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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

#511

Post by areyousure »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #343
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…

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…

> The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930.

The most common age of death in France, for both men and women, in 1930 was 0.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#512

Post by cmyr »

tekla wrote: post #499
atleastoptimal wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we removed the electoral college in the US, or if voting day were a national holiday, all those issues would automatically be addressed. The old and conservative make too powerful a voting block, and it perpetuates every corporate, oligarchic, xenophobic greed cycle one could point to as a rot in our system. I don't think old people are bad because they're just taking government money and have big fancy houses, bu…

The "all problems will be solved if all my political policies are implemented" seems to be a fairly insidious strain of authoritarianism that is infecting the progressives.

'insidious authoritarianism' is a curious way of describing two not-unreasonable proposals that are presumably aimed at making american democracy more representative and accessible...

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#513

Post by WalterBright »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #454
WalterBright wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-debt-25-percent/ (25% of national debt was incurred during the last administration; half was COVID relief measures, the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO) Sources at bottom of the first link. This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a gros…

Your thesis is the government consumption of the GDP has nothing to do with where the productivity improvements went?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#514

Post by mynameishere »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #13

It's nice to see a populace willing to defend itself from the ruling class. If only we had this kind of organizational capability in the US.

Anytime a real protest occurs in the US, 100s of people wind up sitting in solitary confinement, uncharged, for months or years. We've only had one real protest in living memory (that I'm aware of) and that will probably be about it. No one really wants to go to the Gulag.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#515

Post by dragonwriter »

mynameishere wrote: post #514
yoyohello13 wrote: post #13

It's nice to see a populace willing to defend itself from the ruling class. If only we had this kind of organizational capability in the US.

Anytime a real protest occurs in the US, 100s of people wind up sitting in solitary confinement, uncharged, for months or years. We've only had one real protest in living memory (that I'm aware of) and that will probably be about it. No one really wants to go to the Gulag.

> Anytime a real protest occurs in the US, 100s of people wind up sitting in solitary confinement, uncharged, for months or years.

That seems dubious under any plausible definition of "real protest".

> We've only had one real protest in living memory (that I'm aware of)

(1) Taken as true, the sample size of 1 undermines the impact of the preceding claim.

(2) Define "real protest".

(3) What is the single example in living memory?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#516

Post by toomuchtodo »

WalterBright wrote: post #513
toomuchtodo wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-debt-25-percent/ (25% of national debt was incurred during the last administration; half was COVID relief measures, the other half was tax cuts for the wealthy) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-deficit-idUSKB... (Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO) Sources at bottom of the first link. This doesn’t include healthcare cost inflation due to a gros…

Your thesis is the government consumption of the GDP has nothing to do with where the productivity improvements went?

You’re comparing decades of productivity going to capital to debt incurred within the last half decade (“Here's where the money went”).

The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here.

To arrived at an improved end state, one would need more unions and labor organizing, as well as perhaps ratcheting down the work week to 4 days.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#517

Post by 76384638 »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #506
supernova87a wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what case you're alluding to or what program that has such examples. But those examples sound like fraud and corruption.

Citizens hold their government to a higher standard. As an analogy, the government can't just go to the hardware store to buy a hammer. It needs to buy a hammer from an American using a drawn out bidding process that preferences veterans and minorities, etc etc. Iterate this for evey little thing. That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. Peop…

More realistically, it needs to buy the hammer from a political donor, a family member or friend of a politician, or some other politically connected person. The hammer will cost many times as much as anyone else would pay for it, and may well be the wrong kind of hammer or otherwise defective, assuming it's delivered at all. If a bidding process is used, the criteria will usually have been designed to favour a predetermined winner.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#518

Post by Supermancho »

ajmurmann wrote: post #418
Supermancho wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere It's not magical, granted. "The economy" is a subjective state (eg metrics) that solely resides in the human mind, rather than a singular thing.

Don't confuse the metrics with the thing itself. The economy is not metrics in the human mind. The economy is me liking Envy apples more than disgusting Red Delicious apples and buying Envy instead. The economy is an employee getting a good offer to fill a need a company has and going back to their current employer to find out who will pay them more / gets more value from them and it's willing to thus pay more. Thing…

> The economy is not metrics in the human mind.

It most certainly is and I have not encountered anything to indicate otherwise. Individual transactions are no more relevant than GDP is. These are individual metrics or acts that influence those metrics, which try to quantify aspects of an aggregate concept.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#519

Post by 76384638 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #345
76384638 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A federal system sounds like a horrible idea and a really dangerous single point of failure. The consequences of such a system collapsing would be apocalyptic, and forcing everyone into a single system without competition all but guarantees corruption and mismanagement. Social security is bad enough, please don't expand it.

The federal US defined benefit pension already exists, it is called Social Security.

I did say "Social security is bad enough, please don't expand it."

Luckily, most Americans have pensions outside Social Security, so you won't end up in a situation where nobody has a pension if it collapsed. It would still be bad, but not as bad as if the federal government had a pension monopoly.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#520

Post by dntrkv »

jtr1 wrote: post #458
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…

1. At least in the US, contributions to social security stop once you hit 160k, making it a regressive tax. Raise that cap and like magic, the system is solvent. 2. Growing home prices come from a lack of supply. And you’ve completely flattened an entire generation into one wealth class, which is a gross distortion of the facts.

Removing the cap would not fix the system, it would only buy us additional time.
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