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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

#431

Post by pid-1 »

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?

Consider the following:

1. A high infant mortality rate brings average lifespan down.

2. Infants don't contribute to the economy nor to public pension funds.

A country might have low life expectancy, but a relatively close number of workers and retirees, as life expectances can be (even more so in developing countries) multimodal.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#432

Post by hinata08 »

kwere wrote: post #17
lm28469 wrote: post #2

That's what you get when 60%+ of the wealth generated in the last two years went to the top 1% and you ask the bottom 80% to work two years longer to cover for an imaginary deficit fyi taxing the 40 richest people in France 2% more would cover the same amount of money as having the entire active population work 2 more years. edit: since it's not clear, I'm talking about pension related debt (the main argument of the…

Or maybe the poorer parts of society should stop trying to be overeliant on the tax levied on a minority of skilled earners (so no trust fund kids) creating welfarism/populism, breaking the fabric of society (as in ancient Rome),incentivizing emigration/delocalization of taxbase; and try to be more selfsufficient from a budget stanpoint, like having a self-funded pension system, that in France case would be increasin…

skilled workers don't make a buck in France

as an engineer, you choose to stay in France for the values, for the quality of life, for your family, or from some kind of patriotism after having had free college.

And you go the USA for money !

Median earnings for engineering graduates is 36k/year in most schools. After direct 'contributions', you're lucky to get about 2000k€ /month (on which you have to save for other income taxes for the end of the year)

My first engineering job, during COVID, was paid 20k€/year ! (bellow the legal minimum, but it was declared as an internship)

It's far from the 6 figure salaries in cali !

Medical doctors should do about 6000€/month too.

Companies in here don't care about hiring skilled workers. They want cheap workers, because they have no long term R&D.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#433

Post by RestlessMind »

vkou wrote: post #241
retinaros wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

> and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world . Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In…

> why would you expect that the first-third world gap to not continue to normalize?

If the third world raises to the first world standards, then great. If that process involves first world standards falling to meet third world ones in the middle at the cost of first-world middle class, then there is a big problem. See where Trump and Sanders got most of their votes and you will start to see a pattern here.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#434

Post by pastacacioepepe »

refurb wrote: post #358
gymbeaux wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at the same time I don’t want to be forced into paying say $1M into social security and only live to see $200k come back to me

Everybody loves socialism until they get back less than they put in.

It's not a zero-sum game. You pay, you receive back all the benefits of a developed society AND the retirement. Otherwise you could keep all your money and live alone in a jungle or desert.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#435

Post by WalterBright »

lumost wrote: post #377
_8j50 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you don't freaking need your own new house to start a family. In most countries most people never buy a new house. Second, wealth is not zero-sum, there isn't a magic pot of gold redistributed between people. As value and demand are added to the economy, so is wealth because the new young people with demands can provide skills or time to be used in value creation and then they also (and older folks that…

You seem to be making an assumption that rich old people can consume their wealth. I suspect the reality is that they cannot and in many cases are obligate savers. This creates a problem for the economy as individuals may lack the capital to start new businesses, innovate, or grow the next generation. Having a nation of renters renting from rich old oligarchs is not efficient. some redistribution may be necessary.

This is the idea again that wealthy people hoard their money, and it must be liberated to benefit the economy.

The fact is, their money is not stored in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. It's all invested in the economy.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#436

Post by joelwilliamson »

coryrc wrote: post #287
justeleblanc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees. Where do you think the money comes from? Thin air? Any increase in the value of pension funds (for example) is coming from the workers.

China's building massive amounts of underused housing. US boomers could have built long-lived buildings and infrastructure (high-speed trains) which provide usefulness to people later in exchange for them paying some money for retirees. Instead, they built ever-decaying roads and rotting ticky-tacky boxes and left nothing durable for future generations. Hell, they even ripped out trains in cities across the country.…

Wasn't the Seattle interurban torn up in the early 1940s? I don't think you can blame that on the boomers.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#437

Post by RestlessMind »

billforsternz wrote: post #305
vkou wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world . Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In…

I've been pondering this exact point for a while. I think we are seeing Western economies regressing to the mean, it's a long term trend. I'm not happy about it, but I can't claim it's not fair.

> I can't claim it's not fair.

Fair to whom? Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries? That will just destroy their well-paying jobs in exchange for some cheap Chinese goods and Indian call centers.

I also feel the same way about current "remote first" trend - American software engineers are shooting themselves in the foot by embracing remote work. Wait until your salaries get normalized to Brazil or Indian levels. Anecdotally, my company had multiple rounds of layoffs and has started hiring all the backfills in the third world now.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#438

Post by hcurtiss »

retinaros wrote: post #235
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #87

The french pension reform attempts have been going on for decades . I remember in the mid-90s a huge, weeks- (months-?) long public transit strike which, funnily enough, kick-started Parisian's interest in roller-blading (and led to the awesome weekly Friday-night roller-blading tour [1]. If it's your thing, I highly recommend it! But be prepared to have to go over some cobblestone sections) France's system has the w…

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

By increasing everybody's salaries, it seems likely to me the cost of goods and services would go up by virtue of inflation. There is no free lunch. At the same time, prosperity is not a zero sum game. The rise of China has coincided with increased living standards in nearly every country. I'm not sure who would be "stealing" your wages. If I were to say, it's French labor policies that are stifling innovation and productivity, and it's manifesting in a decrease in living standards. I once met a couple French businessmen in a bar, both in the tech space. They bemoaned how difficult it was to fire anybody in France, meaning they worked very hard to not hire people to begin with. They were also in the US specifically to look for investment opportunities. This is the kind of thing that's choking France.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#439

Post by spywaregorilla »

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?

When someone says the life expectancy used to be lower and we now have a lot of people who are old are not working would lead you to believe that there were not a lot of old people not working in the past. That would be wrong. The plurality of people were dying at 75 as I said.

The average lifespan is very insufficient to tell you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#440

Post by justinclift »

nonethewiser wrote: post #427
justinclift wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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

Um, why would that be expected?
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