Only marginally related to the topic—not sure if this belongs here or to the Open Thread:
What do people think the effect of raising or lowering the retirement age would be on unemployment? Intuitively, I’d guess that lowering the retirement age means that more old people will retire, and more young people will be needed to take up their jobs, lowering the unemployment rate (and effectively transferring wealth from old to young generations). But I can remember very few people (almost exclusively in meatspace) ever suggesting lowering the retirement age to combat unemployment—and indeed governments all over Europe have been raising it. Is that another case of “people are crazy, the world is mad”, or am I missing something?
Lowering the retirement age also increases the number of people receiving pensions and other retirement benefits; many of those benefits are underfunded (depending on country) and quite expensive to pay out.
New, young workers also tend to come in at lower pay scales than older workers leave. Those two effects can plausibly increase the cost to government of retirement, so they don’t want people to retire early. That might also function as a wealth transfer from elderly people to corporations (or shareholders) too.
Seems to me that Europe is reducing unemployment by letting more people study at universities. It’s like a pissing contest which country will have higher % of people with university degree, regardless of their quality. -- Sometimes it seems like we will soon have a university in every village, everyone will be a student until their thirties, most students will leave the university illiterate, and then they will either have to work till age 80 to retire, or spend their whole lives unemployed or working for the government.
Actually, this can make sense from a utilitarian viewpoint. Young people supposedly can enjoy their free time better than old people, so we are actually trading retirement for longer childhood.
It just feels horrible to people with priorities like me. I would rather learn efficiently, work efficiently, and retire soon knowing that I have already paid my debts to the society. Probably because I am having more fun now than when I was younger—I have more freedom, more money, more professional and social skills, and my health is still okay—so the only complaint is that I feel like I don’t have free time for anything, and the end of the rat race is nowhere near. (But that’s also an issue with my horrible time management and not being strategic enough.)
Only marginally related to the topic—not sure if this belongs here or to the Open Thread:
What do people think the effect of raising or lowering the retirement age would be on unemployment? Intuitively, I’d guess that lowering the retirement age means that more old people will retire, and more young people will be needed to take up their jobs, lowering the unemployment rate (and effectively transferring wealth from old to young generations). But I can remember very few people (almost exclusively in meatspace) ever suggesting lowering the retirement age to combat unemployment—and indeed governments all over Europe have been raising it. Is that another case of “people are crazy, the world is mad”, or am I missing something?
Lowering the retirement age also increases the number of people receiving pensions and other retirement benefits; many of those benefits are underfunded (depending on country) and quite expensive to pay out.
New, young workers also tend to come in at lower pay scales than older workers leave. Those two effects can plausibly increase the cost to government of retirement, so they don’t want people to retire early. That might also function as a wealth transfer from elderly people to corporations (or shareholders) too.
Seems to me that Europe is reducing unemployment by letting more people study at universities. It’s like a pissing contest which country will have higher % of people with university degree, regardless of their quality. -- Sometimes it seems like we will soon have a university in every village, everyone will be a student until their thirties, most students will leave the university illiterate, and then they will either have to work till age 80 to retire, or spend their whole lives unemployed or working for the government.
Actually, this can make sense from a utilitarian viewpoint. Young people supposedly can enjoy their free time better than old people, so we are actually trading retirement for longer childhood.
It just feels horrible to people with priorities like me. I would rather learn efficiently, work efficiently, and retire soon knowing that I have already paid my debts to the society. Probably because I am having more fun now than when I was younger—I have more freedom, more money, more professional and social skills, and my health is still okay—so the only complaint is that I feel like I don’t have free time for anything, and the end of the rat race is nowhere near. (But that’s also an issue with my horrible time management and not being strategic enough.)
True that. I hadn’t thought of it as a contest among countries but only as one among people within each country, but now that I think about it...