>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.

Congratulations, you have failed statistics.

> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s

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.

It's gone from about 70 for average people in 1920 (when life expectancy was at a local minimum, probably due to pollutants and terrible diet) to about 80, not counting infant mortality. That still means tripling the years in which someone is retired.

If you look at the pension system today, people work for about 40 years, and are retired for about 20 years.

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.

For Switzerland life expectancy for men went from 26 years at 50 years old in 1981 to 33.1 at the same age in 2021. That's more than 7 years. (At birth it increased from 72.4 to 81.6 at bit more than 9 years).

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?

> 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.

>Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population.

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.