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Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#521

Post by pengaru »

oldpersonintx2 wrote: post #136
dueltmp_yufsy wrote: post #97

Seems the US will have to do this soon. Just very very unpopular. Not sure which party will actually pull the trigger.

"Not retiring" in the US will be more dictated by inability to purchase a home than Social Security. Look at all these people around you in their forties who are still renting. They are basically too late to buy. They will be "forever renters". This means they will have to work until death, as their rents continue to rise when their peers who owned homes took their downsizing premium and lived off of it for a few yea…

Housing in the US isn't anywhere near as cost prohibitive as a vocal minority of people like to make it sound like it is.

You just have to give up on the Santa Monicas, San Franciscos, and Manhattans of the nation. There's plenty of affordable housing outside the top tier cities, and modern tech has made it easier than ever to work from practically anywhere on the planet.

The only people in their 40s I know of who are still renting that I would consider "forever renters" are being extraordinarily undisciplined with their finances and spend what they could be saving towards a down payment on credit card debt they self-inflicted.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#522

Post by TrackerFF »

I mean, makes sense? I live in Norway, so quite similar socioeconomics. People become older, so makes sense they have to work longer.

Imagine 50 years down the road, and the life expectancy is 90+ years. If people retired at age 65, that would mean you'd spend almost one third of your life as a retiree, living off a system which you paid into for 40-45 years.

But with that said, you can't expect a plumber, roofer, kindergarten teacher, etc. to work until they're 70. Your body will likely be shot years before that.

Chill office work, though? A senior colleague of mine just recently retired. He's 68, and wanted to work even longer - but had promised his wife that he'd retire for the past 5 years.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#523

Post by kulahan »

tomp wrote: post #506
timschmidt wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced. You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, so…

> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)

This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#524

Post by zeroCalories »

triceratops wrote: post #488
zeroCalories wrote: post #18

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 want to have a long and easy retirement for your elderly, you need a growing population Or a population that can produce the same amount of stuff and services with fewer and fewer workers. Fortunately that's what capitalism excels at.

That's a nice way to restate that young people will have to produce more, and receive less. But tell me, what incentive do you have to produce more when you'll just have it snatched away to be given to someone else? Why not move to the U.S where your productivity will be rewarded, or just put in minimal effort?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#525

Post by godelski »

wyager wrote: post #493
godelski wrote: post #442

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…

  > There are finite resources to allocate.
The truth of this statement depends on context.

I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.

The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).

This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.

The same is true about the economy in general.

You're right!

  >  If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...

IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#526

Post by incompatible »

dralley wrote: post #491
toomuchtodo wrote: post #456

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…

I don't think we need nearly as much as most people think. How much is being taken by the wealthy from the workers already? How much effort goes on the work of maintaining and protecting the system of inequality? How many people are already doing nothing when they would be willing to work?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#528

Post by godelski »

glimshe wrote: post #513
wyager wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#529

Post by incompatible »

tredre3 wrote: post #514
dralley wrote: post #491

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.

I haven't worked for a long time. If others were like me, I suppose the system that exists now would fall apart, but really, I don't consume a lot.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#530

Post by zeroCalories »

kulahan wrote: post #523
tomp wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)

This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.

Sometimes you gotta know when the parties over and it's time to leave.
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