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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

#961

Post by jodrellblank »

smeeger wrote: post #566
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…

consider what humans did before society. they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. but at night they would spend a few hours looking at the stars. what we have now is pretty similar. except instead of stars we have screens. i would say life is ok if you can read something interesting every day and have a job that you enjoy. i woul…

> "they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours"

Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#962

Post by throwaway3103 »

lancekey wrote: post #958
porridgeraisin wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sudd…

Best simple and obvious explanation I’ve seen for the root cause. So … probably most straightforward solution is to update local zoning laws to encourage a more communal style of living. Not communes but more along the lines of suburbs-as-village.

Or better child care provided by the government.

Having a child has a significant impact on your professional career (women in particular). Even in countries with great parental leave, like Denmark, the absence still reduces the years of experience you would otherwise get. Once they are "ready" for a child, they are in their late 30's and barely have time to birth one or two babies and would probably not have the stamina required to take on more.

The social pressure of raising the perfect kid with multiple activities in their "spare" time is much higher today and require more from the parent.

Ideally, people should get children in their early 20's, when they are physically more fit to handle the pressure. Unfortunately the current education system does not combine well with young parents. The government would need to integrate child care in colleges so that the parents have somewhere to place the children while studying.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#963

Post by jodrellblank »

nradov wrote: post #430
idiotsecant wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes ,what has to give is a tiny fraction of the corporate and individual wealth hoarded by the richest and most powerful members of society.

How tiny of a fraction? Can you quantify this for us? In principle I think some kind of wealth tax on fortunes above a certain level would be a good idea. But there are a lot of practical implementation problems in terms of identifying and valuing illiquid assets. Like for example I have friends who own forestry land (for softwood timber harvesting) in a foreign country. Those assets have some value but trade infrequ…

It's always odd to see this dichotomy on HN comments:

1) I'm amazing, I can solve any problem, I'm enlightened by my own intelligence, I'm the mover and shaker who drives all worldly productivity, and I do it by wrangling the newest technologies in the most imaginative creative and intelligent ways, no problem is too great for my superior intelligence!

2) Pay taxes? Ah but, uhh, that's impossible; like ... who decides? There, there's a dealbreaker for you! Hah! And anyway how much? I.. I... there's complexity, don't you know how difficult and complex it is to ... own a forest? Nobody could make a decision, I can see already that the combined might of a nation's experts could not come up with a figure, forget AI, this is just ... give up already, come on, some problems are forever out of reach.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#964

Post by CooCooCaCha »

pillefitz wrote: post #740
charcircuit wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By value you mean furthering the individualization and alienation by technology, which destroys the planet and gives us what, AI data centers? And the AI agents won't even do our jobs?

I'm convinced there are a large number of people, mostly in tech, that are unknowingly in a death cult because they think complex human systems can be boiled down to simple metrics and logic. And they get attached to this libertarian-type thinking because it makes them feel smart and above it all.

Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#965

Post by hoppp »

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…

I am in Denmark right now, I feel similar.

But my solution is to be an entrepreneur and also avoid working whenever possible.

So If I stay here and I need to work in my 70's, at least I will be happy I didn't work in my 30's like a slave.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#966

Post by timschmidt »

tomp wrote: post #831
pfannkuchen wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they missed is that people typically work for much longer than they are retired. If the periods were of equal length, I think the Ponzi scheme thing would be true. As is its sort of a modified fractionated ponzi.

Do they? 0-25 education, 25-67 work, 67-82 pension, it's almost equivalent (42 working, 40 not working)

Education isn't work?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#967

Post by wkat4242 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #674
wkat4242 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In Holland they just abandoned this for a US-style "every man for himself" 401(k) thing. Do you mean the second or third pillar? Ref: https://www.pensioenfederatie.nl/website/the-dutch-pension-s... EDIT: (added below) > US-style "every man for himself" Also, the US system has (at least) two pillars: national pension (called "social security") and private, tax-sheltered savings as 401(k)/IRA.

The second. The first pillar I don't have full access to due to not living there all my life.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#968

Post by Night_Thastus »

moktonar wrote: post #790
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…

Shouldn't expenses be proportional to population size? If not so, then spend less? Birth rate below replacement doesn't mean population size is not enough to pay for expenses, it just means it will slowly decrease, which btw is good, we are definitely too many. In nature only bi-sexual reproduction is capable of reducing population size when needed, that is a very good indicator that when resources become scarce, onl…

Infrastructure can't be scaled down easily once it is built. You can't just shrink roads, water lines, electricity lines and otherwise once a population has shrunk. Nor can buildings like hospitals and fire stations. So no, expenses are not proportional.

Those costs continue, and now you have fewer young people to pay for it - and more elderly that will need assistance. It is vicious.

Some countries like the US have skirted past this problem due to immigration. Others like Japan have not have much immigration and are beginning to suffer the effects.

But every country will face it in the long run.

The cold hard fact is that when people are educated and have access to healthcare, they simply stop having enough kids to meet replacement rate - even when wealthy and when having great support systems.

Humans do not act like most species. We do not form neat equilibrium with our environment based on available resources. That kind of logic didn't apply the moment agriculture was developed.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#969

Post by Gothmog69 »

rayiner wrote: post #697
mchanson wrote: post #638

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? Improved health so we can all work more is kinda stupid.

> 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.

Do we? Most people struggling to get the things that were easily available 50 years ago
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