Many countries are in the process of raising the retirement age; I will have to work until I'm 67 years old, when my father's generation could easily retire early at an age of 55. Is that progress?
Image by geralt - source:Pixabay
In today's short post I'd like to quickly address the omnipresent lie with which this completely ridiculous and unjustifiable is sold to the masses. Almost everyone I ask says they understand why this is being done. "Our generation has a much higher life-expectancy than previous ones; progress has caused us to live longer than before, so it's only natural that if you live longer, you'll have to save more for those extra years. I don't see any problem here."
Rising life expectancies have also had a part to play. According to the World Bank, life expectancy at birth in the UK has risen from 75 to 82 over the past 30 years.
source: Schroders
This is so maddening! This I find the perfect example of blindly accepting what you're being told, without taking even a second to think about it. A nation's life-expectancy says exactly nothing about your life-expectancy. The fact that on average a nation's population lives longer doesn't mean at all that its citizens live longer lives.
The main reason average ages have risen is because less children die at young ages. And in most recent decades this has been compounded by the simple fact that less children are even born at all; there's far less small numbers to drag down the nation's average age. It's true that we also managed to prolong life at the end, but in practice this means exactly that; we just die slower, keeping ourself alive with medicine and treatment. These are not productive years:
Though we’re living longer, this doesn’t necessarily mean our health will allow us to work for additional years. Healthy working life expectancy tells us the average number of years people in a population are likely to be healthy and in paid work from the age of 50. Healthy working life expectancy focuses on working life after age 50, which is when health problems (such as common age-related diseases, including pain or mobility issues) can make it difficult for people to continue working or find a job that fits their needs.
Our study of healthy working life expectancy found that on average, people in England can expect to be healthy and in work for almost nine and a half years after age 50. However, these years are not necessarily lived consecutively as people may temporarily leave work or experience health problems. These findings came from data on 15,284 people aged over 50 in England who were interviewed several times from 2002 to 2013.
source: The Conversation
Off to work, you lazy bums! - source: Wikimedia Commons
The only proven relationship between economics and age is that rich people live longer! And they also have less offspring; there's the solution to your imaginary overpopulation problem. Make the Third World as wealthy as the global north to ensure a birthrate below 2.1 kids per family, the rate needed to maintain a stable population size. But the planet isn't overpopulated at all in the first place, that's a lie too.
Writing this down, I'm baffled once again at the self evidence of it, and the gullibility of so many people. It drives me crazy sometimes to hear people actually defend government's policy of austerity with words like "we all have to take responsibility for the debts we have accumulated as a people." AAARRHGHGH!! Be silent please! Debt = money! Without debt no money! I wish it were different, but for decades the country with the highest national debt has also been the richest country! 1+1=2!! And WE did NOT accumulate those debts in the first place!
But no. The Secretary of Finance has but to point out that the debt is getting too big and the sheeple make it their responsibility to help alleviate the nation's burden... Sigh... I'll leave it at that for now. This should be no news for the remarkably well educated and freethinking audience that's gathered here. But I would ask of you this: if these obvious lies are discussed in your vicinity, please don't stay silent and educate these unfortunately misinformed fellow human beings...
Now watch the usual lies being told in the below linked video, and pay special attention to the reaction of the students, all in their mid twenties; they know what's going on. It's a program that originally aired in 2005 and it mentions how the life-expectancy will continue to rise. Well, I'm sorry, but life-expectancy has begun to fall in the United States and some other First World countries; shows how wrong they were and how policies are based on nonsensical economic models. Look, there's more than enough wealth to go around and for every worker we've lost to pay for the elders' pensions, we've gained 5 robots and 10 computers. So stop it with the nonsense already and allow everyone, EVERYONE, to live a decent life...
Raising the Retirement Age
The above is a redacted version of a post I originally released on Steemit in November 2018
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