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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

#601

Post by interstice »

jltsiren wrote: post #583
amag wrote: 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…

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and…

I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#602

Post by lmm »

Aurornis wrote: post #422
bombcar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few highly paid professions where the main purpose of that profession’s union seems to be to prevent there being an adequate supply of the professionals.

What I find interesting is how often casual discussions about unionization on the internet will organically reinvent this concept. Especially on HN, Reddit, and Twitter the banter about unionization always seems to pivot toward using the union to force companies not to hire certain developers. The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to ot…

> The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)

Bear in mind it's completely normalised for companies to charge higher prices in one market than another, and put barriers in place to make sure customers in the more expensive market can't just pay the lower price. So all the union is doing here is bringing it closer to a level playing field.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#603

Post by KPGv2 »

amag wrote: 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…

> we used to have some 10 good years of doing whatever we wanted

Don't you get a whole month of vacation every year while you are in your working years?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#604

Post by ilya_m »

skissane wrote: post #567
tomp wrote: post #483

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. Retirement depends on having young workers. People approaching 60, 70 simply didn't have enough kids to have good retirement. It's not…

I live in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement, and the government pension is intended just as a back-up for those who are too poor to do so. Everyone has an investment account ("superannuation", or "super" for short) which is taxed at at a reduced tax rate, and your employer is required to pay 12% of your salary into it. There are many providers of such accounts ("superannuation fund…

> in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement,

I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:

The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#605

Post by triceratops »

jordanb wrote: post #56
constantcrying wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is about how the system is funded. If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic. But the pension system in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now . This can only work with a steadily growing economy which continually generates m…

Fundamentally any retirement plan that doesn't involve canned food in a celler is pay-go because the retirees will be consuming resources from the economy they retired into rather than the one they were workers in. Their retirement savings can be in public company stocks instead of government guarantees but that only works if there are people willing to buy those stocks (ex: younger people saving for retirement).

That's only true if the economy doesn't grow i.e. productivity doesn't improve. If retirements are funded from returns on assets they scale with productivity. If they're funded by current workers they're bounded by the limits of population and wage growth.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#606

Post by KPGv2 »

interstice wrote: post #601
jltsiren wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and…

I guess this comes down to whether you view what you get back for devoting most of a life to work as a negotiated agreement with government or as a one way street.

Isn't democracy the negotiation part?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#607

Post by KPGv2 »

galactus wrote: post #595
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…

When you state that "European social safety nets are pretty damn generous" it seems to imply that someone else, rather than the Europeans themselves, is being generous and footing the bill.

I don't think it implies such a thing:

definition "generous":

• (of a person) showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected: she was generous with her money.

• showing kindness toward others: it was generous of them to ask her along.

• (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary: a generous sprinkle of pepper.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#608

Post by [deleted] »

incompatible wrote: post #526
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…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#609

Post by 8bitsrule »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #456
gessha wrote: 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.

>just an illusion

It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).

So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#610

Post by creato »

bibabaloo wrote: post #481
neom wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a sense of how you see it playing out?

I feel, generally, with an aging population + rising unemployment due to AI, we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare. The most optimistic, utopian, solution would be UBI and an artisan economy, but I think we all know that capitalism isn't kind enough for that to play out so we'll probably end up with…

> we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare.

I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.

The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.

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