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Comment by BadCookie | Hacker News Reader

These stats are for the U.S., but one thing that usually get ignored in these retirement discussions is just how massively life expectancy depends on income level and sex: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/

Raising the retirement pension age screws over the poor, especially poor men. Perhaps retirement age should be tied to income/wealth somehow ... and maybe even sex (as controversial as I imagine that would be).

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An aboriginal man in Australia is suing on exactly that basis - he has a lower life expectancy and so wants access to the pension earlier.

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/uncle-dennis-is-taking-t...

I've always wondered about suing the government for raising the retirement age. They're changing the deal we agreed to, without my consent. If I had known the full extent of the altered deal (i.e. no retirement till 69), I would have made different decisions from the start.

If I have a 20 year mortgage with the bank I can't just change the terms so that the deal suits me better. Why can the government do that with my retirement age, with zero repercussions?

Usually they don't. For everyone currently over 50 nothing changes. For people between 40 and 50 one more year.... So only a fraction of the population is affected and young people don't have a lobby.

> For everyone currently over 50 nothing changes. For people between 40 and 50 one more year.... So only a fraction of the population is affected and young people don't have a lobby.

So I'll go to the bank tell them I'm just not going to pay the last year or two of my mortgage?

Or a car dealer and tell them I'm simply going to pay less for their car without them being able to say no?

You just said the same thing - "it's only a small inconvenience, so it's fine".

The government regularly screws people over without their consent. The repercussions is to protest and make the government’s life as miserable as possible.

It's very hard to make someone's life miserable when they're living in the Élysée palace, eating 5k€ breakfasts.

No, the repercussion is to realize you can't rely on government and stop voting for governments that make lots of promises. This is what happens when a society rejects libertarianism. Instead of a nice private pension provider you can take to court you have the government, who forbid others from running Ponzi schemes whilst forcing everyone to take part in theirs.

Wonder why race is the metric here? Men also have shorter lifespans, and I assume there will be other constants that correlate with life expectancy (height, hair colour, genetic disposition to disease, etc).

in most countries retirement age is tied to sex and yes it screws poor men the most.

The great news is that changing your gender is but one government form away in most of these countries.

It's been done before:

In Canada, to deal with the sexism of car insurance premiums for example: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-man-legally-cha...

In Argentina, to retire 5 years earlier as a woman: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5544173/Argentinian...

In Switzerland, also to retire earlier, which seems almost trivial given the 1 year difference between men and women, but by spending just 75 francs for the reassignment, they unlock of 28,680 francs of additional retirement over their lifespan: https://www.europeantimes.news/2022/02/a-man-changed-his-gen...

And I realize these sources are not great, but I chalk that up to the fact that this is an untouchable subject for mainstream, a taboo subject for many, and an uncomfortable subject for most of us. These are also still fringe cases, even if the benefits are quite clear. There is also something unsavoury about exploiting the system in this way, but it's counterbalanced by the fact that it's a system that's screwing you over.

In a way I do look forward to cases like these ending up in court, solely because I want to see the decisions that result. Do we get a legal ruling on the mutability of gender? Does gender become permanent at a certain age? Does the court instead decide to deal with each case individually, knowing they could potentially set up a tsunami of cases?

Pragmatically, it seems easiest if you just erase gender from these systems, but realistically that would benefit men which makes it unlikely from the current wave of Western-influenced lawmakers.

I figured the one upside of retirement was it was a baseline for the poor. If it screws them over too I think it should just be eliminated all together and return the tax to the worker to save/invest on their own.

That's basically the system we started rolling out in Australia in the 90s (see mandatory super).

Unfortunately it doesn't work for everyone, though, and a traditional pension is still needed as a backup.

It seems like unfortunately many governments have proven incapable of responsibly handling the money. In the case the government is entirely incapable of handling the money I'd at least see the worker get that tax waved to have something for whatever meager existence is left with the money.

Honestly, our system works really well for 90% of people. Look into it.

You almost certainly want people who aren't working any longer to get some sort of base level income. And if this income comes from the government, the details may differ, but the big picture looks a lot like social security. This is especially true because, at least on an ongoing basis, few private firms offer a defined benefit pension any longer except for whatever obligations they incurred before they mostly scrapped the plans going forward.

> unfortunately many governments have proven incapable of responsibly handling the money

The system that GP described forces people to put their money into superannuation funds (not government) that invest on their behalf, which I'd say is pretty competent government policy. For the most part it works well, but it does distort the market (e.g., super funds buy housing stock, old people have more money available to them), and not everyone can contribute enough before retirement age. The counterfactual would be a whole lot of people that have spent all their savings by retirement age.

I don't follow how Social Security in the U.S. is tied to how responsible or otherwise the government is. It is paid into by the current workers and is a mandatory spending item in the U.S. budget.

Maybe you were referring to another country though.

In Aus, the government doesn't manage the money. They set a mandatory percentage of your wage which must be put into superannuation, but you as an individual can choose the fund to manage your account, and you can move funds at-will with no penalty. The Tax Office actually facilitates the move to help prevent any nefarious actions from the funds.

There is also the option of running a self-managed fund, where you invest the money yourself.

That said, it has created an incredibly politically powerful industry managing $3.3 trillion, which comes with its own issues.

> They set a mandatory percentage of your wage which must be put into superannuation

For further clarification, it's the employer who has to pay the super contribution, not the worker.

And if anyone is about to claim "same thing, if the employer didn't have to pay that, they would pay it out as additional wages", my only response is a heartfelt "lol".

I think "lol" needs to be expanded a bit to be convincing.

I can't see how it is not the same thing. The employer looks at the total cost of employment and works out if it's worth hiring someone. If that cost is 10% higher because of super, that means there is 10% less to go to (direct) wages.

Now granted, that will differ at different points in the labour market. For minimum wage jobs, I agree that employers wouldn't suddenly start paying 10% above award if super was scrapped.

I haven't changed jobs much in my career, but when talking about pay I still find people need to be explicit if they are talking about including or excluding super. Most jobs advertise the pay excluding super, but some will quote total package.

Yeah, that's particularly the case if you're contracting: they'll advertise the hourly pre-super rate more often than not.

You know what would happen: they'd be taken by scams disproportionately, and we'd hear to no end how their lesser educations left them vulnerable to that. The taxpayer will still be on the hook to bail them out.

Yes they might just invest with some sleazy ponzi scheme that then collapses, telling them the money they thought they saved isn't there and they'll have to keep working for longer instead of retiring at the age agreed.

The origin of the modern pension system in Prussia was not actually designed to let people retire; the age was initially pegged to 70, the life expectancy of Prussians in 1881.

American Social Security had an age of 65, but at the time of its passing life expectancy for American men was 58.

> The origin of the modern pension system in Prussia was not actually designed to let people retire; the age was initially pegged to 70, the life expectancy of Prussians in 1881.

As you can already read sidethread, a life expectancy of 70 means huge majorities of people living well past 70. Every baby who dies at the age of 8 months means half a dozen people die in their 80s. (Or, you know, several dozen people die in their 70s.)

Even if lifespans weren't skewed low, which they are, 50% of all people would live beyond the life expectancy at birth.

> American Social Security had an age of 65, but at the time of its passing life expectancy for American men was 58

That was life expectancy at birth. It makes more sense when considering retirement system design to consider the life expectancy of people who are at least old enough to be in the workforce.

Of the people who were 21 when Social Security passed around 65% of them survived to at least 65.

Of the people who were born around the time Social Security passed, over 70% of those that made it to 21 made it to 65.

And if I remember correctly, the primary motive for the Prussian pension system when it was introduced was to reduce youth unemployment by getting the elderly out of the way.

I think still today that is a deciding factor, as some economies have high unemployment and there retirement can be cheaper and better than caring for unemployed people at all ages. And other economies have high employment and would even benefit economically from a larger workforce.

This trend is starting to reverse; in some low birthrate economies like South Korea and Japan, we are seeing dual effects of both labor shortage and declining health of old people due to declining social pension payments and lack of socialization in old age.

That makes too much sense. Will never happen.

That’s a silly argument because social security is meant as insurance to cover a wide range of outcomes.

You can be poor and be an outlier who lives to 100, or a rich person who is an outlier and dies before even getting your first payment.

Saying the average life expectancy is lower ignores the huge overlap of actual life spans across both groups.

I mean if you want to be precise than maybe make the retirement age based on the health conditions of the individual in question? In good shape. Work more. Bad shape? Retire.

I'd like you to read about the Cobra effect first, though.

So you work until your health doesn't allow it anymore ?

The whole reason of retirement is to have a bit of freedom in relative good health after a life of work

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