661–670 of 1001 posts
The solution is pretty simple for the society. Either have three kids or you work till you are 70.
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…
Another idea: Allow people to retire early, but they receive lower monthly payments from national pension. Most national pensions have the reverse: You can retire later and receive higher monthly payments.
> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself.
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My guess - they'll just gut the benefits to anemic levels for everyone slowly rather than some big easy to point to maneuver like this.
Whoever does that will get voted out. Voters over 62 make up >25% of the midterm vote. By 2030 - that number could easily be >30%.
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…
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Like med schools in the US
The US docotor shortage is a myth. Wait times are the result of beauracratic nonsense has reduced the efficiency of the existing physician workforce [1, 2]. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26132... [2] https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-problem-with-u-s-health-care-isn...
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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…
> People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities. Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries. It was only when the postwar regime of making new housing illegal took hold, and housing prices inevitably spiralled out of control, that they stopped. > Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized…
London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.
> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.
Oh, I agree. However, for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.
> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.
Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!
> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.
It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.
> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.
Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.
> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.
Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?
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It depends on the system. In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing. Luckily there are still parties fighting the implementation. I don't think ponzi scheme is justified, it is too negative, it just makes no sense to actually accumulate all that wealth for so long.
> "every man for himself" 401(k) thing It allows you to do that. In most cases there are various life index funds that operate the way a traditional pension scheme would and is likely the default option in any employer plan. You can additionally add your own money outside of your paycheck and you can use the money inside of the fund to make your own investments. You are also allowed to take personal loans against you…
Unfortunately Holland has become very neoliberal and everything collective or social is frowned upon. That's really why they changed it.
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Taxes pay these pensions. Taxes that citizens have paid for their whole working lives, with the understanding that they would benefit from that pension fund in their later years. It's actually far closer to a "vacation", but not "sponsored by the government" -- closer to "that you've been saving for already for years."
You save for a state pension the same way you save for state health care - not at all. The current working people pay for the current retired people, and this only works so long as there are significantly more working than retired people. Advantage of this system: You dont need to be afraid of not having saved enough money if you end up living too long. Disadtvantage: Thid only works if there are substantially more w…
Currently, it's the worst of both worlds: you get taxed quite a significant portion of your income, and then, in the middle of the game, someone changes the rules and tells you to play longer in order to get the prize.
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> 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…
> You've created an impossible situation which will never exist It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea) > why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed. Humans took care of THEIR elderly. The system was made to take care of THE elderly. Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not…
Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.
> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.
Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.
> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)
I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases