The end of retirement
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
I do know some folks who have, instead, semi-retired (go in one or two days a week). People at the end of their careers have lots of experience to pass on. And it seems to keep them active and healthy. I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.
If I had to hazard a guess I would say that most people in this position feel like they should get paid 50% of their previous salary for doing 20% of the work (and limiting their scope largely to mentorship rather than IC work), and with the combined scope reduction of both time and work performed, their employers would rather pay them even less than what a strict accounting of hours worked would indicate.
Not to mention the fact that if your organization is so lop-sided that you only have experts near retirement and juniors who actually need 20% or more of their time being mentored, you're facing an existential staffing crisis.
But effectively, yes, they're keeping high-performing older talent around so some hard won lessons rub off on the youngsters.
I always thought companies should spend more time broadly categorizing employee allocation. E.g. this year you're going to be 20% mentor, 20% strategic advice, 60% IC
Everyone wears multiple hats in a healthy company, and part of the ageism problem is that the only management-visible hat is "work produced."
I work at a small trade school as the training coordinator and this is something I come up against every day. Our employers locally desperately need people but have no one to spare for training. It’s a really vicious cycle. As an example we are running a pre-employment program in January for youth. It’s a great program, 8 weeks long, the students are paid by the govt, they get employment readiness skills, tool skills, job shadow at four different businesses for a day each, and then have a two week work experience at one of the locations. The employers get paid too! Out of 18 original employers, 10 have backed out citing too busy. Yet they are all scrambling to hire people.
I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years. I’m off the tools now because I want to support my fellow workers and have them learn the safe way to work, also my knees haha. But seriously though, we’re all struggling with way too much work and not enough people, and the experts are retiring.
Maybe the cost of a notebook computer or other device, if required. And business cards, if anyone still uses those. What else?
edit: possibly some training costs, depending a lot on the type of job and the previous experience of the worker
That just doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees.
Also there are fewer young people in the rest of the world, the birth rate has declined worldwide.
Certainly for senior people there are probably one dayish a week roles that don't even have to happen every week. But now you're still essentially talking about being a consultant.
It's a little secret that actually many young people don't want to be mentored nor is it in the interest of companies. In contrast to the common narrative that older people are of great value to enterprises because of their experience in reality it's much better not to make use of it but let younger people make all mistakes again (often there also a lot of newer mistakes to make because technology or some other circumstances changed).
(I am being a bit sarcastic here but there's also truth to it).
It also slows the economic shock of depopulation. Now it won't hit until most of the non-retired people start to die.
Life expectancy trends have reversed and I suspect will worsen with more climate and zoonotic disease crossover, antibiotic resistance; though maybe mRNA cancer vax will balance that out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/22/1144864...
But the author is Canadian, working for the CBC, which I don’t think suffers from the ageism in most of corporate America. But if you are post retirement age, you are expensive and will be a target for employers because you certainly have lower future potential value by definition and there will be at least assumptions about reduced productivity.
Outside of doctor/lawyer where people admire experience, maybe nearing retirement folks can work as teachers or walmart greeter, but high paying jobs will be in short supply and favor the young. If AI further quelches job creation, it will be even harder for old people to keep working.
About half the article is about ageism in Canada as an enormous barrier to working past 64. If anything what the author describes sounds worse than anything I've heard in the US (but maybe that's because I'm too young to see it yet).
No, that's completely wrong and this is a lie that keeps being repeated. Life expectancy has only been increasing because child mortality has decreased to almost zero. The upper end has not shifted much at all.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
For example, this study reported on in 2018:
The researchers looked at birth and death data for people above age 65 from 1960-2010. They found that the average age of death in those who live to be older than 65 increased by three years in every 25-year period, which means that people can expect to live about six years longer than their grandparents, on average.
Furthermore, this trend continued at a relatively stable pace over the entire 50-year period and in all 20 countries that they analyzed. Factors like medical breakthroughs caused minor fluctuations in how quickly lifespans increased, but these variations averaged out over time
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/11/06/lifespan-increasing-peo...
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
and
"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Someone then replied with data showing that life expectancy is getting longer even setting aside infant mortality, to which you replied that the difference was that reduced mortality at age 60 adds mostly unproductive years, while reduced mortality at age 0-1 adds mostly productive years.
My question was how that has any bearing on the question in this thread of whether or not people are living longer? It wasn't clear to me at least without more info. Or maybe it was just an unrelated tangent. But that lack of clarity is why I asked.
Like, it’s distasteful and I hate it and it’s one of the reasons I hate capitalism.
Your worth is your labor. Nothing more.
"You've stopped contributing to the economy, it's time for you to die now" is a disgusting attitude that we should not tolerate as a society.
> On average across all population subgroups, people who survived to age 50 were expected to live over 8 years longer in 2000 than in 1940, corresponding to an increase in e50 from 23 years in 1940 to 31.3 years in 2006, or an average rise of 1.3 years per decade.
An 8 year increase in life expectancy at age 50 (from 73 to 81.3) seems like a pretty large increase over the span of 60 years.
I’d be more interested to know what the change in healthspan is, though. Living longer is less interesting to me than living longer in good health without worsening pain and disability.
A change of five to eight years makes a material difference in actuarial terms when you have to plan for retirement:
> In 1920–1922, Canadian men who had lived to age 65 could expect to live for 13 more years, and women could expect to live for 13.5 more years (to age 78.0 and 78.5 respectively). The expected total life span of 65-year-olds was substantially higher than life expectancy at birth: 19.2 years higher for men and 18.0 years higher for women.
> In 2009–2011, 65-year-old men were expected to live until they were 83.8, while 65-year-old women were expected to live until the age of 86.7. This means that from 1920–1922 to 2009–2011, the life expectancies of 65-year-olds increased by 5.8 years for men and 8.2 years for women. This is a much smaller gain than the 20-year increase in life expectancy for newborns during this same period.
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2016002...
Starting at 65, the odds of hitting an age of 90 are worth considering when doing planning:
> Assume we have 1,000 relatively healthy 65-year-old men. The chances of their staying alive at least until their 80s are quite good. More difficult, however, is avoiding critical illness – very serious conditions such as heart attacks, life-threatening cancers, stroke and Alzheimer’s. (There are 14 classifications in all.) While more than 500 of these men will survive until age 90, only 39 of them are expected to avoid a critical illness by that age. Of the 41 survivors at age 100, none is expected to be free of critical illness.
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/r...
The problem is making it to adulthood wasn't straight forward. Until the 20th century, your likelihood to make it to adulthood was only 50/50. There even if you made it out of infancy, child labor, disease, food affordability, etc., were all major causes of death. Making it to adulthood meant that you were lucky or privileged.
Now for calculating retirement ages for individuals who were adults when they started working, sure, the life expectancy has basically been flat. Maybe a few years of uptick, but nothing substantial like it seems looking at the overall stats of going from 45 to 75.
Some numbers:
Canada total dependency ratio: 52.1 youth dependency ratio: 23.9 elderly dependency ratio: 28.2
USA total dependency ratio: 53.7 youth dependency ratio: 28 elderly dependency ratio: 25.6
Japan total dependency ratio: 71.1 youth dependency ratio: 20.1 elderly dependency ratio: 51
You ain't wrong though, yet. We may see that argument coming up in the next 20 years.
The move from defined benefits to self -directed and -contributed retirement plans seems like a ticking time bomb.
We know most people's financial literacy sucks.
And the original reason for social security was that we don't want old people to suffer in poverty.
Well... when people inevitably mismanage their own retirement, or suffer the whims of the market without the benefit of sophisticated pooling or hedging... we're going to be looking at that again. (Arguably, already are)
A life of work isn't something you should be able to lose as quickly as you can.
On the other hand, we have young families who can't afford homes near their jobs and insane childcare costs.
I think we just got too far away from the natural order where elders cycled out of the workforce and assumed family oriented duties.
Doubt there's any going back though.
In a previous natural order, 3+ generations of families lived in close proximity and the labor of families was shared across grandparents, cousins, siblings, aunts & uncles.
Natural orders seem to have acquired lifespans.
This seems like such a critical issue that governments around the world will need to have significant societal changes - at the moment this doesn't seem like something that tech or biotech will be able to solve simply.
as you can't change the birth rate overnight, and even if you could, it would take ~20years for the kids to begin earning, there needs to be a short-term solution. and that is immigration.
good thing immigration is so popular in rich western societies at the moment.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1
What is the alternative? Just let the population age?
I would say change the culture to become self sustaining again. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is today.
What is the long-term one then? Keep importing people and hope for the best?
well, it normally would be, in our situation the climate likely will interfere with any long term plans.
Healthcare for the elderly will put huge strain on government budgets.
With the young struggling to afford housing with fulltime work, I find the authors disappointments about not getting those lavish vacations obnoxious.
As my friend's father used to say, "I've never had a problem finding work. Ever. Getting paid for that work, now that's another matter."
This is ageism. A 66 year old hasn't lost their business knowledge yet, but they're often treated as though they're already senile.
Doesn't mean I forget everything about a space but I'm certainly less current if I spend 1 day per week than if I spend 5 days.
I would love to hear why old ppl don't choose to voluntarily end their life. What good is a life spent in 'poor house for the old' . seems kind of an obvious strategy to end your life but maybe will to live trumps all commonsense even in old age?
1) It's physically and psychologically hard to end your own life 2) You aren't going to feel old, you'll just feel like you do now, but with an achey body and some brainfog. 3) A society that encourages old people to shuffle off this mortal coil is probably a bad one
Why do you think this?
Somewhere about here it becomes apparent that the value of our judgment is tied to the value we place on others.
Maybe its just a social taboo and not a real line.
most old ppl caring for elderly fulltime want their parents to be dead though.
I've seen this personally in family members who totally transformed into different human beings in a good way once they were freed of the burden of caretaking. I could sense their hearts jumping with joy and relief when their parents finally passed away.
> Maybe its just a social taboo and not a real line.
I disagree. In any agecide scenario, adults won't consent and would be murdered. Murder is a bright line. Advocating the murder of people we love is an even broader, brighter line. Crossing that devastates human bonds.
The burden of caring for aged parents is heavier now. A primary reason is the absence of the extended families that we're evolved to live in. Modern pressures to scatter families means that a 12 person burden is being born by 1 or 2.
Similarly, raising children is more difficult than it was historically. Murdering our burdens may be an expedient solution but I feel there are less catastrophic ways out of this.
Voluntary suicide probably should be an option for those who don't want to continue their lives. But it doesn't evaporate the underlying problem, since many people (very reasonably) want to continue their lives through infirmity.
The old age is considered prime meditation time in the shaolin monasteries. Even if you live in poor conditions, exploring the realms of your subconcious in meditation is seen as an end goal. See Jhana stages to achieve in meditation.
I don't believe this, myself, and can see myself considering this in a few decades. I'm in my 40s now, hopefully I have maybe two decades of good-ish living left. After seeing shit like Alzheimers destroy people I loved - I don't want to go through that myself or burden other loved ones.
> In a nutshell, the 30 idea is a rule of thumb financial planners can use to guestimate how much young couples starting off on their financial journeys need to save for retirement. Rather than state something like save 10%, 12% or 15% of your gross (pre-tax) income each and every year, The Rule of 30 views retirement saving as occurring in tandem with daycare and mortgage repayment.
> From the get-go, Vettese suggests young couples allocate 30% of their gross or after-tax income to those three major expenses: Retirement savings, daycare costs and mortgage payments. However, when starting out, they may have to save less in order to handle payments for daycare and the mortgage. Since daycare expenses are temporary after a few years or so (depending on how many children a couple has), once that expense has finished, they can ramp up the mortgage paydown and/or retirement savings. And if—ideally five years before retirement—the home mortgage is paid off, then couples can kick their retirement savings into overdrive by allocating a full 30%, or more, solely to building their retirement nest egg.
* https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/retired-money/the-rule-of-...
* https://www.myownadvisor.ca/the-rule-of-30-review/
* https://boomerandecho.com/the-rule-of-30-book-review/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Vettese
Anyone interested on reading up on retirement, especially if you're Canadian, should look at Vettese's work.
Move to a sane country.
(serious question, as someone who left from one after it turned into an overpriced third-world dump and is now looking for a place to settle down)