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Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

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Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#41

Post by alephnerd »

The Israel example doesn't pass the sniff test.

While Israel didn't build the next "Intel", it built the next Cisco (Palo Alto Networks), Symantec (Wiz), Akamai, and it's own "Intel" (Tower Semiconductors), and Israeli VC has absolutely cornered the Enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry.

Yet, concentrating on business creation seems to ignore the fact that high value industries like much of tech just don't generate that much employment.

The high-tech sector only represents a little over 11% of overall employment in Israel [0]

Median gross salary is around $2800/mo [1] yet tech salaries are around $10,000/mo [2]

While the tech industry is extremely prominent in Israel, it isn't a major employment generator. Most Israelis don't work in tech and are impacted by extremely high CoL - Israel has some of the highest cost of living among OECD countries [3]

This article posits that additional industrial policy can help rebuild large employment industries. While I am strongly in favor of industrial policy, most high value industries are high value EXPLICITLY because they are heavily automated or have low headcount requirements.

Industrial policy for the sake of generating employment simply doesn't work when high value jobs have significant barriers to entry (no, not everyone can code and not everyone can synthesize biopharmaceuticals).

[0] - https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-t...

[1] - https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%...

[2] - https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760

[3] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#42

Post by defrost »

nradov wrote: post #29
lenerdenator wrote: post #10

At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs .

The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.

Hell of trope there.

I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years.

My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935.

He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here.

Rephrased, it's just as problematic, albeit with a kernel of truthiness:

  Clearly some of us are still fully capable of doing manual labour at 67 but those who have spent their lives doing software "engineering" have usually accumulated some significant mental burn out by that age. They need a break.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#43

Post by Buttons840 »

missedthecue wrote: post #34
Buttons840 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want the debt paid off? The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years? What happens if we don't pay off the debt?

Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend. The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential. Situ…

So lets raise taxes now and pay it off. Who should we tax? Should we squeeze blood from stones and try to get the poor to pay more taxes, or should we tax the wealthy?

Who am I kidding. The current administration showed us--what was it? last week?--that they prefer cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing the deficit.

Republicans ALWAYS increase the deficit. Democrats usually do, but not always.

It looks like we'll probably let the generation that created this mess retire like normal, and instead try to fix it by making their children and grandchildren work until death.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#44

Post by programjames »

standardUser wrote: post #21
SoftTalker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.

We have a way to measure this, it's called the Gini Coefficient, and it spiked in the 80's under deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. Since then, it's been out of whack with Western norms and now more closely resembles Latin American wealth distribution. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2023&lo...

I think the Thiel index is more theoretically grounded (essentially measures entropy). Not sure if data gets collected on it though.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#45

Post by Marsymars »

Detrytus wrote: post #27
lenerdenator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. There is, though. The 60+ year-olds wanting to retire spent the last four-to-six decades racking up a metric crapload of public and private debt. Not only did they spend a lot, they seriously weakened the ability for revenues to cover said debts. Severe bureaucratic handicapping of revenue agencies, mean…

There is nothing wrong with living off of your savings. After all it’s the money you earned so you don’t owe anyone anything for it, and you can spend it as you see fit. The problem with retirement schemes today is that most people’s savings are not enough to pay for their retirement so the younger generations need to chip in.

“Savings” are just an abstraction - people can’t literally live off their savings - they trade their savings for labour, and the system is rigged so that those doing the labour have disproportionately little power to set the exchange rate, and the value of savings get juiced to benefit those holding them.

We could shuffle some numbers around with fiscal, monetary and labour policies in ways that would result in far more wealth flowing from the old to the young, rather than from the young to the old as is happening now, and it would still be true that “people earned their savings and can spend it how they see fit”.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#46

Post by noah_buddy »

defrost wrote: post #42
nradov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.

Hell of trope there. I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years. My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935. He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here. Rephrased, it's ju…

You see those who have survived the job, not those who don’t. Have you ever asked your father about people he’s worked with who are now dead? Probably a whole lot of em.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#47

Post by XorNot »

defrost wrote: post #42
nradov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The retirement age has already been pushed back about as far as it can be, barring major advancements in medicine. Maybe some of us will still be fully capable of doing software work at age 67 but those who have spent their lives doing manual labor have usually accumulated some significant disabilities by that age. They need a break.

Hell of trope there. I live in a rural community filled with farmers and FiFo workers (fly in | fly out mine and rig workers) with a median age of ~ 60 years. My father has worked hard manual labour his entire life, he only recently stopped splitting wood and climbing ladders. He was born in 1935. He's not unusual here, many 60 and 70 year olds, 80 year olds even, are still active on the land here. Rephrased, it's ju…

Pretty significant selection bias in that observation.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#48

Post by davidgay »

felipeerias wrote: post #37
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #20

Interesting claim - let's see if it passes the sniff test. It's very unlikely that we are actually currently at an ideal retirement age on the margin where a move in either direction hurts. If raising the retirement age hurts young people, then lowering the retirement age probably helps young people. Does that sound correct to you? Would lowering the retirement age now help young people?

If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them. However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes. In Spain, for example, the social security has a la…

> However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

If one accepts this hypothesis, then raising the retirement age is good for all previously-working people, as they now have less people to support and more workers providing that support...

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#49

Post by WalterBright »

I'm very skeptical of this. It smacks of burning half your crops so the price of the remainder gets bid up.

We can also examine it by pushing it further. What if the mandatory retirement age was 30? The wages for those under 30 will be higher because of supply and demand, but they'd also have to support all those people over 30 who are not contributing anything to the economy.

In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace.

Re: Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

#50

Post by jmyeet »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #28
Buttons840 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retirement isn't a right Society decides what people's rights are. Why should we not decide that retirement is a right? The wealthy not paying a wealth tax is not a right.

The math still has to check out. Yes I agree getting rid of the ultra wealthy improves the situation a lot and should be done. But at some point you still have too many retired people for the working population to support. At that point it's going to have to be considered that a 60 year old is still perfectly capable of working low physical demand jobs rather than spending 10-30 years on cruise ships.

Social security spending is currently about $1.5T a year, with receipts slightly lower than that and reserves of ~$3T [1].

US corporate profits are around $4 trillion a year [2].

I view that $4T as the exploitation of surplus labor value. Put another way: it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for labor. A mere 10% of that would make a significant difference to Social Security.

As for your contention that a 60 year old is capable of working. Doing what? The prospects are already dire for people who are laid off in their 50s. You want them to be cashiers at Safeway at minimum wage? Minimum wage isn't even a living wage.

Many of these people have done physically demanding but completely necessary jobs their entire lives. Their bodies can be wrecked.

I don't know your circumstances but generally speaking I see a lot of "tech-hubris" on HN. People who skew younger and are very privileged to work in tech. The hubris part is being young, many think this will go on forever. The reality is ageism is rampant in tech. The other part is thinking you won't be impacted by automation (and AI).

Will you be bagging groceries until you're 67-69 because Amazon made an AI that now does your job?

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html

[2]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corporate_profits_quarterl...

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