This is really scary. The whole western world is in for a rude awakaning in the coming years with regards to retirement.
Retirement is the golden carrot dangled in front of us for all our working lives, an embodiment of Protestant work ethic - "work hard and you will be rewarded in the end". However, very much has changed since retirement and pensions were designed. I can't find a good source, but (in Sweden) when pensions were introduced after WW2 people worked from their late teens until they died (40+ years of productivity), produced 3 or more children per woman (good population age distribution, the classic "pyramid") and the average lifespan was 64 years (1 year before retirement).
Nowadays, many of my peers don't get a "real" job until their early/mid-thirties (work for 30 years of producitivty), produce 1.7 children per woman if they reproduce at all (leading to a top-heavy population where fewer and fewer young people must support more and more old people) and life expectancy is much, much higher. Now, these things are in of themselves good, but they break the original design horribly. I really, _really_ hope that we can cross the chasm to a robot-centric/base-income society before it all breaks down.
EDIT: Found this after posting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis
Retirement is the golden carrot dangled in front of us for all our working lives, an embodiment of Protestant work ethic - "work hard and you will be rewarded in the end". However, very much has changed since retirement and pensions were designed. I can't find a good source, but (in Sweden) when pensions were introduced after WW2 people worked from their late teens until they died (40+ years of productivity), produced 3 or more children per woman (good population age distribution, the classic "pyramid") and the average lifespan was 64 years (1 year before retirement).
Nowadays, many of my peers don't get a "real" job until their early/mid-thirties (work for 30 years of producitivty), produce 1.7 children per woman if they reproduce at all (leading to a top-heavy population where fewer and fewer young people must support more and more old people) and life expectancy is much, much higher. Now, these things are in of themselves good, but they break the original design horribly. I really, _really_ hope that we can cross the chasm to a robot-centric/base-income society before it all breaks down.
EDIT: Found this after posting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis