There are basically two kinds of jobs, the ones that break your body down and those that don't.
While it seems logical that retirement age should be raised in light of increasing lifespan, in fact what this will do is decrease the pensions of those whose work is physical, and frankly whose bodies have been beat to crap over forty or so years. Those folks pretty much have to retire early and how many fries would you like with that (working in a restaurant kitchen is also no walk in the park). This is not a simple problem with a single solution ER On Dec 17, 12:42 am, James Annan <[email protected]> wrote: > Morpheal wrote: > > OLD AGE PENSION HELL AND ONLY A GOVERNMENT CAN SAVE US > > An interesting rant, parts of which are close to my heart. It is > worthwhile to consider how the social contract has implicitly changed > since pensions were first introduced. Initially, life expectancy was > lower (or at least hardly higher) than pensionable age, and it is only > in recent decades that we have reached the situation where people expect > to have 20+years in education, at most 40-45 in work (often with > substantial periods between jobs, including childcare and other family > responsibilities) and a further 20 years in comfortable retirement. It > is hardly surprising that the system is starting to creak a little. > > The solution seems rather obvious to me: raise retirement age. Indeed > this is already happening, on an official basis in some cases and > unofficially in others (ie OAPs doing a bit of work on the side). Of > course there needs to be some safety net for those who are incapable of > productive work (and I guess their numbers must have increased a fair > bit along with life expectancy) but I don't really see why we should > consider it our birthright to sit around for (in some cases) several > decades after reaching 65 or even 60 in some jobs. > > I don't know exactly what the figures show but I would expect that a > gentle staged increase in statutory retirement age, maybe adding one > year to the threshold per 5 elapsed, would go a very long way to > defusing the "pensions timebomb" at a stroke. > > James > - probably without an official pension, but being paid in Yen :-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
