democracy: only numbers matter, if you are the dominant demographic, you can get whatever you want, regardless of the nefarious impacts down the line.
When people keep repeating the trope of democracy is the worst form of government expect of all the others, I laugh my ass off. It can only be so if you have a way to weigh the votes otherwise you are just ruled by the tyranny of the mob and that generally doesn't turn out nicely.
The problem has been artificially created, the ideology said that restricting personal freedom was better for everyone as a whole and we can very much observe that this was a lie of epic proportions...
If pensions where not mandatory you would be almost right. But pensions are mandatory, the state will invest the money upfront and earn from those investments. It's just a way of making you pay more, and then give you back less. Another hidden tax to pay whatever operation their incommensurate ego want to pursue.
Allow me to remind you that Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". Or in this situation, pensions are the worst form of retirement savings, except for all the others. Political parties struggle even imagining alternative solutions, but if you found a better idea by all means please come forward and we will all vote for you! I will for sure.
Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea. Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops. Maybe _that's_ why they struggle, because they don't find a way of taking your money without telling you... we changed forms of government, but taxes (and hidden taxes) remain, did you notice?
> Non-mandatory, private savings is a far better idea.
As someone who reads personal finance sub-reddits I completely disagree. The vast majority of people (a) do not have the long-term thinking for long-term needs, and/or (b) have money go by them without noticing they haven't saved anything. There's a reason why "Pay yourself first." is a mantra that has to be hammered into people through education (e.g., The Wealth Barber); most folks don't get that education or don't take it to heart.
> Ah wait but now the govt doesn't have the money anymore... ops.
In Canada the government does not have access to the money of our public pension, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP ~ US Social Security).
Then make the govt pension plan opt in and make the citizens choose whether or not to have the money invested (maybe give a discount to those that do). Be transparent and track the total you already payed and what your pension will be at retirement age. Don’t change retirement age suiting your ego and fake needs, but let people decide. Don’t come up with excuses to strip some more money from the citizens, and make the government more efficient instead. How does that sound to you?
I honestly didn't notice. I know exactly what my taxes are and where they go, and I can even vote to direct them this or that way. I highly recommend such an approach.
I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism.
As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.
Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.
I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.
> with limited ambitions outside their borders
I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more? Some examples and counter-examples would help.
Also, I don't buy the argument that "small democratic countries" are so different than larger ones. I hear this argument a lot from both sides (big and small). One difference that I do see is how they choose to use their military power, but that applies to non-democratic state also. Ultimately, the goal of a democratic state is to (1) get rich and (2) treat your citizens well (free speech, along with decent education, public safety, healthcare, and retirement).
> I see this term used frequently in Anglo-American media. I don't get it. What is special or different about the "Nordic" model compared to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Austria? Their regulations, tax rates, and social benefits are nearly identical.
The big difference is the culture around it all, in Scandinavia these things works with low corruption and high freedom and transparency while the more southern parts are much more corrupt and authoritarian.
So that results in Scandinavian countries topping so many charts while France, Austria, Germany etc do not. So the difference is not what they do but how deeply rooted that is in their culture. Scandinavian countries started this, the others just copied Scandinavia.
By the way, the retirement age of 65 was chosen at the time based on "when the average worker dies", a long retirement had never been the plan. We are now getting back to that.
I can imagine the workers joking about making it to retirement... Coal miners probably had little chance, we can't imagine today how hard that work was. They were usually "worn out" around age 50.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.
You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.
They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.
This is a nice outlook from a vacuum. The reality is those perfectly healthy elderly people are still going to struggle to compete with the younger workforce who will be anything from more physically/mentally apt to just simply cheaper. So they’re probably going to be forced into retirement without the means to actually do it.
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
Older people can charge whatever price they want for their work. They can even undercut the young by exploiting their high rates of home ownership and receipt of pensions. Where I grew up there was a DIY supermarket famous for employing mostly retirees or older workers. And the elderly have the benefit of experience - there's a meme that employers don't want that, but it's not true. Employers love experience. What they don't want are bolshie activists who create trouble. Plenty of people out there who are willing to trade cooperation and experience for salary, and can thus easily outcompete youngsters who might be willing to do what's asked but don't have the experience to do it well.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?
What we’re really talking about is freedom. Freedom to do what you want with your time whether it’s relaxation or work, but on your own terms.
When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.
It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.
Working just means that you get paid to do something.
What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.
A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.
By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?
I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all.
Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
But what is the point of all of increases in productivity if not to let us enjoy life more? Longer life expectancy should be more than offset by the increases in productivity.
> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.
If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?
pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be.
Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.
There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.
And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.
If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.
You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.