Fallacy of the excluded middle, nobody suggested that people should be spending themselves into penury. This is a great argument for universal healthcare though.

And a collective insurance-like pension system, where the people dying early subsidise the people dying late. Then everyone just needs to save to the expected age of death, rather than the maximum age of death.

We have a fairly efficient market in (vanilla) annuities which act as a form of longevity insurance.

Annuities are great (if administered effectively, which is helped by economies of scale).

The UK has an efficient annuities market, it seems to me. My understanding was that in the US, it was to a large extent a tax-avoidance scheme, rather than a risk-mitigation mechanism, but I don't know enough about it.

In addition to regular vanilla annuities, for which we have a pretty efficient market, we have these terrible, awful, no good products that are misleadingly called variable annuities.

The variable ones are far more profitable and so get pushed onto people while you need to go seek out someone to sell you an ordinary annuity. They have a deservedly terrible reputation which I fear has tainted the ordinary kind somewhat in the public mind.

I don't think anyone is suggesting it is a dichotomy; they are pointing out that the value function is not linear.

People used to run out of money all the time when they were old. A hundred years ago in America most elderly were very poor and taken care of by their families. Now poverty is more concentrated in homes with young children. That sounds more comfortable to me, as an adult professional, but is it better for society?