The title says that 65-year-olds are learning how to code, yet the article itself only mentions one example. It does not provide more data, except about the decline of productivity and the aging population.
A 65-year-old learning how to code is still probably very unusual.
>Now she uses her new-found skills to automate work processes like doing reports, drafting budgets and other repetitive tasks, saving her hours in her day.
lol i have been using computers for along time and i still have not done that yet. Rather than lots of repetitive tasks it seems i have to focus on a few tasks that require precision and cannot be automated. Very seldom can i recall ever being in a situation where i would spend hours doing something that could be automated. Also trying to code a program to automate the task would take longer than doing the task. I think i can recall one time 2 months ago needing to check 70 accounts and doing it by hand which took a half hour was way faster than trying to spend hours trying to code a program to do it.
You don't know what she is doing. Maybe now she can adjust a report to return the figures she wants, for just a week's worth of data or whatever. Most people can benefit by becoming more computer literate.
In my scrappy work environment I have to help set up some subscriber emails on the side of my main production engineering work. We’re short-handed.
Every week, sometimes multiple times in a week, I get effort approval emails. For each item in the approvals list I have to file a ticket, filling out the details expressed in the email.
Doing this once maybe takes half an hour. Doing it every week, or more often, gets annoying, frustrating, etc. Writing something to take care of it in some spare moments is making the process just that much less of a burden.
In short, if you do it only once in a while—sure, not a big deal. If you’re doing that banal half-hour task on the regular and it blocks you from getting something else done that benefits from more attention then the effort expended to automate it makes a lot of sense.
Automation doesn’t need to be end to end. Consider a case if you need to do an aggregation with pdfs, simple script to read and pull the data points is pretty trivial. You will still need to type the results by hand in excel (for example), but that « automation » just reduced the effort it’d take otherwise.
Translation: Singapore's government is failing its elderly generation. A very small percentage are able to keep working and supporting themselves for a few more months / years by learning how to program, in probably the most basic sense. Everyone else is unable to find work but unable to receive retirement benefits that they've paid for during their working years in taxes. This circumstance is due to either corruption or ineptitude, or both.
This will probably be a more prominent story in the US soon as well. Save your money as best you can and don't count on governments to fulfill their promises.
When I was growing up, the retirement age in the US was 65. Now it's 66 and will soon be 67. By the time I retire, it will probably be higher. It's blamed on the population living longer, yet the average lifespan has been decreasing recently. The government failed (or ignored) the fairly obvious result of modern medicine making people live longer and did not plan for it, and continues to not plan for it other than cutting benefits. How many 66 year old programmers do you know?
The average lifespan decreased by something like 0.1 years. It's a slight dip in an otherwise upward trend in life expectancy and it's mostly due to opioid crisis. At any rate, I fully expect social security benefits to be lowered by 2030 as we are approaching an inflection point in expenditures versus S.S. taxes taken in.
Let's make sure social security is around forever, and available for those that actually need it. We can slightly increase taxes and slightly reduce benefits for wealthy people to keep social security working basically forever. I'm fortunate to be a highly compensated engineer. If I'm making say $250k a year, I could pay a little bit more in taxes to help the system be sustainable, and also more likely to be there if I do need it.
Taxes for this benefit are capped at $8,240 or 6.2% of salary up to $132,900 [1]. The reason taxes are capped is because benefits are capped. My company could pay a bit more in payroll taxes and they wouldn't care, they'd love to hire 5 more experienced and well compensated engineers like me. There's a similar issue on social security wages - let's say I accumulate $5 million in assets at retirement, I'm going to be earning a pretty good amount of income even when not working, so you could reduce my social security (maybe via extra taxes?). People grumble about that money, "it's mine, I paid for it my whole career" - and you did pay for it in taxes. But things like social security also serve as a crucial part of our weaker societal safety net in America. I want it to be there for people that need it.
I probably won't need it in retirement, but most people will. If I do lose all my money, or say I wasn't as lucky in my life and was hurt or not able to accumulate so much wealth, I want it to be there - for me and others.
The US has a culture that believes that only suckers pay taxes, the willingness/desire to defer problems to future generations, and the inability to capture meaningful revenue from the extremely small percentage of the population that reaps the lion's share of the benefits of the economy.
> Income taxes in America are more progressive than in other rich countries--according to an authoritiative official study which, to my knowledge, has not been contradicted. The OECD's report "Growing Unequal", on poverty and inequality in industrial countries, includes a table that provides two measures of income tax progressivity in 2005.
US Social Security also pays out more than most Western European countries.
The US tax system is regressive by taxing earned income differently than capital gains. It also gives the truly wealthy an opportunity to indefinitely defer or avoid realizing gains. The "progressive" US tax code only targets high income/upper middle class individuals.
Taxing capital gains differently than income is a regressive element, one the US tax code shares with nearly every other country in the OECD. Overall our capital gains tax rates are on the higher end: https://taxfoundation.org/us-taxpayers-face-6th-highest-top-.... But the overall tax system is progressive.
The parent comment made a relative statement (comparison of US to Europe). You responded with an absolute statement (US tax code is not progressive). That’s completely irrelevant to his/her point.
>If I'm making say $250k a year, I could pay a little bit more in taxes to help the system be sustainable, and also more likely to be there if I do need it.
I'm all for helping those in need and having a safety net, but I don't think what you're advocating for is a realistic solution. Social security is in trouble because it was mismanaged - increasing taxes to offset the burden of mismanagement is a half solution, and likely only a temporary fix. Social security (as well as a multitude of other things) is in its current state because we Americans lack the necessary systems/skills/policies to manage it properly.
All of these points have been known for some time and were actually "designed into" Social Security reform legislation that was enacted in the 1980's. The American people (through their elected representatives) have chosen to indefinitely postpone additional reform that may address some of your criticisms.
Therefore it seems to me that the civil servants running Social Security have been doing exactly what they were expected to do so it still isn’t clear to me how they're mismanaging it.
These things all come because our elected american representatives how not put more money into it. For my entire life every year there has been a report that they needed to put a bit more in and although there have been small amounts it has never been enough added. Calling this mismanagement of the program is not accurate because it suggests that the money was somehow lost or misinvested by the leaders of the program somehow. The senators and representatives in congress didn't put the right amount of money in it to match the payouts they set.
One example - Medicare is insanely expensive. IIRC the US government spends more on healthcare than Canada (adjusted for population etc) due to the huge costs of the most expensive clients (old people) getting "free" gold-plated private healthcare.
> It's blamed on the population living longer, yet the average lifespan has been decreasing recently. The government failed (or ignored) the fairly obvious result of modern medicine making people live longer and did not plan for it
Singaporean pensions are defined contribution: what you put in plus interest is exactly what you get out. So corruption is not the issue, but people falling through the cracks is.
You can blame it all on incompetent governments, but that’s taking the easy path.
With endless inflation as a reality, the only way to support retirement is to basically build a pyramid scheme. For every old person who retires, you need multiple young people to work to support them. Seeing as how Singapore’s fertility rate is only about half of the replacement rate, that’s not possible.
The elderly today have a few people falling through the cracks. The elderly 50 years from now will have nothing to their names and no family to support them. They’re truly fucked.
It has nothing to do with inflation. Retirement savings are capital, but production requires labor. The mechanics of retirement are just a proxy for diverting production from working young people to non-working old people, and that’s true whether you have private retirement savings, tax-funded retirement, or traditional family arrangements where children care for elderly parents. In any of those systems, if the older generation is much bigger than the young generation, you have a problem.
Several people do it, like several people do matchstick Eiffel Towers or have a crocodile as a pet.
It's still rare, and in no way anything statistically significant to write home about, nor the "way out" for the serious problem of old people forced to work.
I'll second that (not a Singaporean yet, but live here enough to call it my home).
Singapore government produces amazing programs aimed to adapt elderly workers to changing environment, which includes help to understand how to work with modern devices. A lot of government money is poured in it and I personally consider it as money well spent. In other countries I've been living in elderly people are usually just being left with their problems or thrown in into some kind of welfare scheme, which younger generation has to be paying for.
In Singapore everyone works which means contribution to society and it pays off with opportunities for everyone and excellent government services.
Foregoing your retirement to make wealthy shareholders wealthier is not useful work. Community work is where "bored" retirees would be better off putting their focus.
I know many comments were about how the article was a cherry picked example, but I was still glad the example seemed to be a useful one.
Honestly, I think even most programmers would benefit from refreshers on how to automate large parts of their workflow (I myself wish I was much more of a sed/awk guru than I am), and how to use the command line and the standard command line tools to get things done.
Not to be too harsh but I think it's unrealistic to expect more than a tiny percentage of people who are very late in their careers to learn to be true programmers, but I think most people could learn bot-like automation tools to improve their productivity.
When I worked in Singapore, it was heartbreaking to see how the elderly were forced to take low paying positions clearing tables and being servers at McDonald's. Not because it's "bad" work or anything, but because in their aging years they were forced to due to a social service system that failed them.
This is obviously a fluff piece that tries to promote the resilience and motivation of the aging population, yet just highlights how bad things are since people have to work til they die.
Edit: OK, OK, I found a 2011 Brookings report that explains it: "Social Policy in Singapore: A Crucible of Individual Responsibility".[0] Basically, social services mandates savings, with more or less self-managed investment, but doesn't guarantee benefits. And it has emphasized home ownership.
So no, their system isn't at risk of bankruptcy. But then:
> Like the standard criticism of defined-contribution pension plans, the standard criticism of somewhat minimalist social policy such as that which characterises Singapore is that it does not cover enough risks and actual problems faced by the poor, the elderly, and the sick and disabled. As we have seen, European, Scandinavian and North American countries spend around 35% of their GDPs on social programmes. Although a comparable figure on total social welfare spending is not available for Singapore, the Government of Singapore spends only 16.7% of its GDP on all its programmes, a figure that is less than half as much as European and Scandinavian programmes spent just on social welfare.
There is some debate over just what public services are essential. But I do agree that livable support ought to be available for those who, for whatever reason, can't provide for themselves, or get support from family or friends. That's arguably a major part of living in a society.
> This is obviously a fluff piece that tries to promote the resilience and motivation of the aging population, yet just highlights how bad things are since people have to work til they die.
It's "learn to code" but in a less aggressive way.
CPF, the Singaporean pension system, is a defined contribution system funded by employers. If you were working before it was created in 1955 (not many of these left), or before contribution rates were ramped up to meaningful levels c. 1985, or -- most commonly -- working in informal or self-employed jobs, it was/is entirely possible to reach retirement age without a penny to your name. There are some government schemes to prevent total destitution, but most rely on having family to support you, which many of the poorest don't (no children and/or broader family estranged).
In the European sense, that if you're 70+ and you're forced to working still after a lifetime of work (even if you had blown every penny of your old salaries on hookers and blow), then the pension system is bad and anybody who approves of it should feel bad -- you wouldn't understand!
I clearly don’t. It’s inexplicable to me why able-bodied people in a country with a birth rate below replacement rate since 1977 should expect to be able to stop working. It doesn’t matter how you structure the retirement system, the math doesn’t work.
> The math works fine. What doesn't work is the productivity distribution from work done.
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.)
It’s not just a matter of having people. The main reason we care about the worker/retiree ratio is that workers generate a surplus that can be used to take care of retirees. To the extent that immigrants and their kids are able to quickly join the middle class that pays the taxes that supports retirees, then immigration helps. But that same fact limits how much you can rely on immigration to address lack of internal population growth.
(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.)
> 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.
The explanation would be automation. If we have machines doing the bulk work of food production and distribution (with some people involved, but not the entire population), then there is in theory room for some people not to work. This means other people will need to take up that slack, but lets honestly look at most of the jobs we do and the world is mostly inventing work for itself. "Must see movie?" "Luxury Appartments" "Diamond rings" "Minecraft" etc. etc. Pretty much most of the stuff we buy in the 1st world are luxuries.
Such automation doesn’t exist now and may or may not exist in the future. Moreover, the kind of jobs necessary to take care of a larger elderly population (doctors, nursing, housework) will be the last to be automated, if it’s ever automated.
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.
My parents are past 65, and my mom is still easily able to spend a full day taking care of our 1 year old, and my dad spent the last few weeks cutting down trees on his property. (They spent the first 40 years of their life in Bangladesh, so your point about healthcare probably isn’t correct either.) Only a small fraction of people work hard physical labor that someone 65-75 could not do. And of course some people won’t be able to do even a normal service job, but you don’t need everyone to keep working, just most people.
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.
My parents are younger than 65. My dad has health issues. He can't chop down trees. If he can hold his fork without dropping it then it is a good day. Without a government pension he would be SOL.
here we go... anecdotal evidence starting with "my such and such can do such and such" so it must be true for most people. I am 38 and last year I tried doing dish duty in a kitchen just for the heck of it and my back couldn't take more than 4 hours at a time.
>My parents are past 65, and my mom is still easily able to spend a full day taking care of our 1 year old, and my dad spent the last few weeks cutting down trees on his property.
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...
> Very few people can do 40 hours of physical labor when they get to be 65 years old
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.
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).
It’s a matter of priorities, isn’t it? Like someone else said, if you take a certain amount of other luxuries (you might consider retirement one of those, I guess) out of the equation, I’m sure the math would work out. As long as everyone has access to basic necessities. Of course, if the population is dying out, no system will last forever anyhow.
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.
Is it equally inexplicable why able-bodied 8-10 year old children are not allowed to work in factories like in the past?
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).
Well, I speak for quite a lot in many countries in Western Europe, including myself. Based on public policies, mass protests in cities, voting patterns, on those issues (pensions, labor rights, pension age, etc), I know why're hardly some minority...
In Asia and Latin America, children support their parents as they age. The West created this dream of individualism where each person had to become entirely self-sufficient through their savings and investments (employer managed or not). It's not surprising that it is more fragile.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadA 65-year-old learning how to code is still probably very unusual.
lol i have been using computers for along time and i still have not done that yet. Rather than lots of repetitive tasks it seems i have to focus on a few tasks that require precision and cannot be automated. Very seldom can i recall ever being in a situation where i would spend hours doing something that could be automated. Also trying to code a program to automate the task would take longer than doing the task. I think i can recall one time 2 months ago needing to check 70 accounts and doing it by hand which took a half hour was way faster than trying to spend hours trying to code a program to do it.
Every week, sometimes multiple times in a week, I get effort approval emails. For each item in the approvals list I have to file a ticket, filling out the details expressed in the email.
Doing this once maybe takes half an hour. Doing it every week, or more often, gets annoying, frustrating, etc. Writing something to take care of it in some spare moments is making the process just that much less of a burden.
In short, if you do it only once in a while—sure, not a big deal. If you’re doing that banal half-hour task on the regular and it blocks you from getting something else done that benefits from more attention then the effort expended to automate it makes a lot of sense.
This will probably be a more prominent story in the US soon as well. Save your money as best you can and don't count on governments to fulfill their promises.
When I was growing up, the retirement age in the US was 65. Now it's 66 and will soon be 67. By the time I retire, it will probably be higher. It's blamed on the population living longer, yet the average lifespan has been decreasing recently. The government failed (or ignored) the fairly obvious result of modern medicine making people live longer and did not plan for it, and continues to not plan for it other than cutting benefits. How many 66 year old programmers do you know?
Taxes for this benefit are capped at $8,240 or 6.2% of salary up to $132,900 [1]. The reason taxes are capped is because benefits are capped. My company could pay a bit more in payroll taxes and they wouldn't care, they'd love to hire 5 more experienced and well compensated engineers like me. There's a similar issue on social security wages - let's say I accumulate $5 million in assets at retirement, I'm going to be earning a pretty good amount of income even when not working, so you could reduce my social security (maybe via extra taxes?). People grumble about that money, "it's mine, I paid for it my whole career" - and you did pay for it in taxes. But things like social security also serve as a crucial part of our weaker societal safety net in America. I want it to be there for people that need it.
I probably won't need it in retirement, but most people will. If I do lose all my money, or say I wasn't as lucky in my life and was hurt or not able to accumulate so much wealth, I want it to be there - for me and others.
[1] https://smartasset.com/retirement/social-security-tax-limit
> Income taxes in America are more progressive than in other rich countries--according to an authoritiative official study which, to my knowledge, has not been contradicted. The OECD's report "Growing Unequal", on poverty and inequality in industrial countries, includes a table that provides two measures of income tax progressivity in 2005.
US Social Security also pays out more than most Western European countries.
https://socialsecurityworks.org/
https://www.epi.org/ (see https://www.epi.org/research/social-security/)
I'm all for helping those in need and having a safety net, but I don't think what you're advocating for is a realistic solution. Social security is in trouble because it was mismanaged - increasing taxes to offset the burden of mismanagement is a half solution, and likely only a temporary fix. Social security (as well as a multitude of other things) is in its current state because we Americans lack the necessary systems/skills/policies to manage it properly.
-Costs already exceed income for trust funds
-Costs will exceed income by 2020 for the entire program
-The OASDI tax rate has been increased 20+ times since Social Security's inception in order to keep the program viable.
Add an inability to even recognize mismanagement.
Therefore it seems to me that the civil servants running Social Security have been doing exactly what they were expected to do so it still isn’t clear to me how they're mismanaging it.
In most cases the governments of the day spent all those taxes. And then they borrowed some money and spent that too.
Now the younger generations are paying the piper, while the older generations expect the gravy train to keep chugging along like it’s still 1959.
Contradiction.
With endless inflation as a reality, the only way to support retirement is to basically build a pyramid scheme. For every old person who retires, you need multiple young people to work to support them. Seeing as how Singapore’s fertility rate is only about half of the replacement rate, that’s not possible.
The elderly today have a few people falling through the cracks. The elderly 50 years from now will have nothing to their names and no family to support them. They’re truly fucked.
The true image is that most 65-year-olds are not learning how to code.
It's still rare, and in no way anything statistically significant to write home about, nor the "way out" for the serious problem of old people forced to work.
(a) almost none 65-year-olds are learning how to code,
(b) implying that even a small but significant (say 5%) group are is lazy journalist / political propaganda BS
(c) even if it was true, 65-year olds forced to learn to code and desperate for work, is not a positive thing, it's a societal failure
Singapore government produces amazing programs aimed to adapt elderly workers to changing environment, which includes help to understand how to work with modern devices. A lot of government money is poured in it and I personally consider it as money well spent. In other countries I've been living in elderly people are usually just being left with their problems or thrown in into some kind of welfare scheme, which younger generation has to be paying for.
In Singapore everyone works which means contribution to society and it pays off with opportunities for everyone and excellent government services.
please answer
Give this woman her pension already.
Learning to code cause you want to at 65 is very different from having to....
Honestly, I think even most programmers would benefit from refreshers on how to automate large parts of their workflow (I myself wish I was much more of a sed/awk guru than I am), and how to use the command line and the standard command line tools to get things done.
Not to be too harsh but I think it's unrealistic to expect more than a tiny percentage of people who are very late in their careers to learn to be true programmers, but I think most people could learn bot-like automation tools to improve their productivity.
This is obviously a fluff piece that tries to promote the resilience and motivation of the aging population, yet just highlights how bad things are since people have to work til they die.
Did they just run out of young people to fund it?
Edit: OK, OK, I found a 2011 Brookings report that explains it: "Social Policy in Singapore: A Crucible of Individual Responsibility".[0] Basically, social services mandates savings, with more or less self-managed investment, but doesn't guarantee benefits. And it has emphasized home ownership.
So no, their system isn't at risk of bankruptcy. But then:
> Like the standard criticism of defined-contribution pension plans, the standard criticism of somewhat minimalist social policy such as that which characterises Singapore is that it does not cover enough risks and actual problems faced by the poor, the elderly, and the sick and disabled. As we have seen, European, Scandinavian and North American countries spend around 35% of their GDPs on social programmes. Although a comparable figure on total social welfare spending is not available for Singapore, the Government of Singapore spends only 16.7% of its GDP on all its programmes, a figure that is less than half as much as European and Scandinavian programmes spent just on social welfare.
So there we have it: individual responsibility.
0) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/social-policy-in-singapor...
Which in turn is code for "Heaven help you if you're poor or just plain unlucky."
It's "learn to code" but in a less aggressive way.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/ploughing-on...
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.
I was thinking more about the time between retirement and getting to the point you need aged care.
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,
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).
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.
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
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).