>
> People will have to work longer. As life expectancies continue to
> increase, retirement age will have to increase too.
>
I understand that, and that's reasonable. The retirement age for Social
Security in the US has been moved up from 65 to 67 for folks my age and will
be 68 for folks a few years younger.
Germany will absolutely have to get rid of retirement at 55. But, I've seen
international studies on aging, and only 3 developed countries (as of 6
years ago) seemed to be marginally OK with handling the aging of their
population. The rest were in various degrees of trouble from big to very
big.
Part of it is that, even with advances, we tend to slow down in our 70s, at
least on average. We cannot expect the same hours of work of a 75 year old
as a 30 year old.
I had been interested in this, so I did three different scenarios. I have
results in a number of different forms, but let me just give a couple.
First, assume Europe's population distribution and a constant life
expectancy of about 78 years, and the EU fertility rate of 1.5. We'd get
the following age distribution:
Now 50 years
<20 21.7% 15.8%
20-40 26.8% 19.9%
40-60 28.4% 24.3%
60-80 18.4% 25.9%
80+ 4.8% 14.0%
Then I added a 1 year per decade increase in life expectancy. I got:
<20 21.7% 14.4%
20-40 26.8% 18.2%
40-60 28.4% 22.2%
60-80 18.4% 25.0%
80+ 4.8% 20.2%
Finally, I took a long term ZPG society, with the life expectancy increase
of 1 year per decade. I got:
<20 30.4% 24.0%
20-40 28.1% 23.4%
40-60 23.0% 21.9%
60-80 14.0% 19.5%
80+ 4.6% 11.3%
You see the biggest contributor is the near 30% drop in population per
generation due to the fertility rate, not the aging of the population
because people live longer.
Dan M.
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
