10 ms·

We should be increasing the retirement age for public pensions as quality-adjusted life years increase. Unfortunately people don’t want to spend extra years wor

We should be increasing the retirement age for public pensions as quality-adjusted life years increase. Unfortunately people don’t want to spend extra years working, or contribute more to pensions during their working years, so we wind up in this unsustainable system.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
If there is actually productivity growth (which I strongly believe there is) - then this can be shared between 4 groups - the workers, the non-workers, the retired, and the capitalists. I think most workers would like to see 100% of these gains go to workers. I think most shareholders would like to see 100% of the gains go to them. I think it'd be fair to share these evenly - and so higher taxes could make it so that the non-workers and retirees get some of the benefits of productivity increases.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
> don't want to spend extra years working How many 60+ people do you know? Do you honestly think they should still be working?
- jazzkingrt 5y ago
  Both my parents are 60+, my father is in his mid seventies, and they are as productive as ever.
  - smcl 5y ago
    Congratulations to them. My dad has worked manual labour since he left school aged 15 - first as a shipbuilder and then in the oil industry. My mum retired from teaching a year ago then developed lymphoma. Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.
    - kiba 5y ago
      We don't need to extract more productivity, sure, but it would lead to decreased medical costs.
    - hobofan 5y ago
      So instead we should extract a few more percent of productivity out of everybody who is pre-retirement age for every additional year of life expectancy?
      - thatcat 5y ago
        The alternative seems to be keeping the young under employed
        nradov 5y ago
        Are you referring to the "lump of labor" fallacy? https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-lump-labor-fallacy-two-lessons https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...
        thatcat 5y ago
        No, that refers to job openings across industries, specifically mentions agriculture jobs declining as other industries grow. Look at the median age of say politicians or tenured professors to see what I'm talking about.
- silasdavis 5y ago
  I know many people in their sixties who choose and want to work, including my parents. They are lucky in being able to choose to work at a reduced level and not out of absolute necessity so that changes the implications, but they do not want to retire completely. It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    My grandpa is 89 and refuses not to work. He thinks he'll fall apart once he does.
    - Dave_TRS 5y ago
      My grandpa is 94 and still enjoys working. Drives to Home Depot every day to pick up supplies for our family company, and other errands around the city. His view is that he enjoys it and helps him stay active.
  - foolinaround 5y ago
    could it be explained as a generational gap? that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work. the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      If the current generation is looking for all possibilities to not work they're sure doing a crap job at it - the number of people working multiple jobs has shot up... Or did you mean that stereotypical millennials are lazy and thus all young people are lazy?
      - foolinaround 5y ago
        the people working multiple jobs is due to how the jobs have gotten 'securitized' - people have become specialists in low skill jobs, leading to no growth at all. A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs. i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.
- rblatz 5y ago
  I know a lot of people over 60 and almost all of them are still working.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Retirement age in Germany is 67, so you'd kind of expect that.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Current 60 year olds aren’t relevant to the hypothetical of “what if we cure more stuff?”, rather “what will 60 year olds be like if we cure more stuff?”
- Daishiman 5y ago
  Hell yes. My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements. We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
This will be challenging since the epidemic of obesity (which kills far more than covid) now effects > 50% of society and leads to disability at younger and younger ages.
- nradov 5y ago
  Obesity is a critical risk factor for COVID-19. And obesity also increases the risk of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and hypovitaminosis D which are all co-morbid conditions that further increase COVID-19 risk. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm
- foolinaround 5y ago
  if obesity was tackled with the same intensity as covid, we would have seen far better outcomes... but too many financial hurdles in its way...
  - vkou 5y ago
    If obesity could be prevented with a $20 shot twice a year, I don't think it would be much of a public health problem.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Is this sarcasm? The US has free vaccine shots and free masks (most chain stores hand them out for free), and people still won’t use them.
  - croes 5y ago
    But I don't get a heart attack if you're obese.
    - sjwalter 5y ago
      But if you're under 60 and yourself fit and healthy, you'd probably not even notice if you caught covid and recovered. Everyone getting fitter is a huge collective win. Even outside the context of a pandemic--fat people have a hugely disproportional impact on national healthcare spend. All of our insurance would get cheaper and cheaper if we reduced the national BMI.
nradov 5y ago
Working an office job when you're 67 isn't too bad. But most people who've spent their whole lives doing manual labor are worn out and broken by that age.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  And likely much earlier than that. They might not even live to their pension date.
dv_dt 5y ago
Why? As productivity increases, shouldn’t some be allocated to leisure?
- hiddencache 5y ago
  Any gains are generally directed towards chasing status. Rather than being allocated towards leisure activities, they end up being used to push up property prices and the profits of luxury goods companies.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Leisure itself is a marker of status.
    - hiddencache 5y ago
      If only... I think generally the people who have achieved the means to enjoy leisure time are the people who are driven by ambition to keep attaining higher status. It takes someone with the ability to step back and assess what's important in life.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    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”?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I guess this might be the case in America but seriously? Economic gains up here in Canada tend to either go into reinvestment or leisure since life is your thing and having a fancier car than your neighbor is silly. I think that due to limits on the supply of leisure goods you will find that your second sentence is accurate - but I think that's due to the increased demand of leisure, not due to the increased demand of status (outside of a small portion of the population).
    - 5y ago
croes 5y ago
Just because some don't work physically demanding jobs doesn't mean you can raise the retirement age for everyone. Even so, many hardly reach retirement age in good health. Before that, it would be better to ensure that all incomes and all gainfully employed persons are taken into account for the pension fund and that such pointless things as a contribution assessment ceiling are eliminated. Then the contribution could even decrease.
Someone 5y ago
Many countries already (plan to) do that. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a05b71b5-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/a05b71b5-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a05b71b5-en/index.html?i...: “The normal retirement age of men will increase in 20 out of 36 OECD countries by an average of 3.5 years based on current legislation. The highest increase is projected for Turkey, from 51 currently to 62 years. Assuming that legislated life expectancy links are applied, also Denmark, from 65 to 74 years, and Estonia, from 63.3 to 71 years, will rapidly raise the retirement age.“
7ewis 5y ago
Probably massively oversimplifying things here, but why does the government have to provide us pensions anyway? Can't they just reduce the tax we pay and instead state that everyone is responsible for their own pensions, so if you save up enough you don't have to work longer...
- krastanov 5y ago
  Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension. And sure, that is on them for being irresponsible stupid young people (i.e. young people), but then it becomes a societal / national problem when every old person is destitute, straining all other systems in the country. If I, selfishly, do not want to be surrounded by destitute old people that lower my quality of life, I have to ensure that there is some (national) system that ensures these people prepare a pension for themselves. Also, on the more utopic/hippy views, it is just nice to help others, so why not institutionalize/codify helping others.
  - neilparikh 5y ago
    > Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension. It is worth noting that if your goal is just to handle the people who didn't make wise decisions when young, the current system does more than needed, and there's a much better way to accomplish that. You can simply force people to save n% in a retirement savings account, managed by the government; ie. take the current system, but keep everyone's money separate rather than merging it into a common pool. This is how Singapore's Central Provident Fund works. The current system really solves 2 problems: people who choose not to save enough, and people who didn't earn enough to save enough. You can solve the 2 separately: the first with the solution mentioned above, and the second with something like a negative income tax. Now, the problem with separating the 2 is that there may not be enough political will for the second system, because it makes it obvious that the amount you receive in retirement is not in proportion with what you contributed. That's the case now too, but it's obscured by the structure of the program.
- dtech 5y ago
  Because people generally cannot work anymore at a certain age, and most western countries do not think it is acceptable to let elderly people starve, even if they could have taken decisions to prevent that. Because you cannot expect all of the population to individually make wise financial decisions spanning multiple decades well past the years they can even generate income if they wanted. A lot of people already have problems budgeting for next month. Because spreading out the "risk" of living much longer than you anticipated prevents destitute 95 year olds.
siscia 5y ago
I don't think we should increase age for public pension. Life is made to be lived, not for working. We should increase taxes income by making everybody pay their fair share, and these include multinational corporations, and implement some sort of UBI. Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.
- friedman23 5y ago
  >pay their fair share Define fair share, it's not clear to me what that is.
  - siscia 5y ago
    At the very least the same percentage that a small business, less than 50 employees, pays in taxes.
    - friedman23 5y ago
      There has to be more to it than that. You haven't even argued why this is fair by the way. "Fair share" is an emotionally charged political slogan that means something different to everyone. Probably why it's used by so many politicians.
      - siscia 5y ago
        I don't have to convince you. That it is my opinion, and you can discard it. But I believe that if we tax small business a certain amount, big corporations should pay, at the very least, the same amount. Again, it is not a scientific argument, it is a political one, and honestly I don't want to be dragged in a technical discussion about taxation.
        friedman23 5y ago
        You say political, I say emotional.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Life expectancy maybe increased a few months, but it is extremely bad science that you can just increase pension in consequence. The age is rising because fewer people die prematurely because of better medicine. Doesn't mean people can now work until a later age, they will suffer the exact same health problems. You can bet that some parts of life even became more unhealthy. I don't expect to live longer than my grandparents that were children in WW2.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

If there is actually productivity growth (which I strongly believe there is) - then this can be shared between 4 groups - the workers, the non-workers, the retired, and the capitalists. I think most workers would like to see 100% of these gains go to workers. I think most shareholders would like to see 100% of the gains go to them. I think it'd be fair to share these evenly - and so higher taxes could make it so that the non-workers and retirees get some of the benefits of productivity increases.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

> don't want to spend extra years working How many 60+ people do you know? Do you honestly think they should still be working?

jazzkingrt 5y ago
Both my parents are 60+, my father is in his mid seventies, and they are as productive as ever.
- smcl 5y ago
  Congratulations to them. My dad has worked manual labour since he left school aged 15 - first as a shipbuilder and then in the oil industry. My mum retired from teaching a year ago then developed lymphoma. Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.
  - kiba 5y ago
    We don't need to extract more productivity, sure, but it would lead to decreased medical costs.
  - hobofan 5y ago
    So instead we should extract a few more percent of productivity out of everybody who is pre-retirement age for every additional year of life expectancy?
    - thatcat 5y ago
      The alternative seems to be keeping the young under employed
      - nradov 5y ago
        Are you referring to the "lump of labor" fallacy? https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-lump-labor-fallacy-two-lessons https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...
        thatcat 5y ago
        No, that refers to job openings across industries, specifically mentions agriculture jobs declining as other industries grow. Look at the median age of say politicians or tenured professors to see what I'm talking about.
silasdavis 5y ago
I know many people in their sixties who choose and want to work, including my parents. They are lucky in being able to choose to work at a reduced level and not out of absolute necessity so that changes the implications, but they do not want to retire completely. It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  My grandpa is 89 and refuses not to work. He thinks he'll fall apart once he does.
  - Dave_TRS 5y ago
    My grandpa is 94 and still enjoys working. Drives to Home Depot every day to pick up supplies for our family company, and other errands around the city. His view is that he enjoys it and helps him stay active.
- foolinaround 5y ago
  could it be explained as a generational gap? that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work. the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    If the current generation is looking for all possibilities to not work they're sure doing a crap job at it - the number of people working multiple jobs has shot up... Or did you mean that stereotypical millennials are lazy and thus all young people are lazy?
    - foolinaround 5y ago
      the people working multiple jobs is due to how the jobs have gotten 'securitized' - people have become specialists in low skill jobs, leading to no growth at all. A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs. i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.
rblatz 5y ago
I know a lot of people over 60 and almost all of them are still working.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Retirement age in Germany is 67, so you'd kind of expect that.
ben_w 5y ago
Current 60 year olds aren’t relevant to the hypothetical of “what if we cure more stuff?”, rather “what will 60 year olds be like if we cure more stuff?”
Daishiman 5y ago
Hell yes. My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements. We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

This will be challenging since the epidemic of obesity (which kills far more than covid) now effects > 50% of society and leads to disability at younger and younger ages.

nradov 5y ago
Obesity is a critical risk factor for COVID-19. And obesity also increases the risk of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and hypovitaminosis D which are all co-morbid conditions that further increase COVID-19 risk. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm
foolinaround 5y ago
if obesity was tackled with the same intensity as covid, we would have seen far better outcomes... but too many financial hurdles in its way...
- vkou 5y ago
  If obesity could be prevented with a $20 shot twice a year, I don't think it would be much of a public health problem.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Is this sarcasm? The US has free vaccine shots and free masks (most chain stores hand them out for free), and people still won’t use them.
- croes 5y ago
  But I don't get a heart attack if you're obese.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    But if you're under 60 and yourself fit and healthy, you'd probably not even notice if you caught covid and recovered. Everyone getting fitter is a huge collective win. Even outside the context of a pandemic--fat people have a hugely disproportional impact on national healthcare spend. All of our insurance would get cheaper and cheaper if we reduced the national BMI.

nradov 5y ago

Working an office job when you're 67 isn't too bad. But most people who've spent their whole lives doing manual labor are worn out and broken by that age.

jacquesm 5y ago
And likely much earlier than that. They might not even live to their pension date.

dv_dt 5y ago

Why? As productivity increases, shouldn’t some be allocated to leisure?

hiddencache 5y ago
Any gains are generally directed towards chasing status. Rather than being allocated towards leisure activities, they end up being used to push up property prices and the profits of luxury goods companies.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Leisure itself is a marker of status.
  - hiddencache 5y ago
    If only... I think generally the people who have achieved the means to enjoy leisure time are the people who are driven by ambition to keep attaining higher status. It takes someone with the ability to step back and assess what's important in life.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  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”?
- munk-a 5y ago
  I guess this might be the case in America but seriously? Economic gains up here in Canada tend to either go into reinvestment or leisure since life is your thing and having a fancier car than your neighbor is silly. I think that due to limits on the supply of leisure goods you will find that your second sentence is accurate - but I think that's due to the increased demand of leisure, not due to the increased demand of status (outside of a small portion of the population).
  - 5y ago

croes 5y ago

Just because some don't work physically demanding jobs doesn't mean you can raise the retirement age for everyone. Even so, many hardly reach retirement age in good health. Before that, it would be better to ensure that all incomes and all gainfully employed persons are taken into account for the pension fund and that such pointless things as a contribution assessment ceiling are eliminated. Then the contribution could even decrease.

Someone 5y ago

Many countries already (plan to) do that. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a05b71b5-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/a05b71b5-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a05b71b5-en/index.html?i...: “The normal retirement age of men will increase in 20 out of 36 OECD countries by an average of 3.5 years based on current legislation. The highest increase is projected for Turkey, from 51 currently to 62 years. Assuming that legislated life expectancy links are applied, also Denmark, from 65 to 74 years, and Estonia, from 63.3 to 71 years, will rapidly raise the retirement age.“

7ewis 5y ago

Probably massively oversimplifying things here, but why does the government have to provide us pensions anyway? Can't they just reduce the tax we pay and instead state that everyone is responsible for their own pensions, so if you save up enough you don't have to work longer...

krastanov 5y ago
Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension. And sure, that is on them for being irresponsible stupid young people (i.e. young people), but then it becomes a societal / national problem when every old person is destitute, straining all other systems in the country. If I, selfishly, do not want to be surrounded by destitute old people that lower my quality of life, I have to ensure that there is some (national) system that ensures these people prepare a pension for themselves. Also, on the more utopic/hippy views, it is just nice to help others, so why not institutionalize/codify helping others.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  > Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension. It is worth noting that if your goal is just to handle the people who didn't make wise decisions when young, the current system does more than needed, and there's a much better way to accomplish that. You can simply force people to save n% in a retirement savings account, managed by the government; ie. take the current system, but keep everyone's money separate rather than merging it into a common pool. This is how Singapore's Central Provident Fund works. The current system really solves 2 problems: people who choose not to save enough, and people who didn't earn enough to save enough. You can solve the 2 separately: the first with the solution mentioned above, and the second with something like a negative income tax. Now, the problem with separating the 2 is that there may not be enough political will for the second system, because it makes it obvious that the amount you receive in retirement is not in proportion with what you contributed. That's the case now too, but it's obscured by the structure of the program.
dtech 5y ago
Because people generally cannot work anymore at a certain age, and most western countries do not think it is acceptable to let elderly people starve, even if they could have taken decisions to prevent that. Because you cannot expect all of the population to individually make wise financial decisions spanning multiple decades well past the years they can even generate income if they wanted. A lot of people already have problems budgeting for next month. Because spreading out the "risk" of living much longer than you anticipated prevents destitute 95 year olds.

siscia 5y ago

I don't think we should increase age for public pension. Life is made to be lived, not for working. We should increase taxes income by making everybody pay their fair share, and these include multinational corporations, and implement some sort of UBI. Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.

friedman23 5y ago
>pay their fair share Define fair share, it's not clear to me what that is.
- siscia 5y ago
  At the very least the same percentage that a small business, less than 50 employees, pays in taxes.
  - friedman23 5y ago
    There has to be more to it than that. You haven't even argued why this is fair by the way. "Fair share" is an emotionally charged political slogan that means something different to everyone. Probably why it's used by so many politicians.
    - siscia 5y ago
      I don't have to convince you. That it is my opinion, and you can discard it. But I believe that if we tax small business a certain amount, big corporations should pay, at the very least, the same amount. Again, it is not a scientific argument, it is a political one, and honestly I don't want to be dragged in a technical discussion about taxation.
      - friedman23 5y ago
        You say political, I say emotional.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Life expectancy maybe increased a few months, but it is extremely bad science that you can just increase pension in consequence. The age is rising because fewer people die prematurely because of better medicine. Doesn't mean people can now work until a later age, they will suffer the exact same health problems. You can bet that some parts of life even became more unhealthy. I don't expect to live longer than my grandparents that were children in WW2.