Maybe instead we should try investing in this area (reducing the burden on services) instead of simply trying to reduce the quantity of folks claiming from the state pension pot.
Now people live way longer, but the retirement age never got adjusted properly to the new reality. So 15-20 years of retirement is the new normal.
In addition, way fewer young payers for the now old.
I think it is possible, but we need to raise (corporate) taxes a lot, and this needs to happen globally, as companies move.
As a star I would love to see global minimum corporate taxes, and then take it from there.
Spend less, save more. Vote for governments that do likewise.
Isn't that something for the individual to decide, not the collective? Many derive from work a lot of meaning in life. If working is what makes some people happy, it would be nice to not punish people for working until they die.
> I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.
Absolutely!
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/pensioners-incomes-...
Only if they are poor. If they're rich, they can continue "producing wealth" from interest and investments even after they're dead.
It's a silly thing to say, of course, but it's built into most people's assumptions who are discussing it.
But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real problem is not about how the pie is split across generations, but about the realities of lifespans, economic production, and expenses. If you're responsible for funding the entirety of your retirement, all of this is abundantly clear. When you nationalize retirement, all sorts of budgeting tricks start happening, like "borrowing" to fund other programs, papering shortfalls via population growth, etc. Then you start getting age warfare when the govt has to eventually cut back.
You could dissolve the national retirement plan, but that seems like a bad idea for similar reasons as entirely dissolving national welfare and insurance programs. It will always be the case that some people, need some help, some of the time. I guess in my ideal world, it's reduced to a much smaller safety net, because the government is managing the economy well enough that the populace has the wherewithal to save appropriately, and they are educated enough to do so.
I think it is a balance.
Auctioning this work to private companies should theoretically make it more cost efficient - and I think it is.
At least I hear that workers a much more stressed than they were historically, so I don't hope this comes with no benefit...
I personally find it hard to reconcile with UnitedHealth Group being apparently the 7th company by revenue in the world, at least I don't think that's what Europeans would mean by "socialized".
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/denmark/usa?sc=...
How these tax cuts are distributed over the population is... not very evenly. There was even an article yesterday in the NYT (iirc) that warned about wealth accumulation patterns in Sweden.
It is the same neoiberal experiment that the US has had since Reagan, just with some more social democracy.
This doesn't require any investment or technological development; it just requires making rational-but-politically-nuclear policy changes reducing the infinite tap of publicly-funded extremely-low-ROI medical expenditures on old people.
An absurd fraction of medical spending goes to protracting the suffering of old people just a bit longer. We can simply stop doing that, given the political will to do so.
Extending people's lifespans won't do much to alleviate these expenditures, except perhaps to slightly dilute the amortization schedule.
I think the system has failed at this point, when you are expected to work that long.
And this is the case in all western countries.
It is just being realized in different ways.
Fundamentalle there are 3 ways to cope
1. reduce pensions
2. Raise taxes
3. Decrease amount of benefit receivers.
Denmark choose number 3
The centre right often argue for less taxation ‘to grow businesses’. The argument being that the economy grows and that’s how the money is recouped. At least that’s what’s happened here in New Zealand.
Looking past ones next pay day does seem universally difficult.
Birthrates seem very hard to change and even if change would happen it is much too slow.
Germany did the experiment on immigration and has not seen GDP growth for half a decade. There the system is failing far worse in some ways, but in Germany employees are paying directly for the pension plans, so the state just raises the employee contributions.
Also, the beaurcracy is the real culprit for growth.
The more old people there is the more taxes you need.
More taxes - economy must grow. And it can’t grow if working population is shrinking
I think, if you are concerned with the cultural shift, you can give immigrants temporary term VISAs and make it clear their stay is going to be strictly temporary. That was supposed to be how the Gastarbeiter system works. Thing is, when you have already on boarded a foreign worker and have had them working for you for 2 years already, you don't want to let them go and replace them with a fresh foreign worker who you have to retrain.
You can look at any country in western europe to see how it's not.
In the US, Italians, Irish, and Germans, as just a few examples, all were treated as unassmilated aliens. People say the same things, generation after generation about newcomers. If you moved to a country with a different language and culture, you might make an effort to learn the language but you would still think, read, etc. in your native language. Your kids would know both languages; their kids would of course speak the language of their surroundings.
What solves these problems is a fundamental belief in freedom for all. People don't need to speak your language to be your equal and be just as human, with the same rights as you.
My girlfriend asked me once in a Restaurant (Cafe Norden in Kopenhagen) why I was ordering in English. Then, I spent the complete evening ordering everything in Danish, to always receive answers in English. And this nearly everywhere (not my bakery, the girls there could not speak a word of English, this was an exception). This was in the early 2000's. This never happened to me in all the other countries I have been living in. A Danish colleague simply told me that he does not like to listen to broken Danish, better switch to English.
Still have a lot of friends in Denmark, integration there is not easy, even for highly qualified people from the EU.
In practice that rarely goes as intended. The first political party to say, "We changed our minds, you can all have citizenship," gets to secure power with an influx of loyal voters.
> If the immigrants have no desire to work, pay taxes, and support the elderly then you won't want them.
What does it have to do with immigration? You could say the same about anyone, regardless of where they are born.
One thing you can say about immigrants, especially undocumented ones, is that they have the drive to drop everything in their old lives, go a long way to a strange place - where people often express hate and abuse - where the language is different, the culture confusing, and the future uncertain.
Those people have more drive than the great majority of the people born in the country, many of whom can't get off their sofas or away from their computers.
In Denmark, immigration from culturally similar countries are usually net-positive, while others are net negative (financially).
There's a reason people are choosing to vote for parties that are (publicly) anti-immigration
So you can reduce pensions, improve the situation for the youth, take efforts to get an improved birth rate, making use of the resources lost to pensioners, and then maybe you can raise the pension later on once you realize things are stable.
I suggest instead altering the male/female ratio, so a stable or growing population can be maintained at lower TFR. Technically, filter sperm to remove those with Y chromosomes before artificial insemination.
Also, that's a wild solution. You'd have to do away with monogamy which would cause some pretty insane societal shifts. However, as a straight guy I can see the appeal lol.
I'm imagining it becoming a social norm for single women to have (at least) a single child. Perhaps they'd team up to make raising them easier, forming loose family-like units. Romantic attachments would be optional.
One consequence of such a situation would be an incentive toward private positive eugenics. Women would prefer semen from top quality donors.
People simply can't afford to send a kid to pre-school childcare because it's 2 or 3 thousand GBP per month. So you have to stay at home to look after them, but then you can't afford the rent/mortgage and/or food because you're not working. Woe betide you if you earn over 1 penny over 100K GBP because then you get zero help with costs.
They need to provide more government funded (i.e. universally free non-means-tested) pre-schooling like they do for 5-18 year olds.
For an interesting case study, compare Japan (who refuses to allow mass immigration and is at risk of going extinct) and the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority). It'll be interesting to see in 50 years which one has had better outcomes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom
> Between 2001 and 2009, the Muslim population increased almost 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_Kingdom?wp...
Granted 2009 was a while ago but they're still the fastest growing population in the UK by a lot.
If it grew 10x between 2001 and 2009 (starting from a very small base), then between 2009 and 2023 it grew by only 0.3x (see graph below).
So rate of growth went from 10x to 0.3x in around a decade, this is a hugely significant deceleration. It actually implies muslim community as portion of population is heading lower.
https://new.islamchannel.tv/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/63860...
However - if we're including atheist then clearly that'll be the majority position.
* well, not even current. 15+ year old
Stepping back a bit, Pew expects Islam to overtake Christianity as the dominant world religion in a few decades: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
The most recent birth rate stats I can find is 2005-2010 where Muslims have a birth rate of 3.0 while the rest of the country is at 1.8. Estimates say it's more like 2.5 now, but the current overall UK birth rate is only 1.57 from a quick Google.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2...
The same article also states that the average age for Muslims is much lower than non-Muslims as of 2016, 28 vs 41 for the UK.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_Kingdom
[0] Figure 2.7 of the Danish Government report "Økonomisk Analyse: Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser i 2018" - https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-ind...
Also the Chinese immigrants in question, like many others, usually immigrate seeking a better life, it's a strong self-selection filter. Middle Eastern immigrants of last 10-15 years in Europe are refugees, displaced by wars; they did not choose Denmark (or other Western European countries) because they planned to integrate and to prosper there, they ran there to merely stay alive. They need a lot of help adapting. Even if they are very willing to work, they may lack the knowledge required for gainful employment, and there are only so many dish-washing and trash-disposal jobs.
Those who adapt can make it big; consider people like Freddie Mercury or Nassim Taleb.
And then their children turn out to be some of the most productive and contributory to a nation (in my experience), even despite some of the headwinds.
It's culture and race does also play a part in it. It's not right to treat anyone differently because of their race, but let's not ignore the reality that skin isn't the only difference between races.
Basically the state spends to much money on humans in general. A young qualified immigrant might have a less negative impact than a slightly older German person, but both of them will be money sinks in the long run.
Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.
The only valid solution is to reduce the spending per person, both birthrate and immigration will only delay the problem.
Denmark should be in a slightly better position than Germany since their health system is cheaper.
I need to see some data backing this. Also regardless of stats, many war refugees(the net negatives as told by media) are actually highly qualified but the asylum process and qualification recognition process is eternal. On top of the trauma and uncertainty, they also need to learn a new language, find a new community, patiently go through all the dystopian meetings, cope with their loss of loved ones.
In reality, it is possible for them to be net positive because if things were faster, they would often out qualify the average locals and this also has some effects on wage and market(over supply, constant demand and all the economics).
> they would often out qualify the average locals
That's definitely not true, which is why they want to immigrate to those countries in the first place.
Regarding your other point: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/publications/oec...
The liked pdf there gives a good overview.
No one wants to implement it.
And it makes complete sense. The reality is having a child kind of sucks for a woman, and I, nor anyone else, can blame a large portion of women for just saying "eh... no". I would probably say no, too, although it's hard to tell, because I'm not a woman.
Having children was once a boon, because conditions were shit. Now it's a burden. So, people will treat it as a burden.
Either make it less burdensome or revert women. Nobody wants to do the latter, so we must do the former. We have to invest in children, because children are a Nation's investment.
- increase productivity more than how much the workforce/receivers grow.
And if AI/robots eventually deliver, we're soon going to need a discussion about lowering the retirement age to 55 or even 50 if we don't want 30% unemployment anyway.
- indifferent to how much automation you have, people still need to pay for it, for money they don't earn.
And as such, it feels like labelling that “raise taxes” is disingenuous.
Indeed the normal Understanding is not only about increasing rates - look at Switzerland eg.
A part of necessities are access to assets.
In the model you propose, inequality in itself will make those more expensive.
They talk abiut the squeeze, if Birthrates increase too suddenly - workers would both have to pay for the elderly and the kids.
If one generation has a fertility rate of 1 child per woman, the next must have 4 children per woman to undo the demographic change.
The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.
The country and the individual has the same problem. But it also goes a generation further.
There was a link on HN recently which I can’t find. It discussed how we are in an unusual time, where kids can often meet their great grandparents. Previously people died younger, so couldn’t. Now people are having kids at an age where it will be unlikely for them to meet their great grandchildren.
I'm not sure that's true - people died younger, sure, but they also had kids much earlier. Even assuming 18 for first child(and it often was earlier than 18), you'd be a great grandparent at the age of 54 - and people have commonly lived that long even in antiquity.
The average lifespans was only 40-something until the 1850-1950 range.
I’m sure plenty lived longer, but the average was terrible.
"While the most common age of death in adulthood among modern hunter-gatherers (often taken as a guide to the likely most favourable Paleolithic demographic experience) is estimated to average 72 years,[169] the number dying at that age is dwarfed by those (over a fifth of all infants) dying in the first year of life, and only around a quarter usually survive to the higher age."
Etc.
The US since then only provides Israel with military aid (most of which is only allowed to be spent buying US-made goods). It’s more of a subsidy for the US military-industrial complex.
Also despite the military aid Israel still spends a much greater share of GDP on its military than most or all other developed countries (so the US isn't subsidising Israel’s unusually high birth rate).
That's a funny way to twist it. US is providing aid to Israel. Billions a year.
US also provides indirect aid, through protection or aid to neighbouring countries (e.g Jordan and Egypt) as bribes so they play nice with Israel.
And who knows, with the way the Iran thing is panning out, you might be paying a lot more if US decides to bomb Iran on Israel's request
If the US starts sending proportional military aid to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.75 vs Israel's 2.83) it will not "fix it".
To me it seems rather obvious: you need both the will and the means to raise 3+ children.
In fact, they may majority be of subsistence in which case the entire dollar value of all of their stuff is simply the land.
The catch-22 is that the people you presumably want to be having more children— educated working professionals— have some of the highest social standards for child rearing.
Increase the number of (young female) immigrants
* In some European countries. Many countries, however, have no meaningful avenues whatsoever for tax efficient pension saving. My own "pension fund" is just a regular broker account where I invest after income taxes, and where I have to pay capital gains as usual.
People with good private pensions can decide to retire 5 years before they officially retire.
1. A state provided welfare benefit Or 2. A privately held long term savings/investment account
Would not be very motivational if you work hard your whole life and then you are considered a useless burden once you retire.
The way it usually works is taxation from the current working generation pays for the current retirees. You are not paying into your own account for later (that is a private pension)
FWIW in the UK there are more children in poverty (so their parents too) than retirees who are in poverty. Kids don't vote though...
What's annoying about these debates is that the people who'd e.g. like to see pension cuts are either young and will change their mind later, or they are so rich that none of this matters to them anyway and the latter shouldn't even have a voice in this debate.
I don't know how this works in other countries. In Finland, it was established decades ago that pensions based on past contributions are constitutionally protected private property. Because people made explicit pension contributions and because the government promised that the future pension would be based on the individual contributions, the government can't alter the deal substantially without a constitutional amendment. If the contributions had been general taxes, or if the promised pension had been independent of the actual contributions, ordinary legislative process would have been enough.
The scale of the problem is absolutely mind-blowing.
Not saying that the math would work out without problems then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
True, but economic growth is very real.
Most don't want to so they have to compensate via taxes and higher pension age.
Sustainable population and economic growth at that rate can't happen indefinitely.
Some people have been vocally saying this system in unsustainable long term, just that Europeans governments never wanted to publicly admit this due to fears of loosing elections, so they kept kicking the can down the road.
It’s not really a Ponzi scheme, it is completely possible for the system to be balanced, it’s just very very hard to get people to vote for you if you say they’ll have less tomorrow
This is exactly what happens in Denmark - a balancing of the pension system.
Also,rgis has been planned since 2006 - so it is nothing new.
Hence only doing this for future pensioners will give equal time as reitred.
(at least, this is the core reasoning)
Definition of a Ponzi scheme: A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investor. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves.
https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...
That's exactly how pensions work in Europe. Replace "Ponzi scheme organizers" by "legally elected governments" and here you have it - you have a whole continent of people believing that their pension is a given. Not everybody may like it, but that's the hard truth.
In the US, people contribute towards a 401K, and choose how to invest, but typically pick up just the S&P 500 - anyway and at least that money is somehow what they have saved for themselves.
But I agree with your statement "it is completely possible for the system to be balanced" - yes a Ponzi scheme can be absolutely balanced, you just need enough participants ...
pensions on the other hand don't have the quality of deception and the value is straightforward - it redistributes wealth from the younger population to the older ones. this reduces the need for individuals to plan their retirements as the state takes care of it. as pointed by another post, you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side.
wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme? unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?
but i do agree that one should not think of pensions as a given. its worth pointing out that there are two types of pensions - defined benefits and defined contributions.
No, not exactly, that's different.
> unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?
That's certainly contributions I don't like either, because of how this system is abused. But to be fair, unemployment benefits or healthcare aren't a pyramid scheme, because you aren't paying for the previous "investors" - you might get back what you contributed (with a lots of caveats). In the case of the pension system, you clearly pay the previous "investors".
Calling it something else than it is, only to taint the system and its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith, if not worse.
I suppose increased life expectancy and fewer young people both contribute to worse dependency ratios.
Living longer doesn’t necessarily mean having more productive years than in the past. We simply have the medical tools to keep people alive even if they can’t much get out of bed.
If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic.
But the pension system in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now. This can only work with a steadily growing economy which continually generates more revenue when more people retire. In some sense it is a literal Pyramid scheme, in which the obligations are continually pushed to younger generations, which have to contribute based on how many pensioners there are.
Especially now as EU economies become weaker this issue becomes bigger and bigger.
Denmark has private pensions like the 401k system in the US.
People can start tapping into these up to 5 years before they are 70.
In reality most people will go down in time and partially tap into private pensions and saving long before they turn 70.
This is opposed to other European countries, like Germany, that does not have these private pensions, but only retirement insurance.
Just as in Germany Denmark funds it's pensions through taxes, Germany additionally funds them through employee contributions.
In Denmark you have ratepension, which truly is an investment account and not an insurance product.
Their retirement savings can be in public company stocks instead of government guarantees but that only works if there are people willing to buy those stocks (ex: younger people saving for retirement).
Whatever you accumulate for retirement (cash, stocks, gold, state pension points) it only represents coupons for your share of the economy of the future. Details may differ but fundamentals are the same: it a promise that the future generation will share some of their yield with you.
Setting aside the issues of declining birth rate for a minute, this seems like a reasonable adjustment to the other factors?
Retirement age has not gone up since it was created in 1940s. Not crazy to raise it a little.
Quickly looking at Denmark articles, it seems they’re raising the age to adjust to life expectancy increases as well.
I don’t see this a sign of the system failing.
There was a steady rise in life expectancy at retirement age in the UK until 2020, then something happened and it's fallen significantly. My guess is that it will rise rapidly over the next 15 years and this will be regarded as some sort of triumph for the public health system (unless there is another pandemic of course).
Since 2010, the retirement age for women has raised from 60 to 65. Bringing it in line with the male retirement age.
See https://www.thetimes.com/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/st...
The age (for both) is gradually rising to 68.
Source https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-...
The policy for retirement age is related to when society sees fit to sustain someone that does not work. I think it has more to do with how the society sees the elders and what it can afford than to the goals of specific individuals.
My dad just turned 78 and has really slowed the last 5 years. Longer life says little about quality of life.
I've been traveling for holidays every year since I was 25 for at least 3 weeks every year, loving it so much. First it was backpacking, now it transitioned into a bit more luxury as I got older.
You don't know if you'll be hit by a bus next year, retirement is a silly milestone to focus on.
There's the flip side if the coin though: old people are healthier in Denmark (vs US for example [1]) due to the social welfare system. Well, that system needs to be funded. With the aging population, the costs are rising but contributions are (relatively) declining. That's why there's a push for higher retirement age. It's either this, or defunding the social welfare programs, or immigration. That last one isn't a viable political option in Denmark at the moment.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/02/05/older-people-are-...
That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.
Or some may say it got outdated.
It was started at times when the life expentancy was low. And it was given at age above the life expentancy. And in the beginning not to everyone. The retirement age got lower and given to broader set of population gradually. These moves made governments popular, so it was no brainer to introduce, on the expense of future generations.
Birth rates that can maintain the economics of relatively low retirement age could not be sustained without destroying the planet. Actually has to be reversed still as it went too far already and deteriorating as we speak, especialy with the ongoing large increase in the overall life quality - causing decreasing birth rate alone - and healt. The system was destined to fail. But how to take away rights? It is much harder than giving, especiallly when the adverse effects are for current voters, not future generations?
So the necessary steps are postponed, postponed, postponed yet again, for many decades, taking about necessity in many forms, meanwhile filling bigger and bigger holes in the budgets, through borrowing, making the problem worse, again for future generations. Very few countries do tiny adjustments, and even those are met with huge protests mostly.
I wonder what the future holds. Painful adjustments or more painful collapse later in some form.
In some rich countries people spend now more years of their life out of work than in work because of much longer education and much longer lifespans. If you want to keep the same social standards, all other things being equal, you need to raise the retirement age.
Of course, those last two sentences are tongue in cheek.
The real problem is that certain segments of society are not compensated for their labor at a rate that would allow them to retire early, and may even have to work beyond retirement age in order to supplement their stipend. Worse yet, these people often work in sectors that offer few affordances for them to maintain their health into old age and may even push them into living conditions that are detrimental to their health (assuming their job isn't detrimental to their health in the first place).
Ideally, people would be able to retire when they want (within reason). The reality is that some people can retire at a relatively young age while others don't really have that option.
The Japanese faced this earlier and harder than Europe, with about 30% of their population being past the retirement age. They increased their productivity very significantly, but it's still not enough, and a lot of older folks in Japan keep working well past the retirement age, sometimes even re-hired by the companies from which they had retired.
Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.
What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/
How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.
This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.
This system was working back in 1860, but it is a Ponzi scheme in decline for the past 50 years. And there is no way out, most people rely on state pensions to live after retirement; it is the perfect trap.
Ha. Total pipedream. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of our current economic system.
Well yeah, because it's difficult, taxing, often traumatic work that pays the same as any other nursing job with a higher QoL and social status. And even then they're pushing out all the actual nursing staff that pays well in favor of MAs/CNAs who get paid like shit.
With a growing population of pensioners and a declining population of taxpayers many EU countries are walking towards a future where it is abundantly clear that the state can not finance pensions. Especially when at the same time their companies loose their economic competitiveness.
I do not believe that raising the retirement age in 15 years will be of any major help here. And it seems especially outrageous for the younger generation.
People also focus on a fixed percentage being returned while ignoring the long term increase in productivity and people’s standards of living. In real terms people in 2025 get way more out of pension systems than people did in 1925, that’s as central to the problem as any changes in lifespan.
Historically payouts also benefited from rising productivity and populations but those assumptions are breaking down.
The increased medical costs as we go, however, might actually make it worse, faster.
The current system is just not broken but unfair. In many EU countries, people are not contributing for themselves, but for the previous generation being currently retired. In turn, it's supposed that babies born today will work for the pension of the currently active generation. This pension system is nothing else but a pyramide scheme and that scheme is now breaking due to a demographic issue - just like a traditional pyramide scheme would break because there are not enough participants to that scheme ...
But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.
If this budget hits the PAYGO limits, which is basically guaranteed, that will trigger automatic cuts to Medicare, so they can backdoor cut the program without anybody voting for that.
Look at all these people around you in their forties who are still renting. They are basically too late to buy. They will be "forever renters". This means they will have to work until death, as their rents continue to rise when their peers who owned homes took their downsizing premium and lived off of it for a few years.
What's crazy is the number of grown adults who think their 401ks will magically grow to fill the gap.
You may argue that the the value of the house will appreciate well in a good market, but there is nothing stopping you from taking the money you saved by renting and putting it in an appreciating asset.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/calculator/rent-vs-buy-calculator
Income Tax
$10k 6.2%
$50k 6.2%
$100k 6.2%
$150k 6.2%
$200k 5.4%
$300k 3.6%
$700k 1.6%
$1000k 1.1%
$5000k 0.22%
$10000k 0.11%
Bracket Marginal Rate
$0 - $176100 6.2%
$176101 - ∞ 0%
Once Boomers pass through the system and start dying off in significant numbers over the next 10-30 years there won't be any size differences between successive generations nearly as large. Gen X is smaller than Millennials, then Gen Z is between Gen X and Millennials in size, and the current generation is projected to be around the same size is Gen Z. This should make it considerably easier to keep the system working.
Polls show [1][2] that this approach (flat rate + 1% gradual rate increase) is the solution voters prefer by a large majority regardless of party affiliation when presented with all the solutions that have been proposed by politicians and experts.
Generally whenever Democrats in Congress introduce bills to address the problem this is the approach they go for, although sometimes they talk about keeping a lower marginal rate for people making between $176100 and $400000, like this:
Bracket Marginal Rate
$0 - $176100 6.2%
$176101 - $400000 0%
$400001 - ∞ 6.2%
According to them there are only three ways to fix Social Security: some combination of (1) raise the money it takes in, (2) reduce the amount it pays out, and (3) make up for any shortfall by paying some benefits out of the general budget.
They also say that #1 and #3 are off the table. Their proposals generally go for #2 via raising the retirement age. That does buy some time but not much, and runs into the problem that the Republican Party Platform says (caps in original) "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE", and Trump also keeps saying that which doesn't leave them any options.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/
[2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...
So this raising of the retirement age will affect a huge portion of workers and 70 is OLD to be working full time for all but the most relaxed jobs. Most older folks I know have know being dealing with multiple chronic age related illnesses well before 70.
In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future.
And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing?
Graeber's thesis of bullshit jobs becomes increasingly more convincing: work isn't about production, it's about social control².
That said I agree we should be further ahead in paving a way to paradise.
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes -- those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs -- a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
Couldn't they, having the same standard of living as in 1930?
Personally I think we should revert to the earlier system, where you are free to retire as soon as you want on your own money, but if you want the state (=other regular people) to fund your lifestyle, you need to be no longer fit for work
If I remember correctly, Denmark even removed a holiday recently. So work more days a year as well.
That's the problem here. That a few people reap all the benefits of this, while the rest of us toil.
Reinvested to increase future productivity
I wonder what a good answer would be here. Intuitively we are increasing productivity in activities that does not increase social welfare. Take corporate lawyering, marketing as an example.
https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/
Etc etc
It seems that significant amount of productivity gains are lost because of activities that profit from deception and counter activities that accounts for them.
Debt servicing.
I have no specific figures to back this up, but my assumption is that as we become more productive, more credit is made available, which leads to bigger debts and asset price inflation. Because of the asset price inflation, the debt is not necessarily used for productive purchases but, for example, to pay more for existing things - the obvious one being a home. The productivity gains are therefore claimed by creditors.
It would be interesting to see how well productivity increases and debt growth (esp. private) correlate.
This projection came true. You can live with a 1930s living standard while working 15 hours per week at a median wage. However, nobody wants to live at a 1930s living standard. It turns out that in aggregate people prefer to spend productivity gains on conveniences and higher standards of living than on working fewer hours.
Maybe not if you want to own a home. Asset price inflation is real. If you already own a home, sure.
Whatever people save for retirement, cash or stocks or points, it only facilitates the said exchange, it doesn't somehow replace or alleviate it. It only works if the next generation exists and is prosperous enough to share their income.
If you think about it, there are fewer and fewer jobs that are genuinely useful.
I know it's a difficult topic, but I can't shake the feeling that we need some sort of government intervention in order to reorient the economy towards activities that actually benefit us.
Productivity gains are kept by the owners of the institutions as profits that made that productivity possible. Do you think YOU will work less once LLM tech is deployed at scale? Of course not, your company will pay you the same and expect the same work. Every company out there will do the same. They will reap the productivity gains.
Keynes was almost right. He underestimated the ability of future generations to consume conspicuously. Also, the need for many to fit in by working, but I digress.
Many don't _have_ to work more and longer. I'm speaking of a large class, very much overrepresented on HN, of smart, healthy westerners with no dependents to care for. We have only one major problem. We live in this bubble nudging us towards conspicuous consumption - gently or less so.
My job closely resembles Keynes' 1930's prediction. Sometimes I work (much) more. Not because I need money, but because the job is interesting. Interesting as in, me learning, contributing something positive to other people's lives, growing my family's financial resilience and robustness, or just enjoying the flow.
Extending the retirement age doesn’t really help the situation much, as you need younger and cheaper pilots to fulfill the roles of pilots who are retiring.
The problem is, becoming a pilot takes a fair amount of time, over $100k in training fees, low pay for a while until fully certified with hours in, a very mobile lifestyle, and now you are subjected to physical as well as mental demands of the job certification standards.
(it has something to do with profit)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medic...
A recent form of profit seems to be offering cheap treatment/medical tourism
https://www.cubamundomedico.com/en/university-of-medical-sci...
Seems impractical for USians, though.
When you try to build a society around human needs instead of capital needs, you end up with different priorities. It's that simple.
If anyone thinks they're making the big bucks and accumulating "soft power" by training a bunch of doctors then selling treatments to Americans for cheap, I'm not sure they can be helped.
I wondered about why there were almost always cuban medics, doctors, nurses etc. in action, when there has been some larger catastropic event in the world, and you could see them in the media.
Why is that, I thought? That doesn't fit being sanctioned by the US(and vassals), being poor in general, and so on.
That's how I became aware of ELAM.
And made up my mind the way I described. Can't help it :-)
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26132...
[2] https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-problem-with-u-s-health-care-isn...
Without NPs and PAs, I'm sure there would be a shortage of healthcare providers.
Well, guess what? I now also have rationed care. I have to wait six months just for a colonoscopy, plus I pay twice as much for the privilege!
It can have its place, i.e. a way to balance bargaining power with the employer. It’s inherently anti meritocratic though.
In some cases it’s not about merit or about limiting supply however. In some cases it’s impractical to test someones work continuously, so instead it becomes honor based. That is, you are expected to go through an elite track and succeed in an exam once and then you are good for life unless you commit fraud or show gross incompetency.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-professional-licensing-a...
Even the cost of PPL, the lowest license on the path, is around $10,000 while the ultralight (European)/sport pilot (US) is over $6,000. From that you need CPL (commercial), multi-engine, complex aircrafts, instrument rating (bad weather or night) etc., that takes time and money most people cannot afford.
The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)
It gets interesting when different demographics start imagining that their ideal union would protect them from other demographics: Commonly, older people like to think of unions that will protect them from losing their jobs to young people.
Then when I’m working with college students and they start discussing hypothetical unionization, they come up with ways to think the union will give them more jobs by protecting them from the old people “hoarding” the jobs. (Sorry, that’s the least likely outcome for a union)
What’s most interesting is that the people I know who are in unions (non-tech industries) don’t hide the fact that decreasing labor supply to increase their own demand is exactly what they expect from a union. The first time you hear someone complain that a non-union worker is “taking food off their table” by simply doing their job you realize that it’s not as simple as Unions versus Corporations like we’ve been led to believe. The Unions are advocating for the people in the union, not workers everywhere.
Australia doesn’t have enough money for that? No problem, just make everyone work longer.
As an individual if I don’t earn enough to cover my spending I have two choices.
1. work more
2. Spend less
In all these discussions we never see politicians do anything about spending less, they just throw us under the bus to work more, while of course exempting themselves.
I also wonder what it would look like for the government to encourage (or even facilitate) "jobs for seniors" that only become available to you after you turn 60. They could be jobs that are, by design, low-risk, low-physicality, but medium-high mental stimulation.
Denmark’s population was 2.4m-3.5m in that period (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark)
Wikipedia cites Danmarks Statistik for the population numbers, the official government statistics.
The 2.4m is in 1900, 3.5m in 1930.
Appreciate this is a controversial view so interested in hearing why I'm wrong so I can stop holding it. I think retirement should just be replaced by disability welfare to be honest.
So, Denmark raising the retirement age is kind of a big deal. I imagine the Danish might be less than thrilled about that.
Isn't 19th century covered by history classes anymore? :/
The state then being kind enough to give you something back after 35-40 years of contributions is expected.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/adding-years-to-life-...
Is a lot easier than "rejuvenation", and a lot more attainable. And also something we do throw R&D money at.
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 a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.
I recall danluu blogging about how multiple times he made code fixes that saved the company more than his salary just in electricity. What I see is an incredible technical achievement but also I see how he's being exploited - the money saved is value he directly provided to society, yet he sees none of it. Where does it go? To people who are already rich.
People have far better lives considering all the things available to them compared to 50 years ago. Most people would not want to live life like how people lived it 50 years ago.
> It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.
This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.
Over the past decade life expectancy in developed countries first plateaued, then declined.
Yes, largely due to the pandemic, but that plateau was also the beginning of decline in some places.
Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.
Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.
It is not that it is hard because it is a controversial subject. It is hard because it is not one problem. To develop rejuvenation you would need to tackle hundreds of very difficult problems, both physiological and neurological, which individually, would represent solutions to critical conditions today (diabetes, dementia, ataxia, arthritis, many types of cancers etc etc).
I definitely don't think we have succeeded in "invented" this, but it surely has happened slowly over time. People in theirs 60s today are surely sharper than they used to be, with less chronic physical ailments.
But the end results is people living longer, and the solution still ends up being pushing back the retirement age.
Well, I guess you're not required to have a private pension scheme. But most jobs come with one, most unions enforce it.
I had one when I was sweeping the factory floor once a week at age 15 -- that was ridiculously because it all disappeared into administration fees.
But the answer is yes, of course you can. It's a free country -- assuming we're not annexed by the orange monkey.
How do you think the US got its population?
I am pretty sure that immigrants pay taxes.
Apparently, the German slogan from the concentration camp era, 'Work sets you free,' has now been decided to be applied to everyone.
I feel they could do better than that with all this wealth.
With what money? The poor folk don't have any by definition, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, which leaves... who...?
You buy something dirt cheap for less than 80k USD. It's not great, it's old run down. But if you do minimal repairs and don't live the high life, you can get by with very little.
But if you want a new car and nice comfy house in a decent location, with all the modern amenities, well, that's expensive.
brother rusted out farm houses 2 hours from any office building, let alone one that hires programmers are like 350k in rural states. Idk where you live, but it ain't Earth.
We need workers for society to keep working. Immigrants need jobs. Sounds like everyone winds unless you have a vague fear of brown people.
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 infrequently so there's no reliable market price. And they probably hold the assets through a foreign corporation rather than directly in their own names. What is a "fair" amount for them to pay in taxes, and how would the government enforce that in a consistent and cost-effective manner?
Making kids easier to have really only has two real options:
1. Go back down the development timeline of a nation and remove rights from women (bad).
2. Implement more social programs to incentivize children.
The reason we need to do 2 now and not in the past is we've developed. Women have rights now, and we need real reasons for them to have kids, not fake reasons like we had in the past.
It's not an unfunded mandate running on deficit spending.
So probably it won't be wiped away by a global monetary crisis that forces us to cut deficit spending and reduce pensions.
The highest total tax rate in the world perhaps?
Denmark is like all the other Nordic countries culturally, except they have much easier direct geographic lines to Central Europe. So it’s basically what you get when you combine the Nordic model (tiny homogenous Lutheran population) with more advantageous geography. Finland is Denmark with extremely unfortunate geography.
It's not so hard to save some money, do whatever you want in your 30s, then work until you're dead.
Not saying this is a great trend, but it’s unavoidable due to the low fertility rate (already a problem everywhere in the developed world and soon to be a problem the world over, as by 2050–before I retire—the global average total fertility rate will have dropped below replacement.).
Not that that stops managers, of course...
1. I've never had more than a max 2 year time horizon when thinking about a hire.
2. If anything, I've found younger people more likely to job hop than those 40+.
Running a car at highway speeds into something or someone else has a much higher chance of injuring or killing multiple people besides the driver.
My point is, if you're unfit to drive a vehicle due to cognitive or physical decline, you're probably also unfit for most jobs involving those skills, and yet you have to soldier on for 4 more years.
What happens when they're putting a new roof on a building next to a crowded street, and the 73 year old carpenter drops a bunch of tiles to the ground 6 floors below ? or he falls and slips off, taking another colleague with him ? Or he simply operates heavy machinery somewhere and gets caught in it.
We simply don’t have those data for roofers.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...
Cut all things that promote or enable public health.
In neo-feudalism, only lords and perhaps some of their most favored serfs, deserve private for profit health care, and the barrier to entry is cost. Why be wealthy if you can’t buy things other people can’t?
There’s always a surplus of peasants in this model.
The most hilarious policies are the ones aiming to force people to have more kids, by paying them or by attacking feminism and lgbt. Making the society unfree will make people less willing to put more kids in it.
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 eight years and if we follow Denmark, five years.
I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-ret...
The generation they belong to are predicted to live to what 80-85 years? Whilst we (assuming you're in your 40's now) are predicted to get to what 90-95 on average?
Average lifespans are increasing, and on top of that the mobility of someone who's 75 now, won't be the same of someone who's 75 in another 35+ years.
That may be true, but will we (who are in our 40's now) have the same quality of life at 90-95 as a now 75-year old will have at 80-85?
My impression so far is that we've done a lot of work at the lifespan, less at the healthspan. What's the point of living until 90 if the last 15 years isn't that fun at all.
FirmwareBurner•4h ago
How will this work realistically? How will you convince employers to keep workers employed till 70? Especially in fast changing fields like IT where a lot of old knowledge and experience gets considered obsolete by those screening resumes. Sure, people might survive longer, but that doesn't mean all workers will be equally mentally or physically fit to still perform well at some jobs at 70 as well as a 30 year old, especially if they're mentally or physically challenging jobs.
I'm not talking about government paper pushing jobs, but private industry jobs with international competition where you need to be agile and up to speed to survive as a business. This system worked for the boomer generation in slow moving highly regulated industries like steel, rail and automotive, where you'd spend all your life at one company who'd promote you and invest in your training till retirement, but this isn't as common anymore. International companies now want things done faster and cheaper and can't be competitive keeping 70-year-olds on the payroll idling around waiting for retirement.
For example, here in Austria, if you're laid off at the age of 50, the chances of getting another job at that age for many professions are already next to zero due to rampant ageism, so workers in some professions end up on long term unemployment till retirement, yet the government agencies are not talking about this major issue and just tell the 50 year olds on long term unemployment to "make a more colorful resume to stand out"(I shit you not). You're also not allowed to take your contributions out of that pot early or all at once to fuck off out of the system and be on your own if you want, proving it is Ponzi scheme in disguise.
bluefirebrand•4h ago
Ok, so if you're near retirement now you're fine
But if you're younger, you can look forward to not retiring until 70, as if the younger generation hasn't been shit on enough
Amazing stuff. One last ladder for the older generation to pull up behind them before they die, I guess
tossandthrow•4h ago
the housing market in Denmark is approachable - you can get houses near major cities for usd 80k.
Social security, you can go unemployed for years and still pay your bills.
Government provided education with stipend - having masters degrees are common.
And the economy is strong.
Most Danes understand that this is inevitable - the big issue is that the politicians have given themselves more favorable terms.
polipus•4h ago
- housing for 80k USD is 525k DKK: no way you can find anything at that price anywhere close to cph. Not sure for other "major" cities, but in cph you can expect to pay 4mil DKK (600K USD) for a ~60 sqmt apartment, prices will fall outside the cities, but nowhere close to 80k USD. Where did you get that number?
- you pay for your unemployment benefit, thought an a-kasse. Its not forever and it might barely cover your bills depending on where you live/your mortgage. If you have family its probably not enough and you need to add an insurance on your salary on top of that.
Just wanted to give my 2 cents.
tossandthrow•4h ago
Look 20 minutes out of Odense, Aalborg, Randers, etc.
Don't let yourself believe that a country is nothing but its capital - it is correct, that if you decide to live in a 4mil DKK apartment in the Copenhagen area, then you have also opted out of public help, and you are on your own.
sib•2h ago
Copenhagen: ~1.4M people
Odense: ~190K people
Aalborg: ~120K people
Randers: ~64K people
ghaff•2h ago
tossandthrow•1h ago
Again - why this extreme focus on the specifics? I merely argued that the housing market in the broader Denmark is reasonable, and you can usually easily commute to jobs in a city while living cheaply - something that is strictly more difficult in the US.
polipus•2h ago
tossandthrow•1h ago
> but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services
The point is exactly the opposite. You can get a house at a reasonable cost, 20 minutes away from a city you can likely get a job in - Even well paid tech jobs (They exists in both Odense and Aalborg).
I fint it disingenuous to pick pick out a very specific situation like this instead of looking at the broader argument.
holsta•4h ago
There are 53706 homes for sale today. 2784 of those are actual homes, not empty lots, costing less than 600K DKK.
I would not expect to live a healthy, comfortable life in most homes at that price range. Draft, mold, poor insulation and high energy bills.
tossandthrow•4h ago
Supermancho•4h ago
pipo234•4h ago
Only for a short period were western population growing so fast relative to small number of retirees that transferring that responsibility to government was a no brainer.
With diminishing demographics anywhere except maybe Africa, we'll need to be more creative once again. Raising retirement age is just one of many hard but inevitable policies.
_elf•4h ago
FirmwareBurner•2h ago
Because, contrary to the leftwing liberal propaganda, people aren't interchangeable cogs of equal value, where one 20 year old German or Dane equals one 20 year old from Somalia or Eritrea, but culture, IQ, upbringing and education make a huge difference, especially in developed knowledge based economies where labor is highly specialized. The infinite uncontrolled immigration only benefits landlords and corporations, while outsourcing the negative second order effects to the welfare state and local citizens. Basically it's another form of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.
So you need high value immigration, not liberal immigration. Some people are intelligent, honest, educated and hard working and will contribute a lot to the system, some are not and will be a net drain on your system, so you need to screen them to make sure you're only importing the high value ones if you want to improve your welfare system.
bossyTeacher•52m ago
A new category of jobs will be created: retirement jobs. People unable to work till their retirement age, will be given simple low paid jobs to earn enough work hours to hit their retirement. Think of all the simple jobs currently outsourced: content moderation for social media websites, training data tweaking, LLM training, teaching assistants, street cleaning assistants, etc.