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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

#771

Post by AngryData »

Ray20 wrote: post #260
CubsFan1060 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the fourth way be via increasing either birth rate or immigration?

No one knows how to increase the birth rate. And all the studies show that immigration increases the budget deficit, not reduces it (at least in that way in which it is being implemented now).

Not having to work as much to live seems like a decent way to increase birthrates. Having kids is/would be much easier if parents were at home more often and able to care for kids instead of contracting out childcare to daycare centers because you cannot afford to not have both parents working full time. But it comes at the cost of not growing as fast and being less attractive to capital investors/owners who are reaping by far the highest percentage of profits currently.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#772

Post by umbra07 »

csomar wrote: post #746
oezi wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did not improve people's lifespans Are you sure about that? The statistic I always heard is that we have seen a 1 year rise in life expectancy every 4 years for the past 80 years. I don't necessarily agree with the Ponzi scheme. If the ratio of old people to young people is constant then the system can be made to work with setting the retirement age without changing the burden on the young. The issue is that thi…

I have a great grand parent that made it to 90+ with relatively little clinical care. So human's life expectancy didn't change much. What changed is that many humans died of what is now preventable causes (ie: diabetes).

Your evidence is that your great grandpa lived to 90?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#773

Post by timschmidt »

SarahC_ wrote: post #733
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...)

>something humans have done since before recorded history Inuits would leave their old out in the snow, and walk away. Just saying.

I looked for references. Found the following which cites three references across 5 decades. It indicates that this practice was 1) rare even before it ended in 1939 2) considered repugnant by many Inuit 3) an alternative to starvation when there was no other choice.

https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...

I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?

I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.

Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.

Wild that I should have to say so.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#774

Post by zurfer »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #728

Realistically, what are countries supposed to do? Almost every single industrialized country has a birth rate below replacement, so there's fewer younger people to help carry the burdens. Medical care means the elderly live on and on and on, draining enormous costs as they age. I'm not trying to be cruel, but from a pure numbers sense it makes perfect sense. Would you prefer taxes go up instead? Lessen spending on in…

short term, there are only bad options.

Long term: incentivize to have more kids.

this will solve the problem in ~25 - 30 years.

but that's too late for most voters and politicians today...

there should be a term for that? how about democracies demographics dilemma?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#775

Post by vladvasiliu »

jltsiren wrote: post #621
interstice wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That socialist principle has always been the essence of the Nordic model. While the Nordic countries chose regulated markets over actual socialism, they embraced that part of socialism. As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burde…

> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

This works great when many more people have "abilities" than "needs". With a declining working-age population and increasing elderly one, the system begins to crack.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#776

Post by close04 »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #743
close04 wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically productivity increased by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. If leaders can’t figure out how to take advantage of that instead of taking advantage of the people then they have no business leading a country. The solution they are applying now is a dead end, literally. It doesn’t scale, the only place it leads to is people guaranteed to die “at work”. And elephant in the room, people in their lat…

1) Work less hours 2) Consume more 3) Have less kids 4) Live longer after the retirement age Productivity increased a lot but expecting it cover all four is way too optimistic.

5) Real wages went down, in general. The productivity pay gap has increased significantly. Take a formerly stable country which is a good indicator of the progression. [0]

Getting terminated at old age is already a huge problem made worse by delaying pension. And it will get even worse as families have to subsidize their elderly even more, making it even less likely to have more (or any) kids.

The current crop of leaders put the entire burden on average Joe. Companies are insulated, always one restructuring away from solving their problem.

And then we wonder why populists win everywhere...

[0] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#777

Post by FirmwareBurner »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #723
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be the case for your hiring principles, but this doesn't reflect the reality and statistics in my European country. People after 50 have a near zero chance of getting hired here as confirmed by the unemployment office.

> People after 50 have a near zero chance of getting hired here as confirmed by the unemployment office. What are the causes for this in your country? I assume that you are an advanced nation with strong labour laws.

Yes that a big part of the reason, laws here make it harder to fire those over 50 versus those below 50 where it's basically at-will. So companies fire you before you get to 50. Same with pregnant women, they get firing protection so companies are less likely to hire you if you're pregnant or if you're at that age were women tend to get pregnant.

You can have regulations all you want, but private companies are still profit driven and will discriminate and take dehumanizing measures to satisfy that profit incentive. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved manufacturing to Asia if they cared about labor so much.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#778

Post by AngryData »

satvikpendem wrote: post #369
jmpetroske wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that saying the problem is birth rates is misguided. Surely we have enough labor to provide for the elderly, why can’t our economy be structured to get this labor to the people who need it?

Do we have enough labor? At least in the US there has been a shortage of elderly care workers. And even if we didn't, what does it mean, concretely, to structure the economy to get the labor to those who mean it?

The US's problem with healthcare workers isn't because nobody wants to do it, its because of not the great wages for a career that many don't just inherently enjoy doing on top of high educational costs and limited positions for trainees. The not great wages cuts prospective workers, caring for old people in general is not super attractive and cuts potential workers, the limited spots for residency cuts many qualified people who had the drive and intelligence and the money to become healthcare workers, and the high educational costs kills even more potential workers before they even try putting a step into the healthcare industry.

A truthful ad for working in an old folks home in the US would be, "slightly over median wages, but with inflexible and unreliable schedules, rampant industry wide exploitation of workers and their rights, likely multiple ownership changes of your place of business, caring for potentially deranged and violent individuals, high non-refundable monetary investment up-front, no guarantee of residency availability"

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#779

Post by jampekka »

pembrook wrote: post #620
jampekka wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The heydays of communism in those countries are long gone. Current tax-to-GDP stats are simply correctly reflecting those countries being poor and heavily black market driven. And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.

> The heydays of communism in those countries are long gone.

Marxist-Leninist countries typically don't have high taxes. Which is kind of obvious as the state doesn't rely on taxes for income. North Korea claims to have eradicated taxes.

> And it’s everything to do with religion and history, why do you think all the Nordic countries had these same 20th century movements and all have extremely similar governance approaches.

Shared history sure: they were geographically very close to each other, or even under shared rulers (e.g. Finland under Sweden for half a millenium), Scandinavian languages are essentially dialects of each other, they were all part of the wider European socialist and labor movements etc. The religion and Lutheran churches opposed development if anything.

The Nordic system is not very radically different from the continental Europe in general, more a matter of degree.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#780

Post by ph1lw »

I'm 29 and honestly skeptical that life expectancy will keep on rising as it's assumed. With all the toxins, stress, rising heat deaths and crap in our environment, will most of us even be healthy enough to work till 70? Could it be 75 when I approach retirement? I think it's important to keep up some positive prospects for our generation - otherwise I can think e.g. of a higher suicide rate which then also shrinks the workforce
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