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Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

telegraph.co.uk

511–520 of 1001 posts

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#511

It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system. In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future. And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing? Graeber's thesis of bull…

> In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage. However, nobody wants to live at a 1930s living standard. It turns out that in aggregate people prefer to spend productivity gains on conveniences and higher standards of living than on working fewer hours.

Lol no you cannot Having 1 wage result in an owned home and enough to feed a family! What a joke...

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#512

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…

If you had to pick an age for societal burden, it'd be the average "young" person who isn't making a net-positive contribution until around the age of 25. Most people don't receive a corresponding 25 years of retirement, and the retirement they do receive is a product of contributing to it for 40 years. But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real…

Young people are an investment. Old people are purley a liability. This is true regardless of how they're cared for, when looking at it from a macro perspective. How the pie is split matters when talking about the sustainability of the system. Could you survive if 90% of your value is in investments? Maybe. 90% in liabilities? Probably not.

Having people fund their own retirement would be ideal from a economic standpoint, but given the histories and complexities of existing systems, it is probably not acceptable politically, or morally, in any country. Honestly it's a distraction.

At the end of the day, a country cannot tolerate too many freeloaders. It doesn't matter if they're pensioners or retired at 50, living to 100 hedge fund managers. Productivity is really the only thing that matters for a countrie's economic destiny.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#513
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself No, it is a resource allocation problem. I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they'r…

> No, it is a resource allocation problem. There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way. > I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected netw…

Im interested in what you are saying but I don't fully understand all your points. Where can I learn more (I have a CS and math background)?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Humans need a constant supply of resources and shelter to survive. There is no "system" which avoids this inconvenient fact. In the absence of any "system" at all, you would still need to constantly work for survival - and in fact you'd just die as soon as you were no longer able to do so due to illness or injury much less old age. In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement…

The "system" would fall apart if people didn't work for at least half their lives, true, but it is absolutely not true that we need people to work until they're 70.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#515
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference between endangering other people vs endangering only yourself.

Yeah, it's not like operating heavy equipment at a construction site will ever endanger anyone.

Yes, doing so at a construction site it is considerably less dangerous to society in general than public roads. Not to mention the individual is more likely implied to be operating at some baseline of function (observed by foreman and others at the work site) which is not the case when a private individual is just driving on public roads.

You are straining credulity.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's a tough reality to face. Problems are piling up for the west that aren't easily solved, and not just with social benefits. Something as mundane as aging sewage systems is starting to become a real problem in many countries.

Demographic collapse is hardly unique to "the west". Have a look at the population age histogram in China, South Korea, and Japan.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#517
post #464
post #409

This is truly sad. As a Swede I fear my country may follow suite. The retirement age in Sweden used to be 65 and now it's 67. Looking at older people around me, most lead a much less active life after 75. So, if we were lucky we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted before old age and age-related diseases start affecting us so much we become limited to a much smaller world. But now we have maybe…

I’d rather a robust pension starting at 70 than an anemic one starting at 55 or an underfunded one starting at 65. You can fill a gap before that pension starts with part time work etc. It’s much harder to make up a shortfall when you’re 85.

But for an individual that would die at 71, which pension would they rather have, in your opinion?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#518
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s what happens when nations like Denmark and Sweden with extensive social wellfare system, does not grow organically and instead allow people to invade their countries and let them use the system without giving anything back. I am pretty sure that immigrants pay taxes.

Some immigrants do a great job but way too many have no interest in integrating nor working, they are perfectly happy with getting money and social healthcare without giving anything back. They even get enough money to send to relatives not able to leave their shitty countries.

> They even get enough money to send to relatives not able to leave their shitty countries.

You're doing a great job satirizing the extreme positions and hateful attitude of nationalistic xenophobes.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#519
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entirely arbitrary. Society heavily favours capital above labour. That’s why we have very rich inheritors never working and people toiling until they are 70. It’s entirely a choice. This issue has solutions we collectively decide not to put in place.

If you stop "rich inheritors" from existing, this moves you away from the knee of the optimization frontier and you're certainly even worse off as an old person. If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.

While I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem (it doesn’t - fiscal policies and social policies scarily live at the intersection of economy and politics - plus even from a pure economic point of view it is much more complicated than a simple optimisation problem and I do have an economic degree by the way), on top of you being frankly condescending while bringing little to the table which would somehow explain if not justify the attitude, you can certainly get away with far heavier inheritance taxes without actually hurting your economy in any meaningful way. You can also tax the rich a lot more heavily without hurting your economy in any meaningful way.

And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans need a constant supply of resources and shelter to survive. There is no "system" which avoids this inconvenient fact. In the absence of any "system" at all, you would still need to constantly work for survival - and in fact you'd just die as soon as you were no longer able to do so due to illness or injury much less old age. In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement…

The "system" would fall apart if people didn't work for at least half their lives, true, but it is absolutely not true that we need people to work until they're 70.

Not with current population growth curves being what they are.
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