Denmark to raise retirement age to 70

As a citizen, your moral duty is to contribute when you can. If too many people fail to do that, the system falls apart. In exchange, the government evens the burden between different stages of life and between people in different situations. You live your life now, the government takes what it needs, and it provides for you when your needs exceed your ability.

Also, as small democratic countries with limited ambitions outside their borders, the Nordic system of governance is supposed to be more "by the people, for the people" than it has ever been in the US. You don't negotiate agreements with the government, but you take responsibility for making things work. If too many citizens fail to do that, the system falls apart.

In other words if there were no "system" there would be no such concept as "retirement" in the first place.

We all wish that we could spend our best years doing whatever we want. That doesn't mathematically work out, though. European social safety nets are pretty damn generous all things considered. Plenty of vacation days, especially compared to the US. It's not like it's impossible to use those well during your "best years".

None of them considers that "the system" gives them food, water and energy, and that procurement of these in the absence of system means literally toiling from birth until death.

You can't retire if you don't have savings or children to support you.

Even if you have savings and/or children to support you, you can't retire if your society didn't make enough children so that your savings can have some value.

Social security was always a ponzi scheme that doesn't work in the long run as fertility rates _necessarily_ drop to or below (really, always below) replacement rate.

Even without social security, if you want to retire, and to have along retirement, then you need your society to have near replacement rate fertility. Or insanely high productivity. I guess you can look forward to AI rendering most jobs obsolete, and hope that humans can -as always before- create new jobs that can't be easily automated.

It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).

So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.

Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)

If the periods were of equal length, I think the Ponzi scheme thing would be true.

As is its sort of a modified fractionated ponzi.

I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:

The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...

It allows you to do that. In most cases there are various life index funds that operate the way a traditional pension scheme would and is likely the default option in any employer plan.

You can additionally add your own money outside of your paycheck and you can use the money inside of the fund to make your own investments. You are also allowed to take personal loans against your own 401k. Which is a generally overlooked benefit of the system. You pay interest on the loan but it just goes back into your 401k itself. You pay interest to yourself.

The great thing with a 401k is it's not industry dependent. If your employer or industry goes out of business you still have a lot of options to move your retirement to a new employer or use some of the funds to bridge yourself to a new line of work.

I used to hate it but now that I've used it I quite like it.

The benefits of a pension start before retirement. I can avoid setting aside a huge pile of money for the potential of an extremely long lifespan and then worry as minor changes to that pile become really critical near and in retirement.

Suppose you’re 50 with 2 million USD in savings. How soon do you retire and what kind of lifestyle do you live in retirement? That’s heavily dependent on what kind of pension is waiting.

The metric I've come across is Quality Adjusted Life Years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

Contrast this with Denmark's lifespan growth over the same period, of 76.8 to 81.4 (+4.6 years) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=2000...

So from the data, prior to covid-19 Danes had gained about 3 and a half years of healthy life, and an additional year of unhealthy life.

It makes sense that Healthspan and lifespan are well-correlated, as most of the ways we have of extending lifespan do so in a way that makes you clearly healthier (such as preventing chronic diseases).

That said, it is true there is a bit of an increasing gap. This isn't just in Denmark, it's global - lifespan rose by 6.4 years from 2000-2019 while healthspan only increased 5.3 years. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...

I get it that some countries have had a plethora of scammers (prescribing pregnancy meds to men so docs can hit quotas and get bonuses/bribes from pharmaceutical companies, people trying to fake blindness to get an early retirement, etc.

But overall reduction of cost with reduction of salaries will ultimately lead to worse healthcare.

A friend was in Germany skiing this past winter. The 10k population town he was staying didn't have a paediatrician and they had to drive 2h to get care for their kid. In Germany, in 2025. I wonder how this very town will be in 2030 or 2050 with that trend..

College is free in Denmark (in fact you get paid to study).

Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.

The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).

If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.

There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.

> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year

That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".

> This isn't a zero sum game

It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)

> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor

You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem

We simply don’t have those data for roofers.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01674...

My point is, if you're unfit to drive a vehicle due to cognitive or physical decline, you're probably also unfit for most jobs involving those skills, and yet you have to soldier on for 4 more years.

What happens when they're putting a new roof on a building next to a crowded street, and the 73 year old carpenter drops a bunch of tiles to the ground 6 floors below ? or he falls and slips off, taking another colleague with him ? Or he simply operates heavy machinery somewhere and gets caught in it.

The Nordic model was created by socialist and labor movements in the 20th century. Finland, a tiny homogeneous Lutheran population, even had a brutal civil war over this. Nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.

Making kids easier to have really only has two real options:

1. Go back down the development timeline of a nation and remove rights from women (bad).

2. Implement more social programs to incentivize children.

The reason we need to do 2 now and not in the past is we've developed. Women have rights now, and we need real reasons for them to have kids, not fake reasons like we had in the past.

Their model obviously works well.

Canada is close in some respects.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26132...

[2] https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-problem-with-u-s-health-care-isn...

Bear in mind it's completely normalised for companies to charge higher prices in one market than another, and put barriers in place to make sure customers in the more expensive market can't just pay the lower price. So all the union is doing here is bringing it closer to a level playing field.

Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.

What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/

How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.

My dad just turned 78 and has really slowed the last 5 years. Longer life says little about quality of life.

The policy for retirement age is related to when society sees fit to sustain someone that does not work. I think it has more to do with how the society sees the elders and what it can afford than to the goals of specific individuals.

I've been traveling for holidays every year since I was 25 for at least 3 weeks every year, loving it so much. First it was backpacking, now it transitioned into a bit more luxury as I got older.

You don't know if you'll be hit by a bus next year, retirement is a silly milestone to focus on.

Retirement age has not gone up since it was created in 1940s. Not crazy to raise it a little.

Quickly looking at Denmark articles, it seems they’re raising the age to adjust to life expectancy increases as well.

I don’t see this a sign of the system failing.

[0] Figure 2.7 of the Danish Government report "Økonomisk Analyse: Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser i 2018" - https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-ind...

Basically the state spends to much money on humans in general. A young qualified immigrant might have a less negative impact than a slightly older German person, but both of them will be money sinks in the long run.

Statistically immigrants in Germany are less qualified than the general population, so they’ll have an even more negative impact.

The only valid solution is to reduce the spending per person, both birthrate and immigration will only delay the problem.

Denmark should be in a slightly better position than Germany since their health system is cheaper.

So you can reduce pensions, improve the situation for the youth, take efforts to get an improved birth rate, making use of the resources lost to pensioners, and then maybe you can raise the pension later on once you realize things are stable.

For an interesting case study, compare Japan (who refuses to allow mass immigration and is at risk of going extinct) and the UK (who has embraced it and is on the way to becoming Muslim-majority). It'll be interesting to see in 50 years which one has had better outcomes.

I suggest instead altering the male/female ratio, so a stable or growing population can be maintained at lower TFR. Technically, filter sperm to remove those with Y chromosomes before artificial insemination.

The elephant in the room that is getting some attention is demographic collapse. It’s been politicized, unfortunately, and seized on by strange people, but the fact remains that we’ve stuck our heads in the sand here. The seriousness of demographic collapse cannot be overstated. Social and economic collapse are inevitable unless something (morally licit, of course) is done to boost birth rates to above replacement rates, or kept at replacement levels. Once we reach a point of no return, it will be impossible to reverse course.

There’s a lot working against healthy demographics. We have decades of alarmist, misanthropic, Malthusian propaganda from types like Paul Ehrlich. We have now a hyperindividualistic culture - politically, socially, and economically - that is hostile both functionally as well as in sentiment toward the healthy function of family, and secondarily the community life it produces, as well as mental health). The logic of consumerism does not sit well with family life, because family life is not something that can be monetized. Consumerism relies on maximizing spending of the atomized individual, and in order for that to work, one must maximize the work done by that individual. Family life interferes with the regime of constant spending and the reign of total work. (Ironically, this makes the celebrated careerism of feminism an expression of this all consuming capitalist drive. It stigmatizes motherhood with demeaning labels like “stay-at-home mom” and celebrates the very office jobs that are the stuff of comedies.) Today, we understand everything with reference to the individual, even anachronistically reinterpreting history according to its alienating categories. Some governments have enacted pro-natalist policies, but they’re typically weak, superficial, and ineffective. We’re addicted to patterns of life formed over the last 70 years that we don’t want to let go of. Governments need to take much more serious measures that drastically favor, prioritize, and protect the family, through and through. Good luck doing that in our democratic societies. Addicts typically change only after they’ve experienced a crisis and hit rock bottom, and by then, it may be too late.

Immigration, of course, is no solution. The belief that immigration can fix the problem is itself rooted in the logic of hyperindividualism, where atomized individuals can be replaced by other atomized individuals to achieve net conservation or even gain according to the numbers. Cultural realities are totally ignored. The rate of immigration that a country can successfully absorb is not enough to outpace demographic decline. Exceeding that rate undermines the whole point of using immigration to compensate for demographic decline in the first place, since mass migrations are always harmful to host populations. You’re basically talking the collapse of the host populace and the formation of new ones in its place. Furthermore, immigration drains the populations of other countries, ones that are likely also facing demographic issues, which basically makes richer countries parasitic and callous about the continuity and futures of other peoples, until there are no more populations to drain of people anymore.

Birthrates seem very hard to change and even if change would happen it is much too slow.

Germany did the experiment on immigration and has not seen GDP growth for half a decade. There the system is failing far worse in some ways, but in Germany employees are paying directly for the pension plans, so the state just raises the employee contributions.

The scale of the problem is absolutely mind-blowing.

* In some European countries. Many countries, however, have no meaningful avenues whatsoever for tax efficient pension saving. My own "pension fund" is just a regular broker account where I invest after income taxes, and where I have to pay capital gains as usual.

People with good private pensions can decide to retire 5 years before they officially retire.

They talk abiut the squeeze, if Birthrates increase too suddenly - workers would both have to pay for the elderly and the kids.

To me it seems rather obvious: you need both the will and the means to raise 3+ children.

Increase the number of (young female) immigrants

- indifferent to how much automation you have, people still need to pay for it, for money they don't earn.

Just as in Germany Denmark funds it's pensions through taxes, Germany additionally funds them through employee contributions.

Definition of a Ponzi scheme: A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investor. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves.

https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...

That's exactly how pensions work in Europe. Replace "Ponzi scheme organizers" by "legally elected governments" and here you have it - you have a whole continent of people believing that their pension is a given. Not everybody may like it, but that's the hard truth.

In the US, people contribute towards a 401K, and choose how to invest, but typically pick up just the S&P 500 - anyway and at least that money is somehow what they have saved for themselves.

But I agree with your statement "it is completely possible for the system to be balanced" - yes a Ponzi scheme can be absolutely balanced, you just need enough participants ...

This is exactly what happens in Denmark - a balancing of the pension system.

Also,rgis has been planned since 2006 - so it is nothing new.

I think it is possible, but we need to raise (corporate) taxes a lot, and this needs to happen globally, as companies move.

As a star I would love to see global minimum corporate taxes, and then take it from there.

Isn't that something for the individual to decide, not the collective? Many derive from work a lot of meaning in life. If working is what makes some people happy, it would be nice to not punish people for working until they die.

> I'm not saying this is an economically easy problem to solve, but we focus so much on economics and so little on policies that make people happy.

Absolutely!

Spend less, save more. Vote for governments that do likewise.

Having people fund their own retirement would be ideal from a economic standpoint, but given the histories and complexities of existing systems, it is probably not acceptable politically, or morally, in any country. Honestly it's a distraction.

At the end of the day, a country cannot tolerate too many freeloaders. It doesn't matter if they're pensioners or retired at 50, living to 100 hedge fund managers. Productivity is really the only thing that matters for a countrie's economic destiny.

But, I just looked it up again for this comment and that same rule says "No changes to social security" in reconciliation. It is specifically called out as forbidden to touch via reconciliation unlike almost every other program. So, maybe you are right, it will just be ignored because it doesn't seem possible to quietly change.

Over the past decade life expectancy in developed countries first plateaued, then declined.

Yes, largely due to the pandemic, but that plateau was also the beginning of decline in some places.

Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.

Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.

https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/

Etc etc

- The productivity growth really has had incredibly strong deflationary effects. So much more, more diverse, tastier and healthier food for example, for so much less money.

- The growing affluence has really created incredible opportunities for scavenging from the waste stream. A practical example. About half of the food I eat is leftovers from a nearby school. I'm proud to be saving good food from going to waste _and_ it lowers our expenses quite significantly.

Let's see. If you pay 15000 euros per year for 40 years, and get 5% interest, that's 1,800,000 euros at retirement. Even if you held that in cash, a 30,000 euro/year withdrawal would last you to 130.

Historically payouts also benefited from rising productivity and populations but those assumptions are breaking down.

- housing for 80k USD is 525k DKK: no way you can find anything at that price anywhere close to cph. Not sure for other "major" cities, but in cph you can expect to pay 4mil DKK (600K USD) for a ~60 sqmt apartment, prices will fall outside the cities, but nowhere close to 80k USD. Where did you get that number?

- you pay for your unemployment benefit, thought an a-kasse. Its not forever and it might barely cover your bills depending on where you live/your mortgage. If you have family its probably not enough and you need to add an insurance on your salary on top of that.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents.

There are 53706 homes for sale today. 2784 of those are actual homes, not empty lots, costing less than 600K DKK.

I would not expect to live a healthy, comfortable life in most homes at that price range. Draft, mold, poor insulation and high energy bills.

Only for a short period were western population growing so fast relative to small number of retirees that transferring that responsibility to government was a no brainer.

With diminishing demographics anywhere except maybe Africa, we'll need to be more creative once again. Raising retirement age is just one of many hard but inevitable policies.

You're doing a great job satirizing the extreme positions and hateful attitude of nationalistic xenophobes.