6 ms·

I have doubts about the survival of retirement as an institution. Fundamentally they're rooted in the fact that population growth is peaking and must peak becau

by api 3y ago

I have doubts about the survival of retirement as an institution. Fundamentally they're rooted in the fact that population growth is peaking and must peak because the Earth is not infinite. You can argue about when it peaks and how high it can go, but it must peak at some point. (Edit: Humans going to the Moon or Mars don't count. People could do that but the distances are significant enough that those are going to be mostly separate economies. They will not impact Earth's economy very much.) Population growth is the fundamental driver of GDP growth. Growth can still happen in other ways via innovation and efficiency improvements but without population growth it's going to be in the low single digits. Without significant growth, retirement just can't work. Savings can't compound enough. Taxing the rich won't provide enough and taxing the middle class will kill the economy and make the problem worse. Lastly retirement is really an institution that was born in an age when people did not live as long (on average) and work was much more physically punishing. I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lifetime of experience could probably be leveraged to provide valuable insight or work on high-value niche problems in specific domains, and that can be fairly lucrative and is often very amenable to remote part-time employment. But regardless of things like that, this is a recipe for pretty significant social conflict. Young people already resent "boomers" for burdening them with cost via not just taxes but squatting on all the real estate and rigging the system to increase its value to fund their retirement. This will get worse, not better.

alkonaut 3y ago
Why would retirement become impossible? Because humans would become unable to work 50 years and in that time save up money for another 20?
- willcipriano 3y ago
  You can't now due to inflation (and inflation is higher than the gamed CPI). Those dollars you earn at the beginning will be worth pennies when you go to spend them. If you had a home you can offset this, but younger people aren't getting on the property ladder anymore due to, you guessed it, inflation. Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned, you used to be able to make up for it by investing but the line can't go up forever.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    > Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned Few that save for retirement keep their savings in cash. Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc. You might not always beat inflation but you also aren't seeing your savings eaten at the rate of inflation. > the line can't go up forever Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2% meaning they literally want everything to slowly go up, forever. The problems usually occur when it's faster and slower than that...
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      > Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc. The historical returns are a aberration from a high growth world, populations are falling. They won't look like that in the coming decades. > Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2% 2% CPI. CPI is a political measure first and a scientific measure second, from hedonic quality adjustment, owner imputed rent and the simple fact that most households don't have teams of economists planning their budget in order to maximally limit inflation means its far from a accurate barometer for the experiences of real people in the economy. The single income households of yore had a higher percentage of discretionary income than two income households today. CPI was unable to capture this change and finds those households are wealthier somehow.
      - alkonaut 3y ago
        > high growth world, populations are falling. Apart from some countries with curious and massive drops in fertility coupled with low or no immigratoin, are there any signs that global population is falling rapidly? If anything it seems it's entering a pretty stagnant phase (for example in the US). Of course stagnation might still mean an aging population, which is a problem in some cases especially when it comes to pension systems, but it doesn't magically make the economy stop growing. GDP growth isn't merely population growth.
        3y ago
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I think it might become question of availability of labour. So unless we increase efficiency massively a unit of currency that buys x amount labour might not even with above inflation investment returns buy even same amount of labour. Simply as there is not enough of it available as most of it has retired.
mantas 3y ago
I'd say modern retirement doesn't work. Retirement of the old era worked in two ways. a) people were passing away shortly after retiring. E.g. the early pensions after the industrial revolution. b) people in retirement would take on essentially unpaid social work. Carrying for elders and kids and so on. E.g. what was going on in late USSR and soon after it's collapse. Those options may survive even with no population growth. But nowadays people expect to live long AND social work to be done by paid employees. And that is not sustainable with or without population growth.
- aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
  The boomers pretty clearly want a 20-year paid vacation on the backs of everyone else. I’m not sure how the working class pays for half the population to do that.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    We need to separate the concept of pensions from the concept of retirement. If retirement should go away as a concept, that would mean it is somehow impossible to put away any money so that you don't need to work your last years. Obviously unless something radically happens to the way the global economy works, many people will be able to set aside 20% their pay, and and live the last 20% of their lives on that. But pensions on the other hand usually involve some sort of government system which often ends up trapped by demographic swings. The key for a pension system is this: don't allow it to depend on demographics. Make sure each generation provides for it's own pensions.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Fundamentally you cannot make each generation provide for itself. Most food cannot be stored for 20 years, so we need to have current day farmers. Even if you say automation, we still need someone to maintain those machines when they break. That means if you retire it must be on some store of value that the future generations want and will trade for food. I used food above, but lots of other things likewise need current work. You cannot retire and sit on a log watching birds, you need to get lots of things from society.
ghaff 3y ago
>I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lot of people do that in some form but it's generally hard to convert into something that pays. (It's easy to contribute to open source projects for example. It's a lot harder to get paid a modest sum for doing so at your own pace and at your own pleasure.) The same things applies in general for casual consulting, writing, etc. in semi-retirement. You can certainly do it for the stimulation but it's hard to get someone to pay you and, in any case, that probably requires a certain amount of maybe-less-fun business activities.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Retiring to open source work is exactly my plan, because there's very little demand for part time software developers.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    There's plenty of contract work for very experienced lead developers that isn't publicly advertised for. Being contract work, it doesn't have to be done 40 hr/wk. You have to build your network and lean on that to find such positions, which may be foreign to many.
    - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      I'm not saying this isn't true, but I find it very hard to believe there's a pool of shadow jobs that are completely unadvertised. Whenever I chat with recruiters about the potential for part time jobs in retirement, they tell me 'that sounds nice, but we never see employers open to that'. I guess if you've 'made your bones' with BigCo and you're in a very valuable niche you might could pull it off, but otherwise it would very much be an uphill slog.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I'm sure there are "names" that can get cushy gigs as advisors, board members, etc. My personal experience is I can certainly pick up a few dollars here and there but getting a steady income flow is harder--and I'm not even sure I'd want to if I were in that position. ADDED: Most of the cases I've run into of decent part-time/freelance work are indeed through people I know but it's been mostly in the beer money category--I admittedly like better beer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
quadrifoliate 3y ago
> Taxing the rich won't provide enough The rich shouldn't be taxed just for providing for other people, but also as a sort of dampening effect to make sure that getting rich doesn't become the non-rich people's only objective in life (like it seems to, for many in the US). Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich) to be able to enjoy the kind of "semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work" that you mention. In fact, taxes on the rich could be set up explicitly to fund something like basic income programs for older people.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich It doesn't work this way. Ambitious people either just move to a county that's more open to business, bringing jobs and economic growth there instead, or they go into politics and get rich just by leeching off the economically productive populace, like corrupt officials in Russia and China. Europe is a good example of this: it's got the highest tax rates globally, and some of the lowest GDP growth rates (and number of new businesses) in the world. People in France, Germany and the UK are seeing their standards of living get worse year by year, not better
  - vel0city 3y ago
    A place can still be good for business and still tax personally wealthy people at a high-ish rate. Sane and easy to understand regulations, fast and competent permitting processes, good labor stock, easy capital access for business growth, etc. are all separate from making extremely wealthy people pay 35% effective tax rate instead of only like 10%. https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and-taxes-revealed/ https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and...
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
    Trickle down economics is a myth. You cant just shout "Job Creator!" enough to make it matter. You(a nation-state government entity) has the power to drag someone back home to pay their taxes. If Apple went 100% based out of Ireland, you could tariff the hell out of Apple products until their sales drop to zero. You can put sanctions on places that run offshore bank accounts where people hide their money. You can nationalize industries that are falling apart due to the requirement to increase profit, ie rail infrastructure. The issue is why would the elected officials who benefit from this, do something to counter it. They're fine with an inequitable world governed by the Koch Brothers' school for business fairy tales. The economy is a sham, the government could pay people to run the farms and clothing factories and stockpile the excess rather than burn it to create scarcity. There are other ways to live beyond this narrow system of faux economic sciences.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
On the flipside, saving money in the bank will become viable again.
treespace8 3y ago
We are past the golden age of retirement. Growing up I saw my entire Grandmothers family retire early and live a long time. They would retire in their late 50s. (Mostly government related jobs) I also meet plenty of my friends parents that would retire around the same time from one of the big three auto plants. You can actually see it here, the age keeps going up. (Canada) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410006001&pickMembers%5B0%5D=4.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1976&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=19760101%2C20220101 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141000...
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
>I have doubts about the survival of retirement as an institution. >I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lifetime of experience could probably be leveraged to provide valuable insight or work on high-value niche problems in specific domains, and that can be fairly lucrative and is often very amenable to remote part-time employment. This is how most old folks lived for all but the last 100 years. I'd totally be down to work 1-2d / wk if the labor market allowed it, but most jobs are 40h / wk or more with very little in the way of part time flexibility. We're going to have to change to allow this sort of work again in the future.

by api 3y ago

alkonaut 3y ago

Why would retirement become impossible? Because humans would become unable to work 50 years and in that time save up money for another 20?

willcipriano 3y ago
You can't now due to inflation (and inflation is higher than the gamed CPI). Those dollars you earn at the beginning will be worth pennies when you go to spend them. If you had a home you can offset this, but younger people aren't getting on the property ladder anymore due to, you guessed it, inflation. Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned, you used to be able to make up for it by investing but the line can't go up forever.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  > Our money isn't a durable store of value since the gold standard was abandoned Few that save for retirement keep their savings in cash. Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc. You might not always beat inflation but you also aren't seeing your savings eaten at the rate of inflation. > the line can't go up forever Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2% meaning they literally want everything to slowly go up, forever. The problems usually occur when it's faster and slower than that...
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    > Most would save in some sort of instrument that would expose them to the stock market, money market, real estate etc. The historical returns are a aberration from a high growth world, populations are falling. They won't look like that in the coming decades. > Central banks normally have an inflation goal of 2% 2% CPI. CPI is a political measure first and a scientific measure second, from hedonic quality adjustment, owner imputed rent and the simple fact that most households don't have teams of economists planning their budget in order to maximally limit inflation means its far from a accurate barometer for the experiences of real people in the economy. The single income households of yore had a higher percentage of discretionary income than two income households today. CPI was unable to capture this change and finds those households are wealthier somehow.
    - alkonaut 3y ago
      > high growth world, populations are falling. Apart from some countries with curious and massive drops in fertility coupled with low or no immigratoin, are there any signs that global population is falling rapidly? If anything it seems it's entering a pretty stagnant phase (for example in the US). Of course stagnation might still mean an aging population, which is a problem in some cases especially when it comes to pension systems, but it doesn't magically make the economy stop growing. GDP growth isn't merely population growth.
      - 3y ago
Ekaros 3y ago
I think it might become question of availability of labour. So unless we increase efficiency massively a unit of currency that buys x amount labour might not even with above inflation investment returns buy even same amount of labour. Simply as there is not enough of it available as most of it has retired.

mantas 3y ago

I'd say modern retirement doesn't work. Retirement of the old era worked in two ways. a) people were passing away shortly after retiring. E.g. the early pensions after the industrial revolution. b) people in retirement would take on essentially unpaid social work. Carrying for elders and kids and so on. E.g. what was going on in late USSR and soon after it's collapse. Those options may survive even with no population growth. But nowadays people expect to live long AND social work to be done by paid employees. And that is not sustainable with or without population growth.

aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
The boomers pretty clearly want a 20-year paid vacation on the backs of everyone else. I’m not sure how the working class pays for half the population to do that.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  We need to separate the concept of pensions from the concept of retirement. If retirement should go away as a concept, that would mean it is somehow impossible to put away any money so that you don't need to work your last years. Obviously unless something radically happens to the way the global economy works, many people will be able to set aside 20% their pay, and and live the last 20% of their lives on that. But pensions on the other hand usually involve some sort of government system which often ends up trapped by demographic swings. The key for a pension system is this: don't allow it to depend on demographics. Make sure each generation provides for it's own pensions.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Fundamentally you cannot make each generation provide for itself. Most food cannot be stored for 20 years, so we need to have current day farmers. Even if you say automation, we still need someone to maintain those machines when they break. That means if you retire it must be on some store of value that the future generations want and will trade for food. I used food above, but lots of other things likewise need current work. You cannot retire and sit on a log watching birds, you need to get lots of things from society.

ghaff 3y ago

>I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lot of people do that in some form but it's generally hard to convert into something that pays. (It's easy to contribute to open source projects for example. It's a lot harder to get paid a modest sum for doing so at your own pace and at your own pleasure.) The same things applies in general for casual consulting, writing, etc. in semi-retirement. You can certainly do it for the stimulation but it's hard to get someone to pay you and, in any case, that probably requires a certain amount of maybe-less-fun business activities.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Retiring to open source work is exactly my plan, because there's very little demand for part time software developers.
- fragmede 3y ago
  There's plenty of contract work for very experienced lead developers that isn't publicly advertised for. Being contract work, it doesn't have to be done 40 hr/wk. You have to build your network and lean on that to find such positions, which may be foreign to many.
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    I'm not saying this isn't true, but I find it very hard to believe there's a pool of shadow jobs that are completely unadvertised. Whenever I chat with recruiters about the potential for part time jobs in retirement, they tell me 'that sounds nice, but we never see employers open to that'. I guess if you've 'made your bones' with BigCo and you're in a very valuable niche you might could pull it off, but otherwise it would very much be an uphill slog.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I'm sure there are "names" that can get cushy gigs as advisors, board members, etc. My personal experience is I can certainly pick up a few dollars here and there but getting a steady income flow is harder--and I'm not even sure I'd want to if I were in that position. ADDED: Most of the cases I've run into of decent part-time/freelance work are indeed through people I know but it's been mostly in the beer money category--I admittedly like better beer.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

quadrifoliate 3y ago

> Taxing the rich won't provide enough The rich shouldn't be taxed just for providing for other people, but also as a sort of dampening effect to make sure that getting rich doesn't become the non-rich people's only objective in life (like it seems to, for many in the US). Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich) to be able to enjoy the kind of "semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work" that you mention. In fact, taxes on the rich could be set up explicitly to fund something like basic income programs for older people.

logicchains 3y ago
>Taxing the rich at high rates and ensuring that lifestyles are slightly more equitable will enable everyone (both rich and non-rich It doesn't work this way. Ambitious people either just move to a county that's more open to business, bringing jobs and economic growth there instead, or they go into politics and get rich just by leeching off the economically productive populace, like corrupt officials in Russia and China. Europe is a good example of this: it's got the highest tax rates globally, and some of the lowest GDP growth rates (and number of new businesses) in the world. People in France, Germany and the UK are seeing their standards of living get worse year by year, not better
- vel0city 3y ago
  A place can still be good for business and still tax personally wealthy people at a high-ish rate. Sane and easy to understand regulations, fast and competent permitting processes, good labor stock, easy capital access for business growth, etc. are all separate from making extremely wealthy people pay 35% effective tax rate instead of only like 10%. https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and-taxes-revealed/ https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and...
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  Trickle down economics is a myth. You cant just shout "Job Creator!" enough to make it matter. You(a nation-state government entity) has the power to drag someone back home to pay their taxes. If Apple went 100% based out of Ireland, you could tariff the hell out of Apple products until their sales drop to zero. You can put sanctions on places that run offshore bank accounts where people hide their money. You can nationalize industries that are falling apart due to the requirement to increase profit, ie rail infrastructure. The issue is why would the elected officials who benefit from this, do something to counter it. They're fine with an inequitable world governed by the Koch Brothers' school for business fairy tales. The economy is a sham, the government could pay people to run the farms and clothing factories and stockpile the excess rather than burn it to create scarcity. There are other ways to live beyond this narrow system of faux economic sciences.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

On the flipside, saving money in the bank will become viable again.

treespace8 3y ago

We are past the golden age of retirement. Growing up I saw my entire Grandmothers family retire early and live a long time. They would retire in their late 50s. (Mostly government related jobs) I also meet plenty of my friends parents that would retire around the same time from one of the big three auto plants. You can actually see it here, the age keeps going up. (Canada) https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410006001&pickMembers%5B0%5D=4.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1976&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=19760101%2C20220101 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141000...

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

>I have doubts about the survival of retirement as an institution. >I could certainly see a kind of semi-retirement where a person dips out of high-pressure work in favor of lower pressure intellectual work that can be completed on a looser time frame. A lifetime of experience could probably be leveraged to provide valuable insight or work on high-value niche problems in specific domains, and that can be fairly lucrative and is often very amenable to remote part-time employment. This is how most old folks lived for all but the last 100 years. I'd totally be down to work 1-2d / wk if the labor market allowed it, but most jobs are 40h / wk or more with very little in the way of part time flexibility. We're going to have to change to allow this sort of work again in the future.