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French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

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Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#421

Post by cscurmudgeon »

bjourne wrote: post #321
atleastoptimal wrote: post #304

In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations own…

At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

They are contributing to entertaining end users of the casino. Entertainment is a valid need. You or some academic in an ivory tower can't dictate worth or contribution. It is determined democratically by actions of consumers (literally voting with dollars).

That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries). These are jobs that powerful folks invent to remain in power by bribing poorer folks.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mgnrega-easy-jobs-may-harmed-...

   A mega job-guarantee program to alleviate massive rural distress may have had an unexpected, deleterious effect: luring India’s skilled labour away from the organised sector. ... Lured by the lesser effort involved—MGNREGA jobs like digging pits and filling them don’t need any skills—they leave their factory jobs to work for 100 days under the program and then take up other contractual jobs for the rest of the year.
Or the famous wages for just looking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli

  Nokku kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organized labour unions in Kerala under which bribes are paid to trade union activists in exchange for allowing unaffiliated workers to unload their own belongings and materials.[1] This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government. In Malayalam, 'nokku kooli', translates into 'gawking wages' or 'wages for (just) looking on'.[2]

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#422

Post by aaomidi »

BobbyJo wrote: post #408
spywaregorilla wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher). https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos... People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old…

Why does the mode matter? We are discussing cost , which is related to the the number of retirees. The average lifespan tells you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment, the mode tells you... what exactly?

The mode is far more useful here because it gets rid of the war outliers.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#423

Post by ryeights »

tomcam wrote: post #402
Uvix wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - Social Security for the people who are already retired is paid for by the people who are currently working. Nobody is "paying into" anything.

I am trying to understand this. What were the mini tens of thousands of dollars I paid to the federal government over a period of 40 years in the form of Social Security taxes then?

You don't have a "Social Security" balance that you can eventually withdraw from in retirement. SS taxes just go into the general government budget, and the future retirement benefits they are theoretically associated with can be modified or rescinded at any moment. The odds of any 20s-30s-year-old--who is currently contributing funds to the Social Security scheme--eventually receiving Social Security checks to the tune of those that boomers are receiving today is virtually zero. It is simply a fiscal impossibility.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#424

Post by nonethewiser »

KyeRussell wrote: post #362
nonethewiser wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we’re playing that game, then this diagnosis is coming from a group with severe anxiety.

This being any sort of ‘tit-for-tat’ response is coincidentally a pretty ‘boomer’ take on mental health. Anxiety can be (and is often) situational, and anxious situations can be a catalyst for general anxiety disorder, etc. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know what it’s like to be an average income earning millennial, even though I am a millennial. But the fact that I’m sitting here on my nice fat tech worker s…

What about observing a trend is a boomer take?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#425

Post by notch898a »

gleenn wrote: post #386
spywaregorilla wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher). https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos... People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old…

My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.

Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that by paying some token contribution like the property tax for their grade school or whatever and then taking advantage of their tax dollars when you get older.

This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#426

Post by legitster »

Levitz wrote: post #364
legitster wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is only superficially the issue. Your currency is only as valuable as there is a market of goods and services to spend it on. Even if you ate the rich and took all of their money, all you've done is created inflation because the actual value of the economy hasn't shifted. An economy is more about the "stuff" than the money - even Marx would have agreed with as much. So this is only ostensibly about funding a de…

Yes. But money is how stuff gets done. It's not an immediate effect, but give people money to people who want food and more food will be purchased, which in turn increases the production of food.

This is the same idea behind trickle down economics, but I don't think reality really works this way. Simply giving people money does not inherently create economic growth.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#427

Post by nonethewiser »

justinclift wrote: post #419
nonethewiser wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we’re playing that game, then this diagnosis is coming from a group with severe anxiety.

> ... from a group with severe anxiety. Maybe they have a good reason for it, which is the point? :p

Doesn’t remove the anxiety, however justified

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#428

Post by eweise »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #304

In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations own…

If you're referring to social security, that money is not free at all. People pay into the system for 40-50 years so they can get a fraction of it back in retirement.

Regarding college inflation, that's purely caused by young people taking out loans. Don't do that. My kid is taking a good number of his classes at the community college. If y'all started shopping for the cheapest way to get an education, costs would come down.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#429

Post by WalterBright »

fleddr wrote: post #355
bjourne wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

Great comment. The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human! All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just kee…

> drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

Here's where the money went:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

And that doesn't include all the state and local government.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#430

Post by toast0 »

chmod600 wrote: post #357
mywittyname wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about every pension system, but there are many that invest in government bonds. The problem what that approach is the sustainability of the system depends entirely upon interest rates, which have been at all time lows for the past 15 years. Some private pensions invest in the broader market. All investment systems suffer from this exact problem: returns aren't guaranteed. Even people with 401ks might exp…

"there are many that invest in government bonds" If a government "invests" in its own bonds, that's not an investment.

Many government pensions invest in other governments' bonds.
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