Yes, that's what we need, more social scientists!
(extended cackle)

The notion that the West's 65 year olds have had all of the work wrung out of them is ludicrous.

There's no reason at all for most of 'em not to keep working until 70 or beyond.

The nature of their work might change, and they may work reduced hours, but that's more than enough to close the supposed shortfall.
After all, Australia is only projecting a meager $ 2 trillion gap over forty years.

Also, the cost of providing medical care is likely to grow at a slower rate over the next few decades than it did over the past few, as the benefits of being able to read a patient's genetic code to determine, before treatment starts, which therapies and doses would be most beneficial, become common.

Japan, Italy, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Spain and others face real problems of this sort, but this article is Chicken Little stuff, Australian style.

Absolutely right, Mike! Increasing the retirement age is the easiest thing to accomplish, politically.

One more thing. Won't deflation eventually reduce costs? Or can some economically minded person explain that it won't.

Michael:

Your sunny confidence would disarm the gloomiest curmudgeon.

There is a difference between allowing seniors to work as a matter of choice, even encouraging them, and effectively compelling them to as a matter of social convention or even law. Whatever advances in health and medecine we may see, the idea that we are soon headed to a world where the average septugenarian can compete as an equal with those in their prime is absurd and potentially extremely cruel. Walk the streets and tell me honestly that most of the seniors you see are ready for a hard day's productivity. Or try to imagine a MacDonald's full of them and you in a rush.

It isn't just a question of physical health and mental faculties. The workplace is becoming more and more fast-paced and competitive. In bureaucratic and corporate venues, even those in their fifties are looking over their shoulders at the go-getters behind them. Seniors are no more likely to muster the competitive drive and energy than they are likely to think raising a new baby would be a cool idea. Or are you going to tell me there will be a pill for that too?

So, by all means, let's push continued work and productivity from seniors, which is going to come as a heck of a shock to millions of boomers. But let's not avoid facing the tough issues by blithely asserting genetic technologies are going to solve everything. The idea that we can just extend the working life by ten to twenty years without missing a beat is folly. Most of them will be on the margins, many with dicey health or emotional fragilities, and questions of basic decency and exploitation are going to arise pretty fast. I'm not sure I look forward to a world where, instead of honouring granny and letting her enjoy a well-deserved rest, we are hounding her out of bed to get to work on time.

Peter:

I'm sure you're right.

So what does that leave us with as a solution, other than raising taxes?

Brit:

Oh, I wish I knew. The best I can come up with is a return to extended family and intergenerational dependency, with an increase in the birthrate. But, as I've mentioned before, it's hard to know whether it would be the old or young that would resist that the hardest.

The alternatives are a)raising taxes substantially and make a dwindling working poulation support an expanding seniority; b)stop investing so much in trying to extend life; c) euthanasia and d)hardening our hearts and exploiting the elderly.

Nice fix we've got ourselves into, eh?

Peter:

A nice fix indeed. But maybe not a disaster, relatively speaking.

Greater inter-generational dependency is desirable, but not possible for everyone, and not the sort of thing you can easily regulate.

I guess only Bart would vote for (c). (b) is all very well until it's you or your loved ones at death's door.

I suppose, rather boringly it's going to have to be a compromise: a bit of 'encouraging' people to carry on working; a bit of raising taxes; plus greater incentives for people to save independently for retirement.

Brit:

Oh, and importing fecund immigrants to take care of we fragile and barren whites in our dotage.

Michael,

Once again you are the fount of wisdom.

The basic flaw of Social Security is best illustrated by the demographic changes since the Wagner Act. When it was passed, there were 16 people paying for every recipient. Today, it is around 3. All that needs to be done is to increase the retirement age, or to increase the rate of return from the investment of people's contributions to the Trust Fund or some combination of the two. This is why some form of privatization is inevitable.

For those whining about increasing the retirement age, we are no longer an industrial nation where large numbers of people make the living through back-breaking physical labor. It's ludicrous to think that programmers or math geeks or engineers or lawyers or CPAs become useless after 65. Moreover, the upper quartile of our society isn't making retirement decisions based on the availability of Social Security anyway. Whether you have that extra grand a month isn't going to change your mind about that cruise on the QE II or that month in the Cote d'Azur.

As for the crack about euthanasia, I don't see any need to keep elderly, sickly people around who don't have family or money. In the US, the average person spends $100,000 for medical care in the last year of his life. In a world of scarce resources, these people are simply not worth it.

Atta boy, Bart. Work or die! We gotta make these old wrinklies stop sucking out our precious bodily fluids.

Bart:

So what you're saying is that individuals have no intrinsic worth of themselves, and should only be valued so long as they are able to contribute to the wealth or greater good of society?

Brit,

When it is a matter of how a society is to allocate scarce resources, yes. Why should my pocket get picked to keep some old geezer alive, when I can pay for my own health care? What benefit does his continued existence give to me?

If he has family, he can move in with them or they can pay for his upkeep.

Bart:

Well, she had a son she was counting on to take care of her, but he was killed at Fallujah and his pension and insurance went to support his two kiddies. So, I guess she dies.

Peter, Brit:

What health care decisions does socialized medicine make regarding the elderly? Bart raises the point inelegantly, but what he says already a long tradition. What precisely is the moral advantage deriving from intrusive medical care at the end of life?

Michael: Spot on.

Simply reflecting the reality of lives both longer and healthier dictates moving the retirement age back. A good deal of Europe's social security problems derive from ludicrously young retirement ages.

Sure, people tend to slow down as they age, and those who are in poor health shouldn't be forced to work. However, we're not talking about having to extend productivity for another twenty years.
Another five would do quite nicely.

Also, we're not talking about the salt mines; the first world economies are increasingly service-oriented, and 68 year olds can hand out towels at resorts, sell sunglasses, guide tours, or staff a register as well as any 16 year old.

As Bart points out, there are plenty of knowledge workers that might contribute only part of the year, or on a consultant basis.

The underlying problem here is that the Boomer generation:
­*Didn't have enough children
*Allowed, ENCOURAGED, the gov't to spend all of the collected pension monies, substituting worthless IOUs, and believed that the benefits forthcoming were somehow "free"
*And, at least in the States, haven't put much aside for retirement outside of the state pension plan.

If they'd only done TWO of those things, there wouldn't be any crisis.
The Boomer generation has well and truly made their own beds, and they "deserve" what they'll get, which will be a shorter retirement, or fewer benefits.

Again, this only applies to those for whom the state-run pension plan will make up 90%+ of their retirement funds, and those people most likely simply spent their retirement money on consumer goods and entertainment.

I feel sorry only for those who planned well, but had hard luck.

Randall Voth:

If deflation were steady and gentle, then it would reduce costs for medical care, but it would INCREASE the relative cost of paying the promised pension amounts.
If the economy were growing, and the political hurdles of having cost-of-living adjustments decrease pension payments could be crossed, (Good luck !), then yes, deflation would be helpful.

Brit:

No, not a disaster, not in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, anyhow.
Just annoying.

Mainland Europe and Japan are going to have enormous social upheaval over this, but nobody has to starve.

Jeff:

"What precisely is the moral advantage deriving from intrusive medical care at the end of life?"

Well, I'm not so pro-life that I believe in keeping the machines on indefinitely long after Granny has become a vegetable.

But then neither am I so pro-euthanasia that I'd join Bart in ferrying Grandad to the gas chamber once he starts mixing up the orders for the McNuggets and the Big Macs.

The problem is that there's very often a gap between the two states which can last for decades, and then a tricky decision for someone (who?) to make at some point towards the end of it.

"When it is a matter of how a society is to allocate scarce resources, yes. Why should my pocket get picked to keep some old geezer alive, when I can pay for my own health care? What benefit does his continued existence give to me?"

Bart, have you ever counted up the ways in which you pick the pockets of others in society? Not literally, of course, but in all the ways that you benefit from others in ways that you can never repay? Do your taxes adequately repay the young men who are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan protecting you from terrorism?

A society which is held together solely by financial transactions is a bankrupt society.

Robert/Brit:

Your brilliance and compassion are wasted here. Bart is convinced his obvious gifts of intelligence and success are things he has only himself to thank for and that the world is trying to bring him down. He lives in a mean world of ongoing competition for "scarce resources". Consequently, he owes no one anything. Sad, isn't it.

Now, I could relate his thinking to a certain 19th century philosopher/biologist, but this is a holiday, so I won't.

PeterB,

In this world, you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER count on anyone but yourself. Not spouses, not children, not parents, not friends, not business associates and certainly not strangers. People are always looking for ways to screw you, one of the many reasons to keep government small.

Until we perfect Star Trek-style replicator technology, it is a world of scarce resources.

Brit,

It's not ferrying granddad to the gas chamber. It is a rational allocation of a scarce resource, medical care. If it were not scarce, it would not be so expensive.

Choices therefore become necessary. The first people over the side should hence be the people least likely to be able to contribute to the 'common good.' Elderly, infirm, sickly people who are entirely dependent on public welfare fit the description.

Robert,

Societies hold together as long as it is in the common interest for them to be held together. People make a rational decision to belong to a society and pay some costs in order to receive some benefits. Because this is not a permanent condition, societies integrate and disintegrate all the time.

Brit:

What is the NHS course of treatment for, say, a 75 yr old diagnosed with cancer?

Peter:

"Now, I could relate his thinking to a certain 19th century philosopher/biologist, but this is a holiday, so I won't."

You could, but be careful of the comparison. On the face of it, societies hewing closely to Bart's line are not comparatively fit, are they?

Bart,
Though you probably don't realize it, you've benefitted from many acts of generosity for which a payment has not been requested of you. I know that I have, and I am grateful for them. Believe me, the society that you are envisioning, where every interpersonal act is weighed and transacted as a financial exchange, would be unlivable, it wouldn't hold together for a single billing cycle.

People don't make rational decisions about belonging to a society. There is nothing rational about living in a society, it is our default condition, we cannot exist outside of a society. The cornerstone of any society is the assumption by all that their life and the life of every other individual in the society is accorded the highest value among the things that the society values. When it becomes apparent that you have to put your life up for auction on Ebay to see if anyone values it enough to bid on it, then there is no reason to belong to that society. If you call the police to report that a man has broken into your house and is threatening to kill you, do you expect the police to look up your latest net productivity figures before calculating if it is profitable to the society to respond to the call?

Robert,

People form societies because it makes sense for them to. When the society ceases to protect them from outside predators and those of each other, the society ceases to exist. Just look at the Roman Empire in the West after about 350CE. This is the premise behind such ideas as Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America for example.

As for the provision of public services, I pay something called taxes and I suppose you do too. The police here in Northern NJ make plenty of money and really have little to do besides eating donuts, standing around at construction zones making double OT, and harassing motorists to increase revenue to our grubby, greedy, venal municipal governments. We be better off without them and just letting people hire mercenaries, like a multinational drilling for oil in West Africa. If our local constabulary had to respond to real crime, of the sort a cop faces in the cities, they'd have to change the uniform color of their slacks from blue to brown, to hide the stains.

If you think the police don't engage in cost-benefit analysis, just take a walk down Lenox Ave around 135st at about midnight and see. Even in NYC, at night in poor areas, police protection amounts to little more than a government functionary walking around in the early morning chanting 'Bring out your dead!' By contrast, when was the last time you heard of a gang holding up the patrons of a fancy NYC restaurant or stealing the proceeds from a Broadway show.