6 ms·

Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at curren

Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at current settings anyway.

pm90 4y ago
No. Easiest by far is to relax immigration restrictions.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Do both.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > No. Easiest by far is to relax immigration restrictions. Easiest way to make citizens of a country vote for anti-immigration parties is to significantly increase immigration.
  - pm90 4y ago
    Regrettably, This is what does tend to happen. But its also a failure of society because immigrants are easy targets for scoring political points, despite it being repeatedly shown how beneficial immigration has been to Western econonomies.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Can you support that last claim? Might have been good for the S&P, but I'm not so certain the average joe off the street has seen said benefits. I could swear I recently saw a stat that locally born men in the US have only shared in like 3% of new job growth for the last decade or something like that.
      - pm90 4y ago
        Income inequality is a separate (albeit related) problem from economic growth. Immigration generates more value, the fact that most of this value is captured by elites needs to be fixed with appropriate actions (higher taxation on the extremely rich etc).
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        'but I'm not so certain the average joe off the street has seen said benefits' Since 1975 productivity has grown >200%, but wages didn't. So average Joe has not seen benefits of anything really.
      - MrMan 4y ago
        lets say an innocent baby enters the world - this immigrant is not seen as much of a threat. you dont say "babys are taking things away from real Americans". just substitute "person" for "baby" and the benefits to the economy are not hard to posit. adding humans to the economy is good. the pie gets larger. more tax revenue. etc etc etc
    - throw_m239339 4y ago
      > how beneficial immigration has been to Western econonomies. Western way of life is unsustainable and no amount of immigration will change that. To govern is to predict and the west needs to prepare itself for a post industrial, post energy hungry era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        This is broad to the point of being unhelpfull - an urban resident vs suburban resident, or US vs Japanese lifestyles are quite different.
    - landemva 4y ago
      That is legal immigration of persons who can pass a background check, are healthy without disease, and who can work to support themselves.
- vuln 4y ago
  The US has shattered record numbers of migrants crossing the southern boarder every month for over a year. It has had zero deflationary effects if anything it causes the supply to shrink even further as demand skyrockets. Migrants still need to be housed, feed, clothed and transported. There is no easy way out.
  - pm90 4y ago
    First, the question is about labor supply. Second, people crossing the southern border will never be large enough to affect the US labor market. Only increasing legal immigration can have meaningful effect on the labor supply.
    - vuln 4y ago
      Millions of jobless migrants crossing the southern border has no affect on labor supply? I also do not understand how "only legal immigration" can have an effect. Immigration is Immigration doesnt really matter the legality of it.
      - pm90 4y ago
        Illegal immigrants can’t participate in vast sections of the economy precisely because of how well immigration checks work. They can only work for the informal sector/low level jobs.
  - MrMan 4y ago
    well we need millions of new people, and should be paying people to come here. there should be no such thing as "illegal" immigration.
codetrotter 4y ago
Idk what the retirement age in other countries is but here in Norway I think it is currently 67. How much additional productive work do we realistically expect people to be able to supply, from age 67 to age 70?
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Raising the retirement age isn't about getting more work out of people, but reducing the number of years the state has to pay retirement benefits.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  Especially in housing, manufacturing and food, which is what the shortages are purported to be in
- Maximus9000 4y ago
  Canada had it at 67 for awhile, but it recently got pushed back down to 65. IMO, it should have stayed at 67.
- paganel 4y ago
  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.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
What I find tragic is that 'we' had all this time to gradually increase the retirement age but didn't do so. I can totally understand the political backlash of trying to immediately increase the retirement age, as old people vote and young people don't. However I feel like forward looking legislators could have passed gradual increases on future generations. If we know life expectancy is gradually going upwards, why not increase the retirement age incrementally based on cohort?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > What I find tragic is that 'we' had all this time to gradually increase the retirement age but didn't do so. ‘We’ actually did exactly that, over a 20 year period that just finished in 2020, under a law passed in 1983. (‘We’ also phased in increased incentive for delayed retirement past the nominal “full retirement age” at the same time, so that the actual maximum retirement age of 70 has substantially higher benefits—+24%-+32% depending on birth year—than the nominal “full retirement age” .) https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/IncRetAge.html https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/IncRetAge.html
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I'm looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#Full_retirement_age_(FRA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... Although I guess I should amend my lamentation to say that 'we' did but it wasn't nearly enough and it took them way too long to start.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Young people arnt jazzed about raising retirement either. I would like to retire some day as well. Not looking forward to the future where I get to "retire" at 80 or 90 because the generation before me couldn't handle a budget.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    Agreed. Having to work to 70 and possibly beyond because some employers haven't figured out how to make their jobs not completely shitty seems like a pretty raw deal.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. The actual maximum benefit retirement age for Social Security is already 70. The misleadingly named “full retirement age” is 67, but I don't think squeezing three more years out of the non-disabled elderly is going to do as much good for the industries where demand exists as you think. EDIT: Also, proposing an immediate increase to the retirement age is probably the easiest way to lose one’s next election in most US constituencies; there's a reason why the increases adopted in 1983 had a phase in starting 17 years after they were passed.
powerhour 4y ago
Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, we can begin lowering the Medicare enrollment age so we can free employers from the burden of overseeing health insurance plans. This would also free up workers currently wasted on interacting with insurance companies on behalf of providers. It's win-win-win-lose (the winners are everyone but the insurance companies, and I'd wager the former vastly outnumbers the latter).
deelowe 4y ago
Easiest way to curb inflation is to reduce purchasing power (read: increase unemployment)...
throw_m239339 4y ago
> Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at current settings anyway. Easiest way to solve that problem is to increase capital gain taxes significantly.
kingkawn 4y ago
never have I seen someone so immediately disqualify themselves from being taken seriously in a conversation
rxhernandez 4y ago
I really doubt that. My mom has quite a few friends that are retired (she's in quite a few hiking and cycling groups) and all of them are doing at least some part-time work. I think it's incredibly cruel that they have to work at all at their age. If my mom hadn't planned her retirement well and people tried to put her back to full-time work, I would eat the cost of taking care of her needs if the state didn't. I mean she was really struggling to do her job at the end.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Or to send kids back into coalmines. You want a non-sadistic solution? Healthcare increases labour supply - or reduces labour supply that is sick or disabled. Actually do we need to increase labour supply? the past couple of decades had little growth in salary becauae labour had no bargaining power. Now corporate profits are record high. A big renegotiation is about to happen and it will be good for labour
pkaye 4y ago
Then US should also remove the cap on social security taxes.
tzs 4y ago
Unless by that you mean that people who have already reached their retirement age and retired and are collecting benefits would have those benefits withdrawn if they are not yet 70 I don't see how that would increase the labor supply. It would just slow down number of people already in the labor supply leaving it for retirement. If you do mean that people already retired but not yet 70 have their benefits cut off until they reach 70 there are a couple problems with that. 1. It would be political suicide. 2. It would be very hard to deal with the logistics. First, a large number of the people who it forces to un-retire will no longer be living where the jobs are. Your plan will tank the market for housing in retirement communities making it impossible for many to sell their houses to move back to where the jobs are. Second, a large number of them won't be capable of doing the jobs they did before, due to age or due to their skills being out of date. Many will need retraining, or will have to take jobs in fields they have no experience with. Dealing with all that would be a lot of work, with many reluctant to put in that effort when the workers that you do manage to get are just going to be temporary.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It would just slow down number of people already in the labor supply leaving it for retirement. If you have the same rate as before of people coming into the labor force and slow the rate of people exiting the labor force, the effect on the labor force is...what, again?

Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at current settings anyway.

pm90 4y ago

No. Easiest by far is to relax immigration restrictions.

throwaway5959 4y ago
Do both.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> No. Easiest by far is to relax immigration restrictions. Easiest way to make citizens of a country vote for anti-immigration parties is to significantly increase immigration.
- pm90 4y ago
  Regrettably, This is what does tend to happen. But its also a failure of society because immigrants are easy targets for scoring political points, despite it being repeatedly shown how beneficial immigration has been to Western econonomies.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    Can you support that last claim? Might have been good for the S&P, but I'm not so certain the average joe off the street has seen said benefits. I could swear I recently saw a stat that locally born men in the US have only shared in like 3% of new job growth for the last decade or something like that.
    - pm90 4y ago
      Income inequality is a separate (albeit related) problem from economic growth. Immigration generates more value, the fact that most of this value is captured by elites needs to be fixed with appropriate actions (higher taxation on the extremely rich etc).
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      'but I'm not so certain the average joe off the street has seen said benefits' Since 1975 productivity has grown >200%, but wages didn't. So average Joe has not seen benefits of anything really.
    - MrMan 4y ago
      lets say an innocent baby enters the world - this immigrant is not seen as much of a threat. you dont say "babys are taking things away from real Americans". just substitute "person" for "baby" and the benefits to the economy are not hard to posit. adding humans to the economy is good. the pie gets larger. more tax revenue. etc etc etc
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    > how beneficial immigration has been to Western econonomies. Western way of life is unsustainable and no amount of immigration will change that. To govern is to predict and the west needs to prepare itself for a post industrial, post energy hungry era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      This is broad to the point of being unhelpfull - an urban resident vs suburban resident, or US vs Japanese lifestyles are quite different.
  - landemva 4y ago
    That is legal immigration of persons who can pass a background check, are healthy without disease, and who can work to support themselves.
vuln 4y ago
The US has shattered record numbers of migrants crossing the southern boarder every month for over a year. It has had zero deflationary effects if anything it causes the supply to shrink even further as demand skyrockets. Migrants still need to be housed, feed, clothed and transported. There is no easy way out.
- pm90 4y ago
  First, the question is about labor supply. Second, people crossing the southern border will never be large enough to affect the US labor market. Only increasing legal immigration can have meaningful effect on the labor supply.
  - vuln 4y ago
    Millions of jobless migrants crossing the southern border has no affect on labor supply? I also do not understand how "only legal immigration" can have an effect. Immigration is Immigration doesnt really matter the legality of it.
    - pm90 4y ago
      Illegal immigrants can’t participate in vast sections of the economy precisely because of how well immigration checks work. They can only work for the informal sector/low level jobs.
- MrMan 4y ago
  well we need millions of new people, and should be paying people to come here. there should be no such thing as "illegal" immigration.

codetrotter 4y ago

Idk what the retirement age in other countries is but here in Norway I think it is currently 67. How much additional productive work do we realistically expect people to be able to supply, from age 67 to age 70?

Analemma_ 4y ago
Raising the retirement age isn't about getting more work out of people, but reducing the number of years the state has to pay retirement benefits.
t-writescode 4y ago
Especially in housing, manufacturing and food, which is what the shortages are purported to be in
Maximus9000 4y ago
Canada had it at 67 for awhile, but it recently got pushed back down to 65. IMO, it should have stayed at 67.
paganel 4y ago
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.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

What I find tragic is that 'we' had all this time to gradually increase the retirement age but didn't do so. I can totally understand the political backlash of trying to immediately increase the retirement age, as old people vote and young people don't. However I feel like forward looking legislators could have passed gradual increases on future generations. If we know life expectancy is gradually going upwards, why not increase the retirement age incrementally based on cohort?

dragonwriter 4y ago
> What I find tragic is that 'we' had all this time to gradually increase the retirement age but didn't do so. ‘We’ actually did exactly that, over a 20 year period that just finished in 2020, under a law passed in 1983. (‘We’ also phased in increased incentive for delayed retirement past the nominal “full retirement age” at the same time, so that the actual maximum retirement age of 70 has substantially higher benefits—+24%-+32% depending on birth year—than the nominal “full retirement age” .) https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/IncRetAge.html https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/IncRetAge.html
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I'm looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#Full_retirement_age_(FRA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... Although I guess I should amend my lamentation to say that 'we' did but it wasn't nearly enough and it took them way too long to start.
thatguy0900 4y ago
Young people arnt jazzed about raising retirement either. I would like to retire some day as well. Not looking forward to the future where I get to "retire" at 80 or 90 because the generation before me couldn't handle a budget.
- powerhour 4y ago
  Agreed. Having to work to 70 and possibly beyond because some employers haven't figured out how to make their jobs not completely shitty seems like a pretty raw deal.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. The actual maximum benefit retirement age for Social Security is already 70. The misleadingly named “full retirement age” is 67, but I don't think squeezing three more years out of the non-disabled elderly is going to do as much good for the industries where demand exists as you think. EDIT: Also, proposing an immediate increase to the retirement age is probably the easiest way to lose one’s next election in most US constituencies; there's a reason why the increases adopted in 1983 had a phase in starting 17 years after they were passed.

powerhour 4y ago

Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, we can begin lowering the Medicare enrollment age so we can free employers from the burden of overseeing health insurance plans. This would also free up workers currently wasted on interacting with insurance companies on behalf of providers. It's win-win-win-lose (the winners are everyone but the insurance companies, and I'd wager the former vastly outnumbers the latter).

deelowe 4y ago

Easiest way to curb inflation is to reduce purchasing power (read: increase unemployment)...

throw_m239339 4y ago

> Welfare and retirement systems across the West are insolvent at current settings anyway. Easiest way to solve that problem is to increase capital gain taxes significantly.

kingkawn 4y ago

never have I seen someone so immediately disqualify themselves from being taken seriously in a conversation

rxhernandez 4y ago

I really doubt that. My mom has quite a few friends that are retired (she's in quite a few hiking and cycling groups) and all of them are doing at least some part-time work. I think it's incredibly cruel that they have to work at all at their age. If my mom hadn't planned her retirement well and people tried to put her back to full-time work, I would eat the cost of taking care of her needs if the state didn't. I mean she was really struggling to do her job at the end.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> Easiest way to increase labor supply is to immediately increase the retirement age to 70. Or to send kids back into coalmines. You want a non-sadistic solution? Healthcare increases labour supply - or reduces labour supply that is sick or disabled. Actually do we need to increase labour supply? the past couple of decades had little growth in salary becauae labour had no bargaining power. Now corporate profits are record high. A big renegotiation is about to happen and it will be good for labour

pkaye 4y ago

Then US should also remove the cap on social security taxes.

tzs 4y ago

Unless by that you mean that people who have already reached their retirement age and retired and are collecting benefits would have those benefits withdrawn if they are not yet 70 I don't see how that would increase the labor supply. It would just slow down number of people already in the labor supply leaving it for retirement. If you do mean that people already retired but not yet 70 have their benefits cut off until they reach 70 there are a couple problems with that. 1. It would be political suicide. 2. It would be very hard to deal with the logistics. First, a large number of the people who it forces to un-retire will no longer be living where the jobs are. Your plan will tank the market for housing in retirement communities making it impossible for many to sell their houses to move back to where the jobs are. Second, a large number of them won't be capable of doing the jobs they did before, due to age or due to their skills being out of date. Many will need retraining, or will have to take jobs in fields they have no experience with. Dealing with all that would be a lot of work, with many reluctant to put in that effort when the workers that you do manage to get are just going to be temporary.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> It would just slow down number of people already in the labor supply leaving it for retirement. If you have the same rate as before of people coming into the labor force and slow the rate of people exiting the labor force, the effect on the labor force is...what, again?