You can't pay for someone to not work for 20 years; who's going to pay?
There isn't enough wealth to cover it. All the wealth of all the billionaires in the world is only the EU healthcare budget for five years.
Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive. People aren't producing enough to do it.
If you want to give 20k/yr to someone it has to come from someone else. That's putting younger generations into a dire financial position.
Work of some form has to be found, even if it isn't covering living expenses for pension-age people. Some form of off-setting the cost has to be implemented, or else there'll be a political and economic crisis.
Since 1950 the retirement duration only grew by 50% (the life expectancy at 60 went from 77 years to 84 [1]) can you recall how much the productivity grew from that time ? If we cannot afford to pay 50% more when productivity grew by a factor 3[2], there is indeed a problem of repartition.
The relevant growth % is the total number of life-years being funded by retirement.
Since the total populaton of US in 1950 was 150, and is 300 million today -- assuming equal distribution of ages -- that's a 4x increase in life-years to fund.
ie., 2x for population size, and 2x for length of retirement
And worse, the distribution isnt equal, ie., there are more of the population today in retirement than in 1950.
So it's at least 4x the number of years, and probably closer to 6x.
No need to take the population into account because I used the per capita productivity.
And do you have figures for the doubling of the retirement duration ? As I showed above, it only increased by 50% in England and I'd be surprised is the American raise was higher since life expectancy is lower there (in part due to a less efficient health system).
Well it's a rather difficult calculation to make in this fashion.
The relevant data needed is total number of retirement hours funded, total productive output, and total "other" essential spending.
What's also happening is the cost of healthcare is increasing, quite dramatically, and eating up productivity gains.
I have a strong suspicion that we're way ahead of "general essential" social spending today, compared to 1950s, per-captia; productivity gains included.
>You can't pay for someone to not work for 20 years; who's going to pay?
For one, people pay pension savings throughout their careers (in most civilized countries).
Second, we've already discussing UBI for life, compared to which "paying people not to work for 20 years" is nothing.
Third, money to pay people is an artificial construct, which is not really what's missing. We have the wealth to sustain them. E.g. we have increased productivity dozens of times over the past 100 years, and yet we don't enjoy those fruits in increased leisure time or work-less access to food, health, studies, shelter, etc. If anything the latter have inflated many times over. Where are those "trickle down economics"?
>Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive.
We have increased the productivity of the average worker dozens of times over the past 100 years. How's that wealth distributed?
The idea is that your future pension is paid by yourself gradually over your productive years. Generally speaking of course - some have no work ever, some do and pay more, some die before they get some of it, and so on.
Complex calculations though, since we can't know the situation 40 years ahead, perhaps not even 5 years ahead.
There isn't enough wealth to cover it. All the wealth of all the billionaires in the world is only the EU healthcare budget for five years.
Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive. People aren't producing enough to do it.
If you want to give 20k/yr to someone it has to come from someone else. That's putting younger generations into a dire financial position.
Work of some form has to be found, even if it isn't covering living expenses for pension-age people. Some form of off-setting the cost has to be implemented, or else there'll be a political and economic crisis.