Raise the retirement age

[DC Al Fine]

It hurts young people by creating less open jobs as I mentioned.

     I've thought about this idea before and I liked it, but I hit that roadblock. Old people need to leave the workforce to open spots for young people.

It's falling into the 'lump of labour' fallacy. There isn't a set amount of work to be divided up. Workers tend to consume more than retirees, which affects the number of total jobs.

[DC Al Fine]

It hurts young people by creating less open jobs as I mentioned.

     I've thought about this idea before and I liked it, but I hit that roadblock. Old people need to leave the workforce to open spots for young people.

It's falling into the 'lump of labour' fallacy. There isn't a set amount of work to be divided up. Workers tend to consume more than retirees, which affects the number of total jobs.

     Does one additional worker (vis a vis retiree) require a sum of one additional employee in the economy to provide all services for? If not, then we eventually run into a problem regardless.

I have no idea about the specific multiplier effect. I was on mobile in my last post, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

All non-workers are ultimately supported by someone else's work, whether it's kid through their parent's labour, poor retirees pensions collected via income tax etc. Even the independently wealthy are ultimately supported through equity and bond income generated by people working. Therefore, if fewer people work, we have fewer people doing useful stuff supporting a larger percentage of the population, making society worse off.

To reverse the analogy, if we had a generous state pension and cut the retirement age to 50, every 22 year old could find a job, but the society would be much worse off.

A better approach IMO would be to integrate elderly people into daily community life more thoroughly and reduce the costs of living for retired people. Extended family living arrangements are a good thing: How much better would it be to leave your children in the care of their grandparents rather than an understaffed daycare that you can barely afford?

Moreover, why must the wealthy and middle-class elderly retire to lavish tropical locales and country-club style nursing homes

While I agree with the general sentiment here, a lot of this is cultural, and was in part driven by the elderly having no options. It'd be pretty hard to affect this with state policy, and a lot of the changes that would support this probably wouldn't be favoured by the left.

e.g. My mother was from a fairly progressive household and married into a religious traditionalist family. Guess which set of grandparents offered unlimited free babysitting when I was born

[DC Al Fine]

The retirement age is way too blunt an instrument to regulate pensions and retirement. In Canada, the retirement age affects:

a) When you can enter the government's guaranteed income program for seniors
b) When you can get the basic state pension
c) When you can collect our equivalent to Social Security without clawbacks.

Obviously if the population is aging, we need to tinker with with the retirement system to make it sustainable, but look at what touching the retirement age affects: everyone from the infirm and destitute up to the very wealthy.

A better way to go about this is to tinker with clawbacks in the various benefit programs. That way the poor and manual workers can retire to a reasonable standard of living, while the well to do either save more or work longer to provide a better standard for themselves.

In my experience, state pensions are much too generous to the middle and upper middle class.  Do you know what the household income of a Canadian couple to begin having their state pension clawed back? Nearly $150,000! We would never dream of giving $1k a month to working folks with $150k income, but that's totally acceptable here. Meanwhile the minimum income program for the elderly leaves much to be desired. A good solution would be to drop the clawback threshhold, using part of the savings to make the system more sustainable and the other part to top up pensions for the very poor.

[DC Al Fine]

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Right. So it must be the fault of people who want to retire before keeling over on the job at age 70. Let's just ignore the fact that almost $3 TRILLION has been stolen from Social Security. How about slashing the military-industrial complex's funding, and take care of our elderly and our veterans. Maybe even increase the tax rate on millionaires by a couple of percentage points, but OH NO I suppose that wouldn't be "fair" to poor Halliburton now would it?

There's never going to be a solution to this crisis which is "fair" for everyone.  That's why it's a crisis.

Rich person says poor people need to bear the brunt of sacrifices to avoid "a crisis". Neoliberalism at its finest.

See this is where the left loses me. I'm sympathetic to leftish solutions on pensions, but this sort of rhetoric trivializes the gravity of the issue.

As the worker:retiree ratio drops from 5:1, to 2:1, to 1:1 in some countries, it gets more and more expensive to provide the same level of support. This issue is bigger than tweaking the marginal tax rate for millionaires, particularly if you want a more generous pension system than Social Security.

[DC Al Fine]

I thought we were talking about the US specifically and not "some countries". Whatever issues Italy and Germany might have, the situation in the US is different, and all I've seen suggests that Social Security is financially secure for the next decades at least.

And regardless, declining fertility rates are not a fatality, but also something that depends on policies. If you want to get serious at dealing with that, a big part of the solution is providing women with the resources they need to reconcile motherhood and a professional life (eg public childcare, long maternity leaves, etc.).

None of those things are going to increase the birth rate.

Agreed The US is a joke when it comes to maternity leave and their fertility rate isn't much different from uber generous Scandanavia. These things are largely cultural and therefore require cultural solutions, which is much more difficult than simply cutting a cheque.

[DC Al Fine]

Interestingly, as I approach thirty, the only college friends of mine with children are women who married Mormon men, and even they only have one child per couple with plans for no more than one more.

Among my much more downscale high school cohort, I know plenty of people with three or more children, frequently out-of-wedlock or scattered across different relationships. One woman who graduated after I did just had her fifth, and I think she's only 25.

It's not exactly getting ignored, but the effect of college, graduate school, and student loans on fertility isn't emphasized enough, especially as a point of advice for children. Survey data show that most college women would prefer to have two or more children - there's not much of a difference between them and high school graduates in this regard - but for economic or cultural reasons they just aren't having gen. A very large share will have one or two, but a substantial contingent have none, and few have three or more.

The economic reasons are a big part of it, but even my high earning peers are balking at having kids. Since my wife got pregnant, I've noticed this weird mix of hyperconservatism and Peter Pan Syndrome among a lot of 20-somethings.

I work at a company which has a lot of well paid 20-somethings. Housing in our city is reasonable and we have modest student loan payments for the most part. We ought to be prime candidates for having kids, yet a lot of my coworkers either think they can't afford to or that it's 'not time yet'.

At the root of it, for secular, educated millennials, having children is something you do in your thirties. It's going to be very hard to turn that perception around.

[DC Al Fine]

The economic reasons are a big part of it, but even my high earning peers are balking at having kids. Since my wife got pregnant, I've noticed this weird mix of hyperconservatism and Peter Pan Syndrome among a lot of 20-somethings.

I work at a company which has a lot of well paid 20-somethings. Housing in our city is reasonable and we have modest student loan payments for the most part. We ought to be prime candidates for having kids, yet a lot of my coworkers either think they can't afford to or that it's 'not time yet'.

At the root of it, for secular, educated millennials, having children is something you do in your thirties. It's going to be very hard to turn that perception around.

Something that I've mentioned elsewhere, and that may have come up in this thread already, is the sheer expense of raising children in a household headed by two full-time workers in the absence of deep community ties or nearby family. Providing childcare, transportation, and, depending on circumstances, healthcare for a child is no simple feat when you're paying for services that other families obtain for free - if not by a full- or part-time stay-at-home parent, than from neighbors, nearby relatives, church groups, etc.

(Is this account really descriptive of larger young families nationwide? I have no idea, but this was the norm in my community when I was growing up, and it remains the norm for the people I know who are having more children.)

Every couple I know with 4+ kids had at least two of the following traits: stay at home mom, active church community, grandparents close by. Not sure if my experience is typical of large families nationwide, but it does cover the suburban Evangelical set pretty well.

Of course raising children with the assumption that they are on the college track is more expensive, and not just in terms of putting savings aside for future tuition that, for all we know, could be twice as expensive as it is today by the time they enroll. I don't think that most college prep spending is necessary or even all that helpful for a child's development, but people have expectations to respect and appearances to maintain. Better to have one stable or upwardly mobile child than several who are downwardly mobile, maybe? I take issue with the risk profile of that strategy, but it's easy to see why it makes sense to parents living in an era when social stratification is so palpable.

So the expenses per child grow obscenely large, especially for status-conscious parents. I can understand why, even in a place with relatively low living costs, a working couple with combined earnings of less than about $90k per year would be hesitant, especially if they are renters with lingering student debt, no savings, and no relatives or close friends nearby who would provide significant assistance with childcare. And a large share of couples with earnings much in excess of that will tend to be so career-focused that raising children is likely to take a low priority until those careers are well-established enough for them to be comfortable with balancing their lives more in favor of family.

I also have suspicions about how this is tied up with changing attitudes toward marriage, especially among people who are younger, more secular, and more individualistic, and the effect that this must have on any long-term planning.

I agree with the general sentiment of this, but it does gloss a lot of cultural aspects of this. The decision to live away form family (particularly if you are from a reasonably prosperous area) is cultural. Grandparents not taking an active role in looking after grandkids is cultural. And of course, the need to put kids in umpteen activities is cultural.*

* As an aside, if there's one thing I hate, hate, hate about modern parenting, it's the putting kids in half a dozen activities. It's just so excessive.