Comments on: Life sucks and then you die, says Ernst & Young

By: poldergeist

poldergeist — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:18:00 +0000

Point 3 of your posting left me puzzled: is there a system that I do not know of, in which the pensions are not paid by the working population? I mean, except for a big frigorific vault that you fill with enough ham sandwiches to feed you for your entire pensioner’s life. I think, It does not fundamentaly change the problem to know if your pension will be diverted from the wealth produced by the worker as taxes on their salary or dividends from shares your pension fund holds in the company where they work. It only solves the demographic problem in the sense that only a fraction of the pensioners will benefit from a pension fund.

By: Doctor Spurt

Doctor Spurt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:21:56 +0000

Agreed – there’s nothing wrong with working longer, lots of people want to and regard retirement age as a form of discrimination. For competent individuals the decision to stop work shouldn’t be handled arbitrarily.

By: manigen

manigen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:40:00 +0000

We’ll just all have to work longer. That doesn’t necessarily mean working forever, but certainly well past 65. As pbergen has pointed out, there can be benefits to working longer; even a little daily activity can massively improve your health. A lot of people retire, sit around the house, decline and die in short order.

That’s not much of a compensation, I’ll grant you, but it’s all I got.

By: pj

pj — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:12:45 +0000

I think there’s something to this ‘most selfish generation’ thing. The baby boomers got their sexual and social liberation, their low tax monetarism and property owning fetishisation, when they’re old they’ll dominate the political landscape and the rest of us will be paying them generous pensions to enjoy their unprecedented life expectancy. Just don’t think about what will happen to us when we get old and the money’s all been spent.

By: pbergen

pbergen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:08:31 +0000

Lose the golden retirement dream; it is an aberration. It isn’t the end of the world to keep working. Many of the new forms of work including many in the service industry are age-independent. And staying even partly in the work force keeps a person socially involved and I suspect happier in general.

I also am looking forward to a no pension personal future and believe that I will be able to adapt one way or another. However, though I hope for a realistic adjustment in the aging population occurs I wouldn’t be surprised if many fight tooth and nail all the way. Kind of the natural effect of a culture that promises the moon to all.

It could be that the aging and retirement issue will vanish in the face of much more momentous changes such as resource depletion or the shift of economic dominance to the East.