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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

#991

Post by jampekka »

0xBDB wrote: post #976
insane_dreamer wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what Keynes meant.

It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else? How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or…

He postulated eightfold increse in economy, though not clear at what working hours. If he assumed 40 hours then and eightfold productivity increse, with 15 hours that would still be threefold increase in living standards. The productivity has increased even more than eightfold.

Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#992

Post by martin-t »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #343
martin-t wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be the obvious solution but is it the right one? People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going? I am no economist but it is my understanding that all this extra money goes to the rich because they've entrenched themselves in positions where they can extract a portion of a person's income with no recourse. It's not normal that…

You only get paid because someone pays you. More outputs do not mean you will get paid more if everyone does so

So why is compensation zero-sum when the economy is positive-sum and to whom does the difference, the extra value produced, go?

Because it certainly does not go to the people doing actual work producing it.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#993

Post by smeeger »

AngryData wrote: post #755
smeeger wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I take issue with the idea that pre-modern humans were working 90% of the time. We know medieval peasants didn't, we know bronze age societies didn't, and we have no real evidence to support hunting based societies doing it either, especially when we consider the lower nutritional health of past humans that made physical labor far more difficult to maintain consistently without just dieing from pushing the body beyon…

ah, sir please read my comment. “before society.” ie the environment we evolved in. not post agriculture. so your whole comment is moot

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#994

Post by smeeger »

jodrellblank wrote: post #961
smeeger wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thing…

we didnt eat or hunt sheep. we followed herds of nomadic ruminant animals across entire continents. simply keeping up with them on foot would be a lot of work. let alone hunting them, moving them, dressing and processing them and then you have the task of making and maintaining all the tools and equipment that were necessary. fires had to be tended… can i respectfully suggest that you are completely wrong?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#995

Post by smeeger »

jinjin2 wrote: post #785
smeeger wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. This is not true at all. A quick google for “hunter gatherer work hours” would tell you that they worked far less than we do today. 2-5 hours of what we would define as work a day, with the rest being mainly leisure.

a quick google is apparently completely wrong

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#996

Post by Affric »

gessha wrote: post #423
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…

Back when it was first introduced, it was based on life expectancy and few were expected to live beyond retirement age. [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...

Sure but the real problem is that we don’t know how to deal with bad quality of life for those suffering the effects of senescence and we have a society that is only just starting to come to grips with the perils of the sedentary lifestyle while allocating a lot of resources to people who haven’t done the work to live a good life past 60.

And we make it hard for younger adults to make time for this. Don’t work yourself half dead by the age of 30 and you will never have secure housing in any major city (where incomes are highest).

A huge part of it is cars. Most people over 70 shouldn’t be driving but we have had these people who have been driving everywhere for 55 years. They lose all ability to function independently in their community.

Give me sitting in a cafe living in an apartment with stairs and no car in Lisbon or Athens or similar any day of the week once I am old. Better than the old folks home.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#997

Post by achempion »

TrackerFF wrote: post #522

I mean, makes sense? I live in Norway, so quite similar socioeconomics. People become older, so makes sense they have to work longer. Imagine 50 years down the road, and the life expectancy is 90+ years. If people retired at age 65, that would mean you'd spend almost one third of your life as a retiree, living off a system which you paid into for 40-45 years. But with that said, you can't expect a plumber, roofer, ki…

What is the point of having so huge government investment fund if it can't subsidise the retirement age?

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#998

Post by jodrellblank »

smeeger wrote: post #994
jodrellblank wrote: post #961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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 thing…

we didnt eat or hunt sheep. we followed herds of nomadic ruminant animals across entire continents. simply keeping up with them on foot would be a lot of work. let alone hunting them, moving them, dressing and processing them and then you have the task of making and maintaining all the tools and equipment that were necessary. fires had to be tended… can i respectfully suggest that you are completely wrong?

OK you don't like sheep, so I Googled cows and found they graze 6 - 11 hours a day and spend much of the other time resting. They eat 60+Kg of grass per day and you aren't going to get 60Kg of blades of grass quickly. Nor are they going to cross continents anytime soon. The BBC fact file on Giraffes says "Giraffes spend most of their time eating, feeding between 16 to 20 hours a day."

Can I suggest that if you want to support the claim, you offer some actual reasoning and evidence - there should be some diaries of native Americans and how they ran so many hours a day they coverd several marathons every day, and about how many mountains of knives they amassed working 15 hours a day knife making, and so on.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#999

Post by nathanasmith »

thrance wrote: post #945
ryzvonusef wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tax wealth Are you saying that Denmark, a nordic socialist country, has not taxed wealth enough?

Americans still don't know what socialism is, huh?

The person you replied to is in Pakistan.

Re: Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

#1000

Post by 0xBDB »

jampekka wrote: post #991
0xBDB wrote: post #976

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's precisely what Keynes meant. He meant that 15 hours of labor now will buy you what 40 would then. How could he have meant anything else? How would he anticipate houses 50% larger than his generation's, or cars with twice the horsepower at four times the gas mileage, or universal air conditioning (as few houses in the US lack air conditioning now as lacked running water in 1950) or a monthly bill for Internet or…

He postulated eightfold increse in economy, though not clear at what working hours. If he assumed 40 hours then and eightfold productivity increse, with 15 hours that would still be threefold increase in living standards. The productivity has increased even more than eightfold. Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

> He postulated eightfold increse in economy

Yes. That's math, the rule of 72. At a 2% growth rate the economy will be 8 times larger in 108 years, more or less. The rate is a bit higher, so we're a bit over 8 in the 95 years since that's been written.

> Keynes was quite damn good at anticipating things.

But that's not anticipating things, that's projecting an existing growth rate out for another century. Improbable really that it would neither rise nor fall, and one of the reasons it hasn't fallen is that we didn't cut our work week to 15 hours. So the only thing (in this context) that he really anticipated was wrong.

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