Live data from Hacker News

Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

telegraph.co.uk

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, productivity has improved tremendously. It's not clear that we actually need everyone working.

If you’re willing to put up with 1925 living standards, you can get away with working way less than people worked in 1925, and way less than most people work in 2025.

What is 1925 standards? All organic food? Mostly tailored clothing? Custom fitted shoes? Only one spouse working? Brand new, incredibly high tech cars being made affordable to the average factory worker? Incredibly high tech entertainment centers? They even had washing machines. So are we talking giving up a dishwasher, a clothes dryer, and only having 1.5 baths in houses? Or are we talking the affordable city workers' hotels where man/women mingled, that enable people to live affordably with dignity in the city center, and actually have a life?

What does '1925' mean? No more shein plastic semi-disposable clothes that fall within what 1920's would consider sci-fi dystopian, universal basic income disposable clothes? Or hormone/chemical saturated 'food' that they wouldn't recognize as such? Or huge McMansions made of literal urea board and plastic extruded chemical 'luxury vinyl' floors? Brand new technology such mass produced cars, affordably available to the average person?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did it all go so right? The highest total tax rate in the world perhaps?

The USSR and Yugoslavia and Albania and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam and China pre-2000s have all had far higher tax rates than Denmark during their worst times, so probably not a great correlation. Denmark is like all the other Nordic countries culturally, except they have much easier direct geographic lines to Central Europe. So it’s basically what you get when you combine the Nordic model (tiny homogenous Luth…

Cuba, Vietnam and Albania have way lower tax-to-GDP than Denmark. They are way below OECD average. Care to share your tax statistics on USSR, Yugoslavia, North Korea and pre-2000s China?

The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#473
post #280
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math for pensions is fine as long as the maxes payout isn’t excessive and you don’t start too early. There’s a huge cost difference between a 30k/year pension at 70 and a 45k per year pension at 60. People also focus on a fixed percentage being returned while ignoring the long term increase in productivity and people’s standards of living. In real terms people in 2025 get way more out of pension systems than peop…

I will pay more than €600000 for this “retirement insurance” over my entire career. So with 30k/year pension and living under the bridge at 70 I must have superior health to break even at 90 and benefit from the “insurance” afterwards. Ok, it’s not that bad, there is some disability insurance included. Better than nothing.

> I will pay more than €600000 for this “retirement insurance” over my entire career. So with 30k/year pension and living under the bridge at 70 I must have superior health to break even at 90

Let's see. If you pay 15000 euros per year for 40 years, and get 5% interest, that's 1,800,000 euros at retirement. Even if you held that in cash, a 30,000 euro/year withdrawal would last you to 130.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll keep getting worse, as more and more people concentrate into large cities. And large cities are family-hostile. The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities. Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. Wh…

> The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.

Everything in social sciences has plenty of reasons and exceptions.

The thing is, there is not much you can change in peoples' behavior. So your only option is to stimulate the behaviors that you want.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one issue I can think of with your idea that someone who is 75 now leads a life as you're describing. The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average? Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another…

Poorer individuals, who need retirement most, don't tend to live as long. Millennials and Gen Z are already victims of old, no-longer-applicable narratives (e.g. save cash, avoid debt, go to college...) and these ones about life expectancy will likely be added to the pile and used to disenfranchise us more while having no connection to reality.

Those old narritives were consiedered out dated for ever generation - but those who do it anyway tend to do well.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one issue I can think of with your idea that someone who is 75 now leads a life as you're describing. The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average? Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another…

With an aging population and increasingly long work lives, individual stressors will increase and societal capacity for healthcare (and overall prosperity) will dwindle. Baby boomers, having lived through some of the most incredible growth in human history, will perhaps turn out to be an anomalous blip in the life expectancy stats. Also, people age differently. There's a difference between living and being alive. Not…

You get downvoted a lot, but I challenge anyone to name a country that hasn't slashed _hard_ social benefits, pensions, % of GDP for healthcare, and similar..

I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc.

But overall reduction of cost with reduction of salaries will ultimately lead to worse healthcare.

A friend was in Germany skiing this past winter. The 10k population town he was staying didn't have a paediatrician and they had to drive 2h to get care for their kid. In Germany, in 2025. I wonder how this very town will be in 2030 or 2050 with that trend..

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR and Yugoslavia and Albania and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam and China pre-2000s have all had far higher tax rates than Denmark during their worst times, so probably not a great correlation. Denmark is like all the other Nordic countries culturally, except they have much easier direct geographic lines to Central Europe. So it’s basically what you get when you combine the Nordic model (tiny homogenous Luth…

Cuba, Vietnam and Albania have way lower tax-to-GDP than Denmark. They are way below OECD average. Care to share your tax statistics on USSR, Yugoslavia, North Korea and pre-2000s China? The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

But it has all to do with corruption. Croatia has one of the world's highest tax burdens per 1000usd earned (or at least it had from a study done some years ago) and you would think that all is is great but this couldn't be further from the truth in reality. Corruption eats it all.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#478
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when it was first introduced, it was based on life expectancy and few were expected to live beyond retirement age. [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...

Turns out retirement is just an illusion to convince you to give your best years for the system.

You're just repeating anarchists' talking points.

None of them considers that "the system" gives them food, water and energy, and that procurement of these in the absence of system means literally toiling from birth until death.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically, old people are a burden on society. If you want to have a long and easy retirement for your elderly, you need a growing population, forever. Like a ponzi scheme. The alternative is that you break young people's back by burdening them with providing for the elderly. No amount of redistribution will help a country with poor productivity. 60 was a reasonable retirement age years ago, because most people wo…

> Economically, old people are a burden on society Only if they are poor. If they're rich, they can continue "producing wealth" from interest and investments even after they're dead. It's a silly thing to say, of course, but it's built into most people's assumptions who are discussing it.

A rich person doing nothing is not productive. They produce by giving their money to someone that is productive and getting rent on it. If billionaires and aristocrats were actually a sizable amount of a country's wealth it might make sense to redistribute their wealth to the actually productive people. But they're not.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#480
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not enough immigrants that actually are of financial benefit to Denmark. Only European immigrants are a large financial benefit throughout their lifespan, and Middle Eastern immigrants are a financial detriment even in their prime working years[0]. That is apart from the cultural effects of having a large portion of your population consist of non-Danish, and especially non-European immigrants, which might hav…

It turns out that economic productivity is not tied to ethnicity or where you are from - fundamentally racist notions - but to how productive you are.

It's because the ME immigrants that make it to Denmark are traumatized refugees from war zones, with education that isn't recognized so they can often only do minimum wage work if they work at all. That's not racist, that's a result of laws and treaties.
Post reply on HN