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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

#871

Post by CooCooCaCha »

charcircuit wrote: post #730
wsatb wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Working means that you are providing value to others. As we advance as a society a single person is able to contribute more and more value to others. Why maintain the same amount of total value being added to society when we can push further and accelerate providing value to one another?

What we’re really talking about is freedom. Freedom to do what you want with your time whether it’s relaxation or work, but on your own terms.

When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.

It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#873

Post by account42 »

refurb wrote: post #617
joelthelion wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, productivity has improved tremendously. It's not clear that we actually need everyone working.

Sure, if you want to freeze your quality of life at 1980 standards. I, on the other hand, prefer 2020 standard of life so I’m going to keep working.

1980 standards supported people having more kids than 2020 standards so it's not exactly been an improvement.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#874

Post by snapplebobapple »

mchanson wrote: post #638
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…

Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things:

convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)

Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.

Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#875

Post by porridgeraisin »

satvikpendem wrote: post #327
dtgm92 wrote: post #9

This is because of their low birth rate primarily right? I think the system has failed at this point, when you are expected to work that long.

How would you fix it? Note that even Scandinavian nations with very generous healthcare and childcare policies can't raise their rates, it simply seems that as people get wealthier, they have fewer kids, regardless of the status of their country's systems.

Yeah, people keep trying to find a purely economic reason for why folks are having less kids. I think I'm satisfied with the very simple reason that raising kids is hard work. Most people feel like 1 kid already gets their hands full. That's really it IMO. Whenever it was that joint families split up into disparate nuclear families, obviously the load of raising say 5 kids that was being shared among 20 people, suddenly fell on just 2 people.

In the places with high fertility rate, you will almost surely observe joint families. I'm from India where we have such demographic variety that you can see adjacent areas with completely different fertility rates. In one, you will see old-style large houses with courtyards and 15+ people in them living as a joint family. Invariably these people have more kids. But in the next town with more nuclear families and modernish apartments, you will be lucky to see 2 kids per family. [1]

This is what births the secondary economic incentives which are mentioned a lot in popular discourse. For example, if you're already living in a house with 15 people your financial realities will require a similar number of people in the next generation to continue the same lifestyle.

[1] Wealth is not a confounding factor here. The specific two areas I have in mind are both more or less equally wealthy, one has folks running a coconut business primarily and the other is a small town with the usual assortment of office jobs.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#876

Post by rayiner »

sentimentscan wrote: post #817
rayiner wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the deal with progress should be that we all start working less. If not is the progress all that attractive? But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.

My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings. I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay. My salary (and my friends') in IT is…

If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day.

The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#877

Post by fragmede »

rayiner wrote: post #876
sentimentscan wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings. I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay. My salary (and my friends') in IT is…

If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day. The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who wo…

Depends on what they do with those 30 and 50 hours. If they're burnt out, even 100 hours chained to an in-person desk, they aren't going to accomplish much, so that's just not true. The right software engineer can come in, have a pointed discussion, have some coffee, go look at some code, have a few conversations, and have a bigger impact in an hour in terms of setting future direction and avoiding pitfalls than a different engineer could do in a week.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#878

Post by Robotbeat »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #429
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.

I responded to a comment that said the reason getting hired over 50 is difficult is because employers are reluctant to hire someone who may retire soon. I objected to that rationale, which makes no sense IMO. I have no doubt that getting hired over 50 is more difficult than for younger people.

And somehow you think your perspective is the only one out in the job market and everything else doesn’t make any sense

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#879

Post by rrgok »

What if we changed how retirement works with just two clear options:

Option A: Take your well-earned pension and enjoy traditional retirement.

Option B: Choose a dignified exit when life no longer feels fulfilling.

I've been thinking about this because retirement scares me. What's the point of reaching old age if your body and mind won't let you enjoy the freedom you've worked decades for? Between health problems, limited mobility, and sometimes poverty, many seniors seem to just... exist.

Not saying everyone feels this way! Plenty of people have amazing retirements. But shouldn't we have more control over our final chapter? Other countries already have compassionate end-of-life options.

What do you all think? Is having this choice reasonable, or am I missing something important about the value of those later years?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#880

Post by podgietaru »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #819
ZeroTalent wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% yes. My father is 67, and to be honest, he really shouldn't be working anymore. Both physically and mentally. And he is not very sick or disabled in any way. He just doesn't have the same capacity as he had in his 50s so after a 9-5 he was just recovering and going to sleep for the last few years. Terrible. He retired last year. He didn't have an easy life. Very few jobs would benefit from his work and continuin…

You can raise you personal "taxes" and provide for you father if you so desire.

That’s not even close to the same thing, and you know it.
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