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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

#861

Post by FirmwareBurner »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #852
Nathanba wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But employees are not just pure net gains. If you hire a bunch of "retirement jobbers" you will still have to manage them. It sounds logical at first that you simply hire a few older people for lesser pay but in Europe the question is also why a 65 year old would accept a far lower paid job if he can simply go back on welfare and get paid the same? The reality will probably be that most old people will be unemployed…

The government itself could hire many of them at a lower price point. Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population. Low wages, social corpo cred and government support (see subsidies) are things they could get for using this. And this would be cheaper than outright paying for the full needs of an ever growing elderly population and an ever shrinking working population. Sure, n…

>The government itself could hire many of them at a lower price point.

To do what?

>Similarly, firms relying on content moderation farms could use the elderly population.

Why would they do that when AI or foreign labor is cheaper? And this is happening right now, let alone in 2040 when there will be more automation and more offshoring. There no room for low-skill repetitive jobs in developed western economies unless you go full communism where the government employs everyone.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#862

Post by wyager »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #519
wyager wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 brin…

> I have little interest in humouring the idea that all of this boil down to an optimisation problem... I do have an economic degree by the way

I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it

> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.

Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.

You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#863

Post by account42 »

munksbeer wrote: post #822
zurfer wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Incentivising to have more kids is not going to work. Things have changed. A lot of people just don't want to have children, and it isn't a financial issue. There does not seem to be a strong correlation between countries which make it easier and more affordable to have children, and the replacement rate.

The government isn't just responsible for finance but all of society. Incentivizing kids doesn't have to just mean dangling money in front of parents. Not having government-funded media encourage lifestyles that lead to less children would be a good start.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#864

Post by wyager »

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)?

CS and math should be a solid basis here. To be honest I don't remember at all where I picked this stuff up - a lot of it comes from random disjoint fields like optimization theory, graph theory, etc. which impinge on econ all the time, although I couldn't tell you a definitive book on the subject(s)

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#865

Post by lm28469 »

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…

> pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you had the chance to find a nice job that paid well and played your cards right it definitely is, why do we need to pay high pensions to people who own multiple properties, have millions on the side and could EASILY thrive just from their passive income ?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#866

Post by account42 »

neuroelectron wrote: post #792
NewsaHackO wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy dog whistle

While 20% of their population is foreign and their birthrate is below replacement, this economic issue shows why it's a failure. Foreigners are too well integrated which prevents the kind of dynamism that is needed in all territories that boosts the economy. Britain should set the standard.

Britain is setting the standard alright - for what not to do if you value your society.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#867

Post by mike_hearn »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #701
Varqu wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. 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 pri…

> Then perhaps it should be said openly, that this is an elderly tax, not a pension and it should be just kept to the minimum, allowing people to save more of their own income for their own private pension. This doesn't fundamentally change the equation. Whether you save pension points or cash or ETFs it's just a coupon for your share of the economy of the future. It's a promise that the future generation will share…

It's fundamentally different in any society with strong private property rights. A private pension is a set of investments, i.e. something that ultimately is owned by you. How much those investments pay off, if at all, is unknown, but if they do pay off then it's yours.

A state pension would be illegal for anyone except the state to run, because it'd be classed as a Ponzi scheme. Those are recognized as being unstable, hence why you're not allowed to run one. There is no investment into owned assets that pay out, just the appearance of it.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#868

Post by sieabahlpark »

js8 wrote: post #815
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…

"Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government" Who are you talking for? I think plenty of people would prefer it to be that. We should respect our elderly, as a society.

[dead]

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#869

Post by mike_hearn »

wsatb wrote: post #648
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…

You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.

They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#870

Post by hijodelsol »

thordenmark wrote: post #735

This is the problem with retirement systems built on Ponzi schemes. The low birth rate has accelerated the inevitable crash. If my understanding is correct, Norway has a system based on investment in the country's economy, in particular oil production in the North Sea. And they are not needing the same austerity measures to retirement benefits.

I assume you are unfamiliar with how pensions in Denmark work. While there is an unfunded social security part that is paid for through taxes, >90% of Danish workers have "occupational pension plans" that they contribute about 15% of their salary to. By the time they retire, they have saved on average 2 million DKK [https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/fo...], so about 300,000 USD. At that time, life expectancy is about 20 years, so that is about 15,000 USD per year from individual capital-backed schemes alone. For the 60% of Danes that are home owners, this alone could probably cover all basic living expenses outside of very HCOL areas. In that way, Denmark already strikes a good balance between purely tax-based schemes (that you are probably referring to as "Ponzi") and socially detrimental schemes like a pure Austrian backpack approach (which would leave people that cannot work in deep poverty).
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