French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

Consider the fact that politicians can be elected and then break the promises they made during the campaign. The electoralist response to this is 'well you can vote them out next time,.' But that ignores the cost of the damage that can occur during the interval, plus it's not clear how the populace is supposed to hold other politicians to account - to the point that there is a general expectation of politicians being dishonest and mendacious.

Really, in what other job are you only subject to review every few years and if people don't like what you're doing in the meantime you can reply with complete BS, often overtly?

Democratic elections are a good thing, but they are not the be-all and end-all of politics. Strikes and boycotts are absolutely a legitimate form of political expression, in which labor or consumer market participants coordinate their economic activity to obtain political leverage. If you won't tolerate anything other than elections, North Korea has those.

Not necessarily. What matters here is whether production matches demand. If the proportion of people in the workforce declines, but their productivity increases by the same amount (which isn't far from being the case in Europe) you don't have a problem.

And even that is too simple. As the population ages, demand changes. It increases im certain domains (health) so productivity increase might not suffice.

...but then of course the productivity of older people declines too, together with their health (higher unemployment, more sick leaves), so there is a lower and lower ROI as you put these people in the workforce. And then making people work longer accelerates the health decline, and so increases the demand. Except those people die younger on average, lowering the demand.

So it's a supply and demand issue, but not quite a supply and demand of workers. It's a complicated economic problem. All of this is talked about in the French debate, which is a lot more subtle than the loud vociferations reported in the news make it out to be.

Hear, hear, especially given the historical priors : (hint: across a generation-sized time spans, governments never keep their promises. Why should they, they usually are in power for decades at most).

And yes, relying on governments to handle your retirement money is completely insane, but the vast majority of folks in e.g. the EU have drunk that kool-aid even though it was guaranteed to fail since day one.

Retirement plans the way they work in Western Europe were always an absolute con, very much like a ponzi scheme (new players pay for the earlier players).

When the young, working population was vastly larger than the old retiree population (because the retirement age was designed so that most people died before reaching it), the government milked their working young for all they were worth.

Now that the age pyramid has inverted (large retiree population, few working youngs), there simply isn't enough income generated by the young to pay for the old and retirement income is paid using debt.

What a freak show.

I'd love to have to repay my debts with those conditions.