I also suppose it depends on how you define able-bodied. Sure, some people are technically able to perform work in their old age. How many can do it and still continue to feel alright, rather than suffer from aches and fatigue that seriously hamper their quality of life in their final years?
When I was a kid I read the essay ”In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russel, and it left an impression on me. I don’t think we need constant growth and increasing material wealth at any cost. One of the things I’d rather see instead is that people who’ve led a long life can retire and finally take it easy for a few years before they pass.
That's the problem. Very few people can still work at that age. To be more specific, there are more or less two types of labor: physical and mental (cognitive).
Very few people can do 40 hours of physical labor when they get to be 65 years old. If they've been working physical labor, their body is beaten and used for the years of abuse. They literally are no longer physically capable, not to mention the significant pain they're in from working a life of physical labor. If they've not worked a life of physical labor, then very few have the physical ability to start doing so when they're 65. Yes, if they've been fortunate enough to have top-notch medical care, good exercise habits, good genetics, and good luck, they may be able to do physical labor for 5-10 years, and then what? Also, a failure of any of those 4 can destroy you suitability for labor. Also, if they've had good medical care and the privilege to maintain a rigorous exercise regime, they likely have enough money for retirement.
In terms of mental labor, first of all, what percentage of the population is capable of skilled cognitive labor, like programming? Also, even among the minority of the population that is suited for such work, some people start losing a significant amount of mental acuity by they time they're 65-70.
In short, any society that fails to care for its elderly has failed, period. Yes, these folks have no choice but to try to get by as best they can, but it's a societal failure.
Surprised that any reasonable person would disagree.
As to the societal failure—its a self-engineered one. Maybe some day we’ll have robots doing all the work, but we’re not there yet. Singapore’s GDP per capita is $90,000 per working person. Enough where you can have a functional retirement system, but not so much that doubling the number of retirees per worker won’t seriously be painful.
Well, those 65+ years old working their asses of to make ends meet would also jump at the chance to play with their grandkids and tend to their garden and trees at their on their (usually non-existant) estate.
How this is non-ironically compared to everyday, forced, minimum wage, work at 65+, is beyond me. This is "let them eat cake" through and through...
I don't believe, from what I've seen, this to be remotely true. Most (not al) of the tradies & labourers I know in their 60s and 70s are very clearly more physically capable than most (not all) office workers i know in their 30s. I guess that's my experience against yours, with neither worth much.
There's probably some real world data out there, though I suspect it would be incredibly geographically dependent. In my country (Aus) in little redneck towns like Bundaberg, you hardly see anyone in public who isn't obese, and they will largely be functionally disabled by the time they hit 50. OTOH middle-class hippies around my rural area are surfing, building houses, and running up and down hills at 80. Perhaps your perception of the capacities of older folk derives from living in disabling urban environments?
None of this bears much on the question of whether people should be mandated to work at jobs they don't choose into their 60s and 70s. I personally think the main fruit of increased productivity should be liberation as far as possible from meaningless & unchosen activity, for all.
But surely,
E(working capacity | is still day laborer and >65)
> E(working capacity | >65)In which case it's true if only by dint of tautology, but in any case isn't pertinent to the point at issue (whether "Very few" older folk can so work).
People advocating these things lack all kinds of empathy, and are themselves seldom (ie. never) the ones forced to work in shitty jobs at 65+... If they were 65+ and had to stand up all day working to make ends meet or end homeless in the street, they'd sing a different tune. And they'd see exactly how "able-bodied" those 65+ are.
That's the second worst problem of privilege - not just having the upper hand at various situations, but not being able to get into the others' (that don't) shoes at all. You don't even have to be born into privilege for this, often the worse offenders are people who worked (and lucked/had connections/took chances others in their situation never had) themselves upwards into society, so on top of their current privilege and distance from those everyday experiences they add their contempt for the billions that did not (since if they did it, everybody could).
I was thinking more about the time between retirement and getting to the point you need aged care.
What's inexplicable to me is why it's possible to extract money from an economy by gambling on businesses as if they're race horses.
I don’t think you really appreciate the scale of the numbers involved. It’s hard to find good numbers for Singapore, but by 2060 the US will have 186 million workers and 95 million retirees. Let’s apply those ratios to today’s economy. That’d be about 80 million retirees. If you took the entire income of the top 1%, that works out to $25,000 per retiree. The maximum social security benefit works out to $45,000. Then the average Medicare spending per retiree is $16,000 per year. (And don’t forget, that 1%-er money is also earmarked to pay for universal healthcare and free education.)
(That’s why European efforts to combat their lack of population growth will fail. The US, by contrast, is far better at assimilating immigrants into the middle class and will be relatively more successful.)
Not sure the American Dream is still alive. The Trump administration might as well be the straw that broke the camel's back.