Why work has failed us: Because no one can afford to retire anymore

Some historical perspective: My understanding is that when Social Security was created, the average life expectancy was 67. So offering it for people age 65 was intended as providing for people in extreme old age who had probably worked physically hard their entire lives and were pretty beat up.

I'm not saying we don't have genuine problems here, but this article is bellyaching about, basically, a golden era when the world was relatively briefly unusually comfortable and acting like that was the norm throughout all of history. The reality is that money per se only became common place something like 300 years or so ago. So the very concept of retirement and saving for retirement is relatively new.

This makes it a little hard for me to take this article seriously, so I confess to not reading it in full. Some of the things it gets right: Pensions are going out of style precisely because people are living longer, so pensions wind up being financially unsustainable.

Given that people are living a whole lot longer and are generally in better health at 70 these days than 65 used to be, it isn't really some huge hand-wringing drama that older Americans need to continue working. Instead, it is evidence of how successful we have been in some sense.

This is a good problem to have. We need to make adjustments to the system, but people living longer and this requiring cultural adjustments isn't some giant tragedy.

Retirement for, say, two decades or whatever is hardly some historical and long standing human norm. It's really rather out of touch with reality to act like it ever was.

One had half his body paralyzed by a stroke, and you couldn't really tell how much understanding he had of the world around him when he was alert. The other two had forms of alzheimer's that, eventually, left them occasionally speaking czech instead of english (they moved to the USA as children) and not recognizing their own children. The first sign they needed full-time care was when we caught one of them overdosing on ibuprofin- get a headache, take some, forget, take more, repeat. That, and leaving the gas stove on for hours.

I fully agree that the retirement age should start increasing, but there's definitely a point of diminishing returns. We may be living longer as a whole, but our physiology hasn't caught up enough to trust that those extra years can be spent making economically valuable contributions to society.

Correct. But this happens because not everyone is privileged enough to get good advice. The vast majority of 18 year olds know nothing, they've seen none of the world, and can only rely on the little knowledge they've acquired up to that point in their life. Lots of people go into college thinking "gee 100k loan, 50k loan, will be fine when I graduate and get a job."

Capitalism is a system in which risk takers are rewarded / punished based on how their risky moves pan out. Unfortunately that means people with safety nets / more leeway to take risks (more wealthy) get more dice rolls and thus increase their wealth, vs if you're poor, you either stay poor, or in many cases if you look at what society's advice has been it's "go to college, a college degree means you'll make so much more money and even at the cost of $200k in debt will be worth it" It's one thing to say "capitalism is how things fall naturally." It's another to say "this is perfect and how it should work and nothing's broken, everyone gets their just desserts, capitalism is the only way, move along." I'm not saying that this is actually what you're trying to convey, but the anecdote you inserted here definitely rings of this (common) sentiment.

> Certainly millennials have the deck stacked against them, but with proper planning, they can be successful.

This is pretty bleak. A chance at success is true in any system. That the deck is stacked is the only salient point.

I'll see your anecdote and raise you one more: talk to a few people who are the first to get college degrees in their family. I suspect you'll find that the vast majority of their parents offered no or even counter-productive advice when it comes to what field to study, or that it matters. Especially if the school they ended up at is one like Harvard/Stanford; there's some pretty good writing about what it's like to be very poor at those schools.

The gap is widening between rich and poor, straight-up capitalism exacerbates those effects, and I don't think it's easy to argue that's a good thing.