Retirement Ages

I've posted two items on retirement ages here recently, one from the NYT's rosy "hooray. . . we can all work until we're 200 years old!" the other day, and then one that was referenced in regard to the Irish election.

So what are the average retirement ages in the world anyhow?

Well, you can find a big chart on Wikipedia and I'm not going to repeat it here.  If you look at it, however, the entire world is remarkably uniform in placing retirement between 60 and 65, although several countries provide 55 and up for women, interestingly enough.  Quite a few more advanced nations are raising their retirement ages, including the United States, but also including Ireland, Australia, Denmark, France and others.

Also worth noting is that earlier retirement ages, by nation, don't equate with wealth.  Actually, the opposite is generally true.  The same is true for young retirement ages for women.  That probably suggest that those younger ages aren't economically stressed as people are dying younger in those areas and categories.  So, while citizens of Bangladesh or Vietnam may be able to retire earlier than in the US, that isn't necessarily really a good thing for most Bangladeshis or Vietnamese, as their governments are likely banking on their not making it to retirement or living long in retirement.  Having said that, while the current life expectancy is a bit higher in the US, its not massively higher than either of those nations.

Those lower retirement ages also probably say something about the nature and extent of retirement in those countries as well as the standard of living.  I.e, they likely don't get much in retirement, but they aren't taking the RV in a trip to Banff either.

Of course, it also says something about birth rates, oddly enough, as well. 

I generally don't subscribe to the commonly cited thesis that a country needs to have a birth rate higher than the death rate, i.e., a perpetually growing population, in order to be economically sound.  That entire concept fails to take into account a lot of things, including the growth in wealth of societies over time and the impact of technology.  Like the Communist economic model, that thesis is based on a concept of perpetually frozen economic and technological conditions, which has never existed in the real world.  Indeed, since World War Two the entire world has evolved into what was basically once reserved for "first world nations" in terms of wealth and that trend is continuing to the extent that its one of the many things that worries people who like to be worried. 

But a feature of that is that governments don't do a very good job of determining tax structures to fit evolving economies, and they're always evolving.  The tax structure of most nations is still the ones that the Romans used; i.e., tax collectors take part of your income or party of your individual wealth.  That probably made sense in 20 AD or 220 AD but it's a pretty primitive way to do things in 2020 AD.

Indeed, while I think the entire concept of a Universal Basic Income is total folly (I have a dormant post on that which perhaps I'll get back around to), government funded retirement is a species of late Universal Basic Income which, unlike other types of UBI, makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, ignorant columnists of the New York Times aside.  I note that as Andrew Yang had some original thinking on how he was going to fund his UBI concept and while I don't support it, showing that sort of original thinking would generally be a good idea here, and it'll become necessary as our undirected manic drive towards "progress" increasingly displaces younger workers.

Anyhow, as we don't think that way, the decrease in the premature death rate, which is really what the increase in life expectancy actually is, combined with the decrease in the first world birth rate, means that at least for the time being this is one area where people who worry about demographic collapse are somewhat economically correct.  When Social Security came in, during the 1930s, deaths from disease, accidents, wars, birth, and poor health were much much higher than they are today.  Given that, lots of people never made it to retirement.  Neither of my grandfathers did, nor did my father.  For that matter, one of my aunts didn't either.  Now, a lot more people make it to retirement and live for a long time while drawing their Social Security checks. That's a good thing, but the rise in retirement ages all around the world is because our good fortunes and good health don't fit the old economic model. 

Which is, I suppose, a good problem to have.