As European, is strange to see how old the US airline flight attendants are on average. In Europe, those jobs are mostly filled by young people, here in US, it tends to be the opposite of the spectrum.
It is an interesting question. Where I come from there is a mandatory retirement, but it is financed by a universal pension system (like social security, based on how long and much you made during your whole life). Now once forcibly retired, nothing prevents you to start your own business and contracting if you want.
Now, I get the no age discrimination intent. I am just wondering if this is a way to underpay people, and have 70yo people who still have to work to make it. Labor is more expensive in Europe probably because the pool of workers is smaller due to mandatory retirement age.
I just wish I wont have to work at 70yo. Would be nice to volunteer, or something if I feel like.
I am not sure what is the effect of mandatory retirement. Maybe it is negligible and does not change much the unemployment rates.
Even if we would forcedly retire everyone at 65yo in US, it might not change much how we compute the unemployment rate. Do you know if in US we count people over 65yo who are not actively working as "unemployed" ?
Flight attendants in the US are mainly older due to union contracts. The airlines went through rapid expansion many years ago, but since then there have been repeated rounds of layoffs. The layoffs go by seniority so younger flight attendants tend to get terminated and move on to other careers. (This happened to one of my relatives.)
Flight attendants in European airlines are surely unionized to at least the extent the US ones are. That doesn't seem right to me.
Maybe you could make the argument that European airlines have grown more in recent decades or something, but then you'd be able to see that per-airline (e.g. Virgin is mostly new hires relative to United, but Lufthansa certainly isn't).
> Flight attendants in European airlines are surely unionized to at least the extent the US ones are.
Can't find any data on this, but it doesn't seem obvious. The largest european airline is ryanair, which is an irish company. And "employers in Ireland can face [...] lesser constraints in terms of trade union involvement."[1]
US airlines have largely consolidated over the last decades and new airplanes don't require as much staff as before (basically cramming an airliner full with cheap seats instead of more staff-intensive premium offerings) which means there were layoff series.
I can't speak to Europe but I've been directly told that with a number of the Asian carriers, the expectation is that young, attractive, educated women become flight attendants, travel the world for a few years, get married, and leave.
Once upon a time, I knew a mid-20s Chinese national lady who was a flight attendant for more or less this reason. She - and I will not presume to speak more broadly than this particular lady - definitely used it to meet and date.
> Labor is more expensive in Europe probably because the pool of workers is smaller due to mandatory retirement age.
Labor is more expensive in Europe because of taxes, primarily. The fully loaded cost of a professional employee is often double their salary, and sometimes more.
Unfortunately that system isn't working for everyone. If you track the economic power of a country like Germany, their people should be wealthy beyond reason. Instead, the people are becoming poorer each generation.
This seems like a typical outcome of Germany's approach to welfare in general - everything is extremely granular. Depending on what you're paid, how you work, and how long you've been working, you can expect utterly different benefits across the spectrum.
Coming from a country with a flat pension, the difference is visible. There are a lot of really poor old people here.
Then again, there are many fewer really poor young people.
Are US flight attendants older than the average US worker? I suspect not.
Also, why is it mainly young people doing these jobs in other countries? Is that even a good thing? Why should relatively older, but still perfectly capable, workers be excluded from this profession? Is this job simply not as well compensated in other countries, so people leave it as they grow older and seek higher salaries?
There's a lot of weird setups in how the us flight attendant pay work, largely due to how the union negotiates them. FAs are paid only while the plane door is closed, so there's a huge incentive to fly long-hauls. Also, flights are allocated by seniority, so there is a pay-your-dues period of short low-paying flights done by workers with less experience, and high-pay long haul flights are full of older, more experienced FAs.
Not too long after 9/11, I was on a flight from San Francisco to Seoul. We were almost done boarding, waiting for the final passengers to get seated. I was in a bulkhead aisle seat, we were about ready to take off and a flight attendant took her seat facing me, and started making small talk. At one point I commented on how reassuring it was to have such a mature flight crew. She smiled and motioned towards a fight attendant in first class who was finishing her tasks. "See her? She's number 2". "Number 2?". "Yes, she has the 2nd most seniority of all 22,000 United flight attendants. 46 years." She went on, "One time, she missed her flight because she drove to the airport for a flight and fell asleep in the employee lounge. When she woke up, she thought she had already completed her flight and went back home."
Now, this may be based on incorrect assumptions about your flying habits, but my understanding is that at least with many of the US airlines, the routes that flight attendants fly on are allotted by seniority, and the longer routes are more coveted, since they allow you to take a smaller number of flights per week to make up the number of flight hours required.
This means that newer, younger flight attendants tend to fly the short domestic flights, while the longer, transoceanic flights (like the ones European travelers are more likely to see American airlines for) tend to be staffed by the older flight attendants.
Not so much allotted as at many airlines it is a “bid” process. You put in for a route, and it goes to the most senior bidders. The perq of being senior is more likelihood of getting choice routes.
Even on the ground, at the airport the people checkin for tickets are way older in US, than their counterpart in Europe.
It is not just flying attendants. But maybe this is specific to US airlines.
Where are you getting that from? Average American wages are $63,000 per worker. Higher than any country besides Switzerland, Iceland and Luxembourg[1]. To compare to this five largest EU members: Americans are paid 28% higher than Germans, 41% higher than Frenchmen, 59% higher than Brits, and 64% higher than Italians and Spaniards.
Labor is more expensive in Europe because workers rights add significant overhead. A simple example, 37.5h work weeks and 5 weeks paid holiday is pretty standard. Then there are severances.
Also, if you look at the median US wages, it's appearant how much does there is at the top.
Yes, Americans do have higher wages overall, but this is because there are fewer worker rights and less hidden costs for the employer. This does not mean labor is cheaper.
we may be comparing different numbers. i doubt it's that low.
i don't know the specifics in germany, but there is net salary and gross salary, and there are employer contributions beyond gross salary, as well as other costs.
my understanding is that put everything together, the cost per employee is twice the gross salary. this includes cost for equipment, work space and whatever else you need to spend money on to help an employee to do their job.
25% seems very low. it's possibly only the taxes and insurance and related contributions. or maybe denmark calculates the gross salary different?
i searched a few resources and found references ranging from 1.5 to 1.7. so not quite 100%.
Employers in most European countries have to pay for healthcare, pension, unemployment, taxes. In US some employers do also pay for those, but in Europe it can represent a much bigger part.
When an American is paid 41% higher than Frenchmen, much (if not more) of those 41% are actually paid by the employer). The frenchman would have healthcare included, pension at 65yo, better unemployment protection, virtually free education for his children, etc.
From an employer's perspective, labor is more expensive in Europe than in US (even the minimum wage is higher in most Europe).
Not saying one solution is better than the other. Just comparing different approaches.
I have an observation to offer, based on "anecdata" and the like. Let's assume that the Baby Boomer generation is that standard group born between 1946 and 1964. Where I worked in 2008, I noticed a lot of the Baby Boomer crowd taking a bath on their retirement funds due to, well, 2008. Lousy investments, house-flipping, and so on. Many of them grumbled about having to delay their retirements considerably. I saw this happen in effect as these people continued to work, often a decade longer than their stated departure dates. They didn't have mandatory retirement, and so they kept plugging along.
I believe this 2008 effect, combined with the relatively small cohort for Gen X, has left the Baby Boomers in power politically, in business, and in university still, leaving Gen X waiting for open positions to climb up into, but they haven't opened up yet. Indeed, with the youngest Boomers at age fifty-six, they will still be a forced to be reckoned with for at least another decade, while Gen X grows stagnant.
We're a small bunch, so aside from bones thrown to us like Stranger Things or Ready Player One, we are largely ignored. We will most likely be surpassed by the Millennials. Part of this, I think, may be slightly due to the kind of fatalistic passive nature which seems to permeate much of Gen X, who are, in some sense, still waiting for the bombs to drop, assuming the acid rain, killer bees, or GRID doesn't get us first.
Call it a wild suspicion, but I think Gen X will be a sort of forgotten bunch a century from now, and the lack of mandatory retirement may be part of it.
> Where I worked in 2008, I noticed a lot of the Baby Boomer crowd taking a bath on their retirement funds due to, well, 2008.
How did they take a bath on their retirement funds? Did they sell everything at its lows for some reason and ignore all advice about how to save for retirement?
We’ve had 10%+ returns for a decade now, they should be fine assuming they had adequate savings before 2008.
I suspect most people never had adequate savings to begin with, and 2008 didn’t have anything to do with their problem, which is they simply never saved or earned enough money to retire at the quality of life they expect.
The oldest Baby Boomers were starting to retire by then. There are lots of variables, but if you're drawing down your retirement funds and the stock market is down significantly for a long period of time you may end up either having several lean years or drawing down faster while the market is down.
I don’t understand the question? The original claim was people took a bath on their retirement savings. Which is only true if they sold all their retirement assets. Therefore, I don’t think it’s accurate to say the 2008 recession caused people to lose their retirement savings. Selling at the bottom of a market would cause one to lose their retirement savings.
They didn't know it was the bottom. It could have been the new normal. However, to me that would imply retiring 4 years later and not 10. One they market turned around retirement was back...
My parents, like a lot of unsophisticated middle-class investors, panic sold in 2008. In previous generations, they’d have had defined benefit pensions and probably not been involved in the stock market at all, or only moderately. And they probably had some crappy funds with excessive expenses, to boot.
No one except the super rich just have a pool of savings that they are going to retire on; for normal people the amount you need to be putting away right now depends on the amount you are going to put away in the future.
Let's say you are in your 50s, have a nice upper middle class job that you spent a few decades becoming qualified for. You are putting away a reasonable fraction of your income such that you can live comfortably now and retire in 10 years. Then the economy collapses, you lose this high paying job and there are no comparable positions available. You are unemployed for a few months and then under-employed working retail at target. You still have all the expenses of an upper middle class lifestyle, but with a salary maybe a bit above minimum wage. You can tighten your belt a bit but a lot of those expenses like your mortgage still need to be paid. Selling off investment assets despite the poor market and reducing the amount of money you put away for retirement is likely your only reasonable option to maintain your current standard of living.
The stock market rebounded quickly, but people were still underemployed and had burned through a lot of their savings to stay afloat, so they didn't have the funds to buy back into the market, certainly not to the level they were prior to the crisis. Retirement is inherently a measure of savings, anything that makes you eat into savings will push back the earliest date you could have retired. Saying they simply didn't have enough money is like a doctor saying you just aren't immune enough to symptoms: maybe not incorrect but a thoroughly useless diagnosis.
Slightly OT, as a foreigner living in the US, the thing that really breaks my heart is seeing a 70+ yr old greeter at Walmart.
I've grown up seeing many retired folks having their own tiny business or just running their family businesses, but the greeter thing doesn't sit well with me. I don't know why it makes me so deeply uncomfortable. It feels like some kind of a breakdown of a social contract.
This sounds a bit condescending and has a lot of assumptions baked in. There are legitimately many reasons why someone at 70 wants to works as a greeter, including pure boredom or curiocity.
I totally understand. I have no idea about their situation and Its not a rational thing to feel. It just isn't something I was expecting to see in the US.
My 74 year old uncle is the same. He collects a 6 figure pension, he doesn't need the money but he does need a place to go to be around people and being a door greeter at a Home Depot (pre-covid, anyway) was what he wanted to do.
Yep, my grandfather has a pension from working as an electrician his whole life, and now he works in the hardware section. He's getting too old and frail to do the activities he used to do, so working in the hardware section lets him feel useful instead of sitting around the house doing nothing.
Not sure if that's better or worse. It almost reminds me of the old ladies in Japan who get arrested on purpose, so that they go to prison and have company.
By the time a person retires they have spent the overwhelming majority of their life working. To a point that not much else makes sense. Working is the social contract.
> By the time a person retires they have spent the overwhelming majority of their life working. To a point that not much else makes sense. Working is the social contract.
No, what the first two sentences describes is institutionalization (or environmental socialization), not social contract. The same thing that extensive periods in prison, or war, or any number of other hostile environments do that make it hard for people to adjust to any other living situation.
I would not read too much into it. I know a surprising number of nominally retired people with plenty of money who are recreationally employed because they enjoy it, often taking those kinds of jobs because it has such low commitment for them. It is a very social activity. I’ve talked to Uber drivers that were wealthy retirees who drove a couple hours per day just to talk to diverse and interesting people, it is an enjoyable routine for them.
Some of my teachers in high school were retired industry executives who taught for the love of it. At least in the US, “retirement” is often about choosing to be a productive and social member of the community without optimizing for the paycheck. It gives them a sense of purpose. I can’t speak for retirement in other cultures but in the US many retirees take an enormous amount of pride in generating value to society even if it doesn’t generate income. My grandparents and great-grandparents were all like this, and they loved it. Sometimes it generated income but they didn’t need it.
I could easily see myself doing the same thing as they did.
My parents both retired in their mid 50s. My mom is a retired school teacher and my dad is a retired factory worker.
Shortly after my mom retired, she was offered a part time position with the school system to help at risk children. At the rate they were going to pay her. She could only work 10 hours a week without it cutting into her pension. She negotiated a pay cut so she could work more hours and still be useful. So she definitely didn’t need the money. [1]
They took the money she earned and went on three month cross country road trip.
After the funding was up for that, she tried to retire again and then another opportunity came up. By now they are both over 62 and getting both of their social security checks, her pension, and my dad is getting money from his annuity that he bought with part of his retirement savings.
She still was kind of bored so she made the same deal again. They took another three month road trip and used some of the money to both fix up their house and increase the size of it by 50%.
[1] most of the time you can work without affecting your pension unless it’s for the school system.
It should be hard to watch: the “Pioneer Generation” was largely left out of modern Singapore's current affluence. The government is taking efforts to make sure they aren’t living in utter poverty, but they didn’t have the well-paying jobs to build up nice pensions like their younger counterparts have: https://www.pioneers.sg/en-sg/Pages/Home.aspx
This is the government talking about what their lives are like. Imagine the harsher reality.
Most consulting firms (BCG, Bain, McKinsey) and accountancies (KPMG, Deloitte) have incredibly strong incentives for partners to agree to leave in their early 60s.
I suspect because they need to dangle the carrot of partnership in front of younger managers, otherwise they’d leave.
It’s a big issue in law firms, where senior associates (the ones who actually are responsible for 99% of the work) get fed up waiting for 70+ year old partners to step down.
Sounds like it could be okay so long as all the benefits that made it possible come back too. Otherwise, we'll be in a Dickensian situation where the capitalists yell "Are there no workhouses?!" at impoverished elderly that they forced themselves to lay off.
The US Foreign Service still enforces mandatory retirement. I purposely retired early to avoid the indignity of being told "you're too old to work for us anymore, here's your hat, there's the door." I didn't want to go out that way.
Cut-throat business practices couched in the language of “freedom to choose”. Let me retire on a good pension at 60 like my grandparents all did.
The world is supposed to be getting better not worse. If i want something “to do with my time” when I’m in my 60s and 70s (if I’m even lucky enough to live that long: many aren’t, and never get to stop working) I want to help out at a local social club or volunteer for a charity, not get paid a pittance to greet customers until my hips collapse.
>Let me retire on a good pension at 60 like my grandparents all did.
My theory: The economic success of my grandfather, part of the post-WWII "greatest generation" in the U.S., was an anomaly.
After WWII the U.S. economy was experiencing unique boomtimes. They won the war with their economy intact, and were by far the most productive country on the planet.
Since then, besides reverting to the mean, globalism and information technology has changed everything.
My grandfather had a 4th grade education, retired from his job at a steel plant, and lived in three of four houses he owned in two states. That is simply not the way the world works any more.
From an economic perspective he was in the right place at the right time. A couple generations earlier he would have been a poor farmer. A generation or two afterwards he would have been a working-poor service worker.
Like I said, this is a theory of mine, that the economy of post-WWII American was an aberration and should not be considered the normal state of things. For those couple/few decades the U.S. was the factory and research powerhouse of the world, other manufacturing bases didn't exist or were rebuilding.
I agree, and it's the same reason I take investment advice from all 50s/60s born with a huge grain of salt. "Put $10,000 in an index fund when you're 23 years old and you'll be a millionaire when you retire!" There are so many assumptions being made there that it boggles the mind. What if the economy doesn't grow 3% yoy for my entire life! What if it just... levels off?
Piketty pointed this out: in the early 1800s, authors would mention actual numerical dollar amounts paid for goods in books and plays. Because for all of prior history economic growth was a few basis points per year, at best. So a British pound earned in 1600 would be roughly comparable in value to one spent a hundred years later.
A pension is nothing special. It is just a lifetime annuity that you can buy yourself. Who wants to beholden to one company their entire career? I would much rather make more money and save it.
While social security of not a great “pension” for most people, if it continues to give the same inflation adjusted benefits today when we retire at the maximum benefit rate. It will give a married couple where one earned at the maximum contribution rate $4500/month. Since the couple with the lesser lifetime earnings can choose to get 1/2 of the higher earnings benefit while both are still living.
We could easily live off of that amount with a paid off house.
While I realize that’s not a realistic scenario for the average American, that’s very realistic for a tech worker living in any major city in the US.
American is back to working until you die. Its what the plutocrats wanted. We had a brief go at labor rights, but its gone now, destroyed by the greed.
72 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadMaybe you could make the argument that European airlines have grown more in recent decades or something, but then you'd be able to see that per-airline (e.g. Virgin is mostly new hires relative to United, but Lufthansa certainly isn't).
Can't find any data on this, but it doesn't seem obvious. The largest european airline is ryanair, which is an irish company. And "employers in Ireland can face [...] lesser constraints in terms of trade union involvement."[1]
[1]: https://www.matheson.com/news-and-insights/article/key-disti...
If anything they are the gold standard on how to do court gimmicks.
PSA stewardess class, 1974.[1]
[1] http://psa-history.org/site/assets/files/4429/7406.jpg
Labor is more expensive in Europe because of taxes, primarily. The fully loaded cost of a professional employee is often double their salary, and sometimes more.
https://www.dw.com/en/poverty-increasingly-threatens-elderly...
Coming from a country with a flat pension, the difference is visible. There are a lot of really poor old people here.
Then again, there are many fewer really poor young people.
Also, why is it mainly young people doing these jobs in other countries? Is that even a good thing? Why should relatively older, but still perfectly capable, workers be excluded from this profession? Is this job simply not as well compensated in other countries, so people leave it as they grow older and seek higher salaries?
This means that newer, younger flight attendants tend to fly the short domestic flights, while the longer, transoceanic flights (like the ones European travelers are more likely to see American airlines for) tend to be staffed by the older flight attendants.
Where are you getting that from? Average American wages are $63,000 per worker. Higher than any country besides Switzerland, Iceland and Luxembourg[1]. To compare to this five largest EU members: Americans are paid 28% higher than Germans, 41% higher than Frenchmen, 59% higher than Brits, and 64% higher than Italians and Spaniards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
Also, if you look at the median US wages, it's appearant how much does there is at the top.
Yes, Americans do have higher wages overall, but this is because there are fewer worker rights and less hidden costs for the employer. This does not mean labor is cheaper.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
i don't know the specifics in germany, but there is net salary and gross salary, and there are employer contributions beyond gross salary, as well as other costs.
my understanding is that put everything together, the cost per employee is twice the gross salary. this includes cost for equipment, work space and whatever else you need to spend money on to help an employee to do their job.
25% seems very low. it's possibly only the taxes and insurance and related contributions. or maybe denmark calculates the gross salary different?
i searched a few resources and found references ranging from 1.5 to 1.7. so not quite 100%.
here is a swiss example with a compact table.
https://www.runmyaccounts.ch/2013/07/wie-viel-kostet-ein-mit...
this one suggests a cost of 6900 for a 4500 gross salary.
but it also adds hiring a manager per 10 employees and splitting that up among the employees being managed, bringing the cost to 8285.
so yeah, it depends on what numbers we are actually comparing
So that measure's not worth much.
I have an observation to offer, based on "anecdata" and the like. Let's assume that the Baby Boomer generation is that standard group born between 1946 and 1964. Where I worked in 2008, I noticed a lot of the Baby Boomer crowd taking a bath on their retirement funds due to, well, 2008. Lousy investments, house-flipping, and so on. Many of them grumbled about having to delay their retirements considerably. I saw this happen in effect as these people continued to work, often a decade longer than their stated departure dates. They didn't have mandatory retirement, and so they kept plugging along.
I believe this 2008 effect, combined with the relatively small cohort for Gen X, has left the Baby Boomers in power politically, in business, and in university still, leaving Gen X waiting for open positions to climb up into, but they haven't opened up yet. Indeed, with the youngest Boomers at age fifty-six, they will still be a forced to be reckoned with for at least another decade, while Gen X grows stagnant.
We're a small bunch, so aside from bones thrown to us like Stranger Things or Ready Player One, we are largely ignored. We will most likely be surpassed by the Millennials. Part of this, I think, may be slightly due to the kind of fatalistic passive nature which seems to permeate much of Gen X, who are, in some sense, still waiting for the bombs to drop, assuming the acid rain, killer bees, or GRID doesn't get us first.
Call it a wild suspicion, but I think Gen X will be a sort of forgotten bunch a century from now, and the lack of mandatory retirement may be part of it.
How did they take a bath on their retirement funds? Did they sell everything at its lows for some reason and ignore all advice about how to save for retirement?
We’ve had 10%+ returns for a decade now, they should be fine assuming they had adequate savings before 2008.
I suspect most people never had adequate savings to begin with, and 2008 didn’t have anything to do with their problem, which is they simply never saved or earned enough money to retire at the quality of life they expect.
Let's say you are in your 50s, have a nice upper middle class job that you spent a few decades becoming qualified for. You are putting away a reasonable fraction of your income such that you can live comfortably now and retire in 10 years. Then the economy collapses, you lose this high paying job and there are no comparable positions available. You are unemployed for a few months and then under-employed working retail at target. You still have all the expenses of an upper middle class lifestyle, but with a salary maybe a bit above minimum wage. You can tighten your belt a bit but a lot of those expenses like your mortgage still need to be paid. Selling off investment assets despite the poor market and reducing the amount of money you put away for retirement is likely your only reasonable option to maintain your current standard of living.
The stock market rebounded quickly, but people were still underemployed and had burned through a lot of their savings to stay afloat, so they didn't have the funds to buy back into the market, certainly not to the level they were prior to the crisis. Retirement is inherently a measure of savings, anything that makes you eat into savings will push back the earliest date you could have retired. Saying they simply didn't have enough money is like a doctor saying you just aren't immune enough to symptoms: maybe not incorrect but a thoroughly useless diagnosis.
I've grown up seeing many retired folks having their own tiny business or just running their family businesses, but the greeter thing doesn't sit well with me. I don't know why it makes me so deeply uncomfortable. It feels like some kind of a breakdown of a social contract.
No, what the first two sentences describes is institutionalization (or environmental socialization), not social contract. The same thing that extensive periods in prison, or war, or any number of other hostile environments do that make it hard for people to adjust to any other living situation.
Some of my teachers in high school were retired industry executives who taught for the love of it. At least in the US, “retirement” is often about choosing to be a productive and social member of the community without optimizing for the paycheck. It gives them a sense of purpose. I can’t speak for retirement in other cultures but in the US many retirees take an enormous amount of pride in generating value to society even if it doesn’t generate income. My grandparents and great-grandparents were all like this, and they loved it. Sometimes it generated income but they didn’t need it.
I could easily see myself doing the same thing as they did.
Shortly after my mom retired, she was offered a part time position with the school system to help at risk children. At the rate they were going to pay her. She could only work 10 hours a week without it cutting into her pension. She negotiated a pay cut so she could work more hours and still be useful. So she definitely didn’t need the money. [1]
They took the money she earned and went on three month cross country road trip.
After the funding was up for that, she tried to retire again and then another opportunity came up. By now they are both over 62 and getting both of their social security checks, her pension, and my dad is getting money from his annuity that he bought with part of his retirement savings.
She still was kind of bored so she made the same deal again. They took another three month road trip and used some of the money to both fix up their house and increase the size of it by 50%.
[1] most of the time you can work without affecting your pension unless it’s for the school system.
This is the government talking about what their lives are like. Imagine the harsher reality.
It’s a big issue in law firms, where senior associates (the ones who actually are responsible for 99% of the work) get fed up waiting for 70+ year old partners to step down.
This is just bad strategy.
The foreign service is the field where wisdom and experience count the most. The only thing new in the world is history you don't know.
The world is supposed to be getting better not worse. If i want something “to do with my time” when I’m in my 60s and 70s (if I’m even lucky enough to live that long: many aren’t, and never get to stop working) I want to help out at a local social club or volunteer for a charity, not get paid a pittance to greet customers until my hips collapse.
My theory: The economic success of my grandfather, part of the post-WWII "greatest generation" in the U.S., was an anomaly.
After WWII the U.S. economy was experiencing unique boomtimes. They won the war with their economy intact, and were by far the most productive country on the planet.
Since then, besides reverting to the mean, globalism and information technology has changed everything.
My grandfather had a 4th grade education, retired from his job at a steel plant, and lived in three of four houses he owned in two states. That is simply not the way the world works any more.
From an economic perspective he was in the right place at the right time. A couple generations earlier he would have been a poor farmer. A generation or two afterwards he would have been a working-poor service worker.
Like I said, this is a theory of mine, that the economy of post-WWII American was an aberration and should not be considered the normal state of things. For those couple/few decades the U.S. was the factory and research powerhouse of the world, other manufacturing bases didn't exist or were rebuilding.
I welcome comments.
Piketty pointed this out: in the early 1800s, authors would mention actual numerical dollar amounts paid for goods in books and plays. Because for all of prior history economic growth was a few basis points per year, at best. So a British pound earned in 1600 would be roughly comparable in value to one spent a hundred years later.
https://www.immediateannuities.com/
While social security of not a great “pension” for most people, if it continues to give the same inflation adjusted benefits today when we retire at the maximum benefit rate. It will give a married couple where one earned at the maximum contribution rate $4500/month. Since the couple with the lesser lifetime earnings can choose to get 1/2 of the higher earnings benefit while both are still living.
We could easily live off of that amount with a paid off house.
While I realize that’s not a realistic scenario for the average American, that’s very realistic for a tech worker living in any major city in the US.