In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population. Except that retirees are unproductive I guess.
Congratulations, you have failed statistics.
Yes. At birth.
The remaining life expectancy at 30/40/50/60 has not increased nearly as much as you would think from the increase in average lifespan at birth.
If the average life expectancy for the retirees increases by 1 year, they'd have to work 6 months longer to keep the system balanced with those numbers.
So can we now please stop to mention all the time that the increase in life expectancy is only caused by infant mortality reduction when it's clearly not the case?
My point was in regards to the GP:
>> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
>> Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
This makes it look like the pension system is doomed to fail due to a massive increase in the average lifespan today compared to earlier.
> That's more than 7 years.
If you're looking to balance the pension system, people just need to work 3.5 years longer given that increase.
If we pretended that there had been 0% increase in economic productivity since then then, then yes, changing demographics are a problem.
This is indeed, what most justifications of increasing the retirement age quietly assume. It's probably quite easy to assume because the % of increase in productivity captured by the working class since 1970s as wealth has actually been quite small.
Compounded economic growth since the 1960s has, I think, been something of the order of 200% though.
There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
This is so obvious it barely merits saying.
>having to raise the retirement age
You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right?
Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant.
Why?
If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more.
Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant.
Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?
The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem.
It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.