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I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.
Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?
Have more controls on provision of medical care to the elderly when it's not passing any cost/benefit calculation especially on public purse. Bump the retirement age substantially upwards for public assistance since an increasingly vanishing minority are working jobs with any real physical toll.
If you want to self-fund your tilting with death sure but incentives are currently massively misaligned
It's really great you're going to be thirty years old forever and maximally economically productive and will never get old or sick and will never be replaced in your job, so you are never going to need home helps, healthcare services, or a pension. Unlike those old useless seventy years onwards people selfishly requiring doctors to treat their arthritis and pneumonia, the leeches!
Publicly funded retirement is a privilege. The line needs to be kept at a point that enables society's books to be balanced. 65 made sense when a comparatively small fraction made it there and massively costly medical interventions weren't a thing.
If you want to stop working either have enough kids or get enough money that you're not on the public purse.
In the US at least, social security and medicare is an entitlement. You essentially earn "points" (not literally but figuratively works similar) in the program the more taxes you pay into it while working, and then come time of retirement or disability you get benefits paid out based off how many "points" you have.
There is an implicit, and in many ways explicit, agreement that this is earned. Some people try to argue against that by pointing that the cash you get out isn't the same cash you put in, but that doesn't actually change anything in the agreement. Money is fungible, it doesn't matter where it comes from whether it got stored in a big bank over the 40+ years of work or it went to seniors of the time and the money comes from workers today, the seniors of today earned their "points" in the benefits system and want to see the obligations promised to them by the government fulfilled.
The correct answer to this was for the government to never make such a promise to being with, not to rip people off.
It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in. It was not earned, in the most literal way.
https://401kspecialistmag.com/social-security-taxes-vs-benefits-americans-take-far-more-out-than-they-pay-in/
The imbalance is mostly driven by medicare; social security is much closer to breaking-even or even losing you money if you are a high earner, although married couples get more under certain conditions.
Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.
I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.
Absolutely. I agree with you that it was a terrible idea and should never have been done this way. It also was done this way, and government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.
Even the most principled small government activists came asking for their share like Ayn Rand. Some leftists tend to say that she was a hypocrite for this, but I disagree. You can believe that taxing your money is a bad idea and also accept that ultimately they did tax your money and want them to fulfill the promises they made.
You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.
It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.
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Of course, they’d make more if they could invest the cash in the market.
I find this hard to believe if it were generalized. Regardless of the financial vehicle people choose for their retirement, the actual amount of physical resources and labor to fulfill their demands doesn't really change. The material burden caused by 40% of society being unable to work isn't alleviated in any way if all of those people are nominal millionaires due to their portfolios' appreciation over time, prices for elder care, cruises in the Caribbean, the local retirement home's weekly Bingo event etc. would simply adjust upwards according to the actual amount of working age people being able to deliver these things.
Society can't collectively out-save demographic change. The stock market or government pension schemes are different ways to save money, but they're just saving nonetheless, not material solutions to the actual issue. Individually, investing is obviously still the way to go as long as there are enough suckers unaware of or not engaging with these better financial options, but that just elevates your relative standing, it's not a solution for society as a whole.
I guess the question is how much of more capital being invested (instead of being moved to the government) would have led to more automation thereby increasing productivity
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Only if you automate an index fund & ignore it. Most active investors lose money over time.
That’s futures and options no?
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Yeah but the government sets forth with many entitlement and implicit vibes then takes them away arbitrarily. End of the day the system has to balance financially somewhat. The seniors of today didn't accumulate sufficient points to get the age target they wanted and it's better to make common sense shifts now rather than be forced through austerity or the day of the pillow in future
I think the best option is to simply raise the retirement age. There wasn't some big reason for it to be at 65, that was just the age of the federal railroad pensions. And they already raised it before, the full retirement age now is 67.
If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed. That way it is truly an insurance for old age, as the name implies. That more and more people are continuing to work while collecting benefits is proof that the age is not set properly for insurance purposes.
People who are crippled early can collect disability benefits as a form of early retirement, something we already did unintentionally back during the great recession.
Note that you'd need to raise the retirement age to, like, 75 in order to avert insolvency if that's the only thing you're doing.
Pseudo-source (option C2.5: (1) raising the early-retirement age from 62 to 64, (2) raising the full-retirement age from 67 to 70, and (3) thereafter adjusting the full-retirement age so that the ratio of retirement years (life expectancy minus full-retirement age) to working years (full-retirement age minus age 20) remains constant would eliminate only 44 percent of the shortfall)
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Things are going to get really interesting when AI reverses the direction of this and brings it down from 67 to roughly 20 (ironically the highest current age at which someone finds jokes about 6-7 to be funny), as the only form of employment available to anyone becomes the original form of employment. Then again, improving cosmetic surgery and sun protection might mean that the age goes back up and/or just remains stable before going up to the 100s.
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This is called "altering the deal". Anyway, aren't you one of those who swears that old people's saved money is no good and they should actually have to personally provide for themselves in their dotage, or have their kids do so?
"We made a deal, but you never signed it or voted for it because it was before you were born, but don't worry about how much it's costing you because you'll get paid back by other people who still haven't been born, except of course that the demographic pyramid is now much taller and upside down and our accountants say there's no way you can't get mostly stiffed. Are you really saying you want to alter that deal?"
I believe the appropriate counter-meme here is the "Yes Chad".
I'm probably near enough to the peak "going to get screwed when the younger people wise up" age that I certainly can't be happy about the situation, but it is what it is.
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but if we're going to insist that someone to do all our work and pay for our leisure without deciding to just let us all die instead, I think creating AGI to ask might still give us better odds than asking the ever-shrinking younger generations of First World countries. And just in case that Fully Automated Luxury Geriatric Space Welfare-Capitalism plan remains mere fantasy for too long, in the meantime it might be a wise idea to back off on the massive debt-funded entitlements gradually, before we add too much more risk that our creditors will decide to back off suddenly. In the worst case, there might be so much of a backlash that the "saved money is no good" contingent actually gets into power. It's dismaying how many young Americans hold favorable views of socialism, but if they perceive the status quo as "socialism, just not for you" then I can see how they might imagine they'd be upgrading.
The real risk to old people is bringing in a bunch of third worlders who then have to support the old people who the immigrants have no connection to which in a democracy means the olds gibs will get voted away.
Seems to be mostly anti-immigration types trying to cut off social security. Immigrants seem to be generally for all gibs.
Oh for sure the immigrants of for gibs for them and the party giving out gibs are gibs for most. But my prediction is that when those immigrants move from a key bloc to the main bloc a different calculus will arise.
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The people who want to cut off Social Security for "boomers" (really Xers) and who want to take the houses of old people because they aren't using them appropriately are pretty much the same. The group which thinks old people's money is no good and if you aren't working now, you shouldn't be able to pay for things is a subset of them. You can't appease them (or anyone, really); victory anywhere would only embolden them. Otherwise I'd be more open to cutting off SS.
The Xers are already showing serious creaks in the structure. Anybody looking at an age distribution chart has to be very alarmed.
If an old person is totally self-funding their retirement and has an expensive house I have no malice to them. I do suspect they might be happier moving into a purpose-built assisted living community someplace with cheaper land values, but that's their choice. The issue becomes when massive subsidies, far exceeding the individual's lifetime contribution are piled on somebody who is also holding a very valuable asset which is increasingly happening.
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I think that we should try to still give old people a decent retirement within our means, but it has to be kept in mind that this was boomers making a deal among themselves that now doesn't work out due to their own foreseeable failings. It's really hard for me to feel sympathy for a generation that went through a boom period with a 10-to-1 dependency ratio now not getting what they promised themselves because the dependency ratio is now 2.5-to-1.
The "deal" is older than the Boomers. And any cutting-off won't fall on most of the boomers; the reality of numbers and the speed of politics means it'll be Generation X which is cut off, plus maybe a few of the youngest boomers.
Yes that's true. Which is why most young people are quite militant since they know it's an inevitability that their personal access to the luxury communism will likely be killed off before they get to harvest a cent
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The deal is going to be altered regardless. The Boomer block is still 5-10 years off peak demographic overhang and the system is already cracking. Public funded retirement can continue to exist but either age or provision of care needs to be shifted till the books somewhat balance.
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Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.
I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.
It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.
But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.
Anti-old policies have a greater issue than just morals for unknown vulnerable strangers. Basically everyone has someone old in their life they love (I have both parents and an aunt) who are still independent right now but might not be in the next decade or two and it's something I really am having to plan for.
But beyond even that, while younger folk like me might want to deny it we are all aware we will get old as well. Voting in anti old policies is moronic then, it's literally voting against my future self. Euthanasia at 75 means I die at 75, and that's assuming the number doesn't ratchet down.
Sure my adult children might be able to care for me but more and more people don't like that, they don't like being independent on their kids and I don't like the idea either. Funding it through taxes on everyone essentially does the same thing, my kids pay a little for every senior and all the other kids will pay a little for me.
Really the bigger answer is automation and zoning reform. We can raise our overall quality of life despite shrinking and aging populations because robots do the labor (as automation has already been doing for a few centuries now) and zoning reform can help create accessible nice homes for the old to move to so young people with kids can have an actual house.
The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.
Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.
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I'm not convinced this really is a solvable problem.
Lifespan has increased without meaningfully increasing the amount of healthy years. Age of retirement can be raised a bit but we're starting to hit hard limits of what is possible (at least for the general population, some jobs can be done by some groups of elderly more reliably).
It isn't really a problem insurance or redistribution can solve because this is something that happens to everyone and welfare states are already stretched to the limit and running massive deficits. This is a demographic and biological problem, not a redistribute one.
A stop gap measure is probably increasing the retirement age where possible and cutting back on non-essential elderly entitlements but at some point we have to ask ourselves what we're doing here.
Let's say we treated this as savings instead and people got a an account of money at retirement that they can spend on healthcare, assisted living and pension; what do we do when that money runs out? That's the situation we're getting into societally, regardless of whether we have insurance based or socialised systems.
We have no treatment for aging so no-one is getting out of this alive, and that is something we as a modern society have to come to terms with. Our current attitude is more than a little childish, imo.
Hopefully AGI really comes and solves aging for us or this is going to get ugly.
We don't need to solve aging, we just need to automate enough work that good living standards can be maintained despite a shrinking and aging population. Like does it really matter if the seniors at a nursing home get their food cooked by a sweaty 16 year old vs a (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) automated cooking machine? Does it really matter if the medical treatment and analysis they get is done by (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) machines and not extensive human labor?
Not really.
In many sectors "build another machine" is already far more efficient than throwing another human laborer in (to the point some run lights out/near lights out), so birthrates and youth stop mattering for them as much. As we automate more and more, this will become increasingly true of the general economy.
That would be nice but I'll believe it when I see it.
I cleverly used examples that we already have (at least to some degree).
Automated food production? Already the case for many steps and products, both at the farms themselves, and in preparing/packaging/etc. Combine this with self driving trucks (self driving cars are already looking better than humans like with Waymo, probably not too long for the trucking industry to start getting more automated) and even stuff like drone deliveries from store to house, and maybe in 20-30 years there will barely be any humans involved in getting food from the fields to your home. Heck, you might not even be a part of that process, COVID has made grocery deliveries really cheap and I use them from time to time and that's with human drivers still not the drones yet.
Medical care? Ok sure a lot of it will remain human, patients will want a human doctor to talk to and a human nurse to look after them but automation is already here and getting better. In all sorts of ways even. Like I got a sleep study recently and all the devices they put on me could read my pulse, detect my breathing, etc without a human monitor. And an auto generated report from what I can tell! Yes a human was there to set it up and look over it, and an expert looked the results and the report but it was mostly technology.
Heck technology even makes a lot of things possible that wouldn't be before. Consider the sleep study again and how they had constant monitoring of my pulse and breathing and oxygen levels. A human doctor, even if they taped their end of a stethoscope to me and listened all night long wouldn't be able to record with nearly as much accuracy as the machine can.
Now of course, automation still has a long way to go. But given the miracles we have already achieved and the amazing standards of living we already get from it, I don't think we should be so doubtful.
Heck one of the only reasons why automation hasn't already solved the crisis is that our living standards keep ratcheting up to match the increase in productivity. Like we're at the point where internet is being considered a basic human right despite most not even having it ~30-40 years ago. Imagine going back to the 1980s and telling people the Internet will be considered a human right. Many would be like "whats the internet?". That's how much we've ratcheted.
You realise of course that even with these inventions we're falling further behind, as does the derivative and in some places even the second order derivative.
The scale of the improvements are not commensurate with the worsening dependency ratios.
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True. I have more faith in the Chinese having the will and the ingenuity to actually accomplish this but the current meta in the West is awash with so much inefficiency and stupidity that it cannot last without alterations.
I'm sure a better scalable approach to eldercare exists but the current trajectory seems ill equipped to arrive there
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Another aspect not many people talk about when discussing this issue is that the elderly are currently sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of underused real estate. Downgrading from a 3 bedroom suburban home with a quarter acre of property to a 2 bedroom condo in a lower cost of living area can finance a hell of a lot of health care. The boomers need to sell their fucking houses and get some of that wealth working again. Social security and medicare payments should be halved for every spare bedroom in your home.
No, it really can't. You'd think so, but transaction costs are high, condo fees are high, and healthcare is hellaciously expensive.
Also ridiculous carveouts in the current pension system. Australia doesn't count the house you live in towards mean testing for public assistance, pension and healthcare so there's a lot of instances where elderly are deliberately sitting on premium real estate (that they don't maintain at all) solely to potentially give it as future inheritance.
I'm reminded of an elderly couple near me growing up where their kids lived an hour away since the suburb had massively appreciated who made their own retirements significantly worse (due to transit and rarely seeing grandkids) by refusing to leave their literally rotting home
Old age social security benefits in the US are not means tested. This is a weight-bearing component of the system -- it's funded by a special tax on all workers, and provided to all those who paid into it. That's what keeps it from just being considered plain old welfare, and what makes it the "third rail" of politics.
As for occupied houses literally rotting in Australia... isn't the country generally rather dry for that? Even in my wet area of the US, if you avoid being flooded from below and keep the roof from leaking, and don't set it on fire, the house will be OK structurally for a very long time.
Also, a couple holding onto a house to keep the health care system from getting it rather than their children goes against the narrative of greedy elders who don't care about their children.
If social security is so smart and inevitable due to self funding by everybody why are they struggling to fund It?
Most of the bits of Australia with significant human presence aren't desert. I just recall going into the local elderly couple's house when I was younger and their roof was being barely patched together due to mold which they didn't have funds to rectify despite the lot being worth about 2.5 million AUD due to location. The house was about 100 years old though.
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If they all start selling then prices will drop because people don't have the money to buy the real estate absent inherited real estate wealth.
Which solves another problem! Win/win!
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Ohno. Premium real estate drops a bit in pricing and transit issues get mitigated.
The point is that it isn't a good source of funding. Much of the value is illusory.
Not in that sense. There's a potential haircut but the great grey migration has to go buy somewhere else which is likely better adapted to their needs. You're confusing this with liquid companies
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Or to a 500-ft2 ADU in the backyard.
Seriously. Unleash the granny flats! Make multi-generational households great again!
Exactly. I've moved from a nuclear family society to a clannish one and the elderly tend to have better QOL through granny flats and staying inside the home
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The meaningful amount of healthy years has expanded hugely? 70 in 2026 isn't what it was in 1970 due to a combination of jobs being far less physically arduous and public health interventions. 65 was picked as a line when most people didn't get there, they were profoundly wrecked on average and there wasn't an expectation of 10 years of meandering cruises.
But yeah the retirement age needs to be a function of where the books can be balanced. If you were incapable of generating enough savings or children to get you there, moving it onto the public purse is ruinous
Not compared to the increase in lifespan. Where people used to die at 65 they now are inching close to 85 (84.1 in Sweden where i live), and few people even in light professions can work to 70, nevermind more than that. I'm not saying that they necessarily need active care at that point but neither are they fit to work, and consume increasing amounts of resources. I Grant you that we might be able to squeeze some work out of them but we can't just increase the retirement age either.
Of course there are exceptions like my wife's grandfather who worked into his mid 90s.
The average 70 year old these days is more fit to work at the typical job of 2026 than the average 65 year old was at the typical job in the early 1900s when public pensions were brought in and 65 was set as the interval for their payment. You are frankly insane if you think that, as a somewhat-young person, that the retirement age will be where it currently is when you're old enough to get there barring some huge luxury AI communism innovation in the meantime. The system is already buckling before the majority of boomers are even retired, medicine will likely continue to improve and unless there is an immediate reversal in the birthrate issue there won't be a large enough pyramid beneath you.
That is literally what I said in my first comment?
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