In 1956, when the French retirement age was set at 62 years,

[speak easy]

life expectancy (at birth) was 68.54 years. Life expectancy (at birth) - the retirement age was 6.54 years

At 2022, the retirement age in France is 62 years. Life expectancy (at birth) is 83.13 years. Life expectancy (at birth) - the retirement age is 21.13 years.

Life expectancy at birth, is a proxy for the real number, life expectancy at retirement age. In 2020 life expectancy at age 62 was 85.5 years for men, and 89.1 years for women. Overall the French pension system will be supporting retirees for 25 years at the age of retirement.

IMO opinion opposition to pension reform, taking into account improvements in heath and life expectancy, is unreasonable, whatever the political complexion of the French President.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/life-expectancy
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/10/pension-reform-in-france-which-countries-have-the-lowest-and-highest-retirement-ages-in-eu

[hunter]

1. Young people ought to look at it this way:

Keeping the age at 62 means they'll get the best jobs sooner as the older folk retire.

Less people working will mean higher salaries, which will offset taxes paid for pensions.

The fact of the 21st century is that most of us have jobs that are not making the world a better place.

What percentage of us grow food, create and maintain housing, educate young people, or provide health care? Everything else is superfluous and not so good for the health of the planet or our neighbors.

This thing we call "economic productivity" isn't productivity at all, it is in fact a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

We should be working towards an economy where life is comfortable, work is generally pleasant, and the environmental footprints of each individual human is small.

As it is now too many of us toil to empower despots and make billionaires greater billions.

Work ethics directed to no good end are destructive.

It's counter-intuitive to everything we are taught, I know.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. That's some brilliant stuff right there my friend

To which, let me just add in my particularly depressing way ... the planets resources are not going to allow for keeping large numbers of people alive to their 70's, 80', 90's ... for very much longer. The past 100 or so years where we COULD ... is a blip, and 99% of why it's happened ... is direct result of society leveraging a one-time bounty of the energy of million's of years of sunlight stored in fossil fuels for the past century.

Fact is, what we've come to expect in our lifetimes ... it's simply not sustainable. I expect a 1 World Government, and a 'Logan's Run' type scenario within 25-30 years due to climate change, and resource depletion, esp. fossil fuels.

What's somewhat amusing to me is how convinced 'we' generally are that the wingnuts with their gun stockpiles and survivalist shit are crazy ... but they just might actually be ahead of us on this subject in some ways at least. Something to ponder at least, and not dismiss out of hand. Esp. since we actually believe in climate change

[Delphinus]

10. Agree

with you saying it was a brilliant post and agree that you are stating some really hard to accept facts. I just read an article yesterday about overshoot - and we certainly have.

[Zeitghost]

13. People have been predicting Malthusian nightmare scenarios for centuries

So far they have all been wrong. Science, technology and human ingenuity will continue to keep us fed, powered and thriving.

[NickB79]

24. Who's this "us" you're referring to?

Because today, almost a billion people are facing food insecurity, and over 2 billion are struggling to a lesser degree.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110219180/record-number-of-people-worldwide-are-moving-toward-starvation-u-n-warns

The report, "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World," says world hunger rose in 2021, with around 2.3 billion people facing moderate or severe difficulty obtaining enough to eat. The number facing severe food insecurity increased to about 924 million.

The prevalence of "undernourishment" — when food consumption is insufficient to maintain an active and healthy life — is used to measure hunger, and it continued to rise in 2021. The report estimates that between 702 million and 828 million people faced hunger last year.

The number of people at risk for lack of clean drinking water is even worse, with 4 billion people experiencing water insecurity globally at least one month out of the year.

https://www.unicef.org/wash/water-scarcity

And both are being made far worse by climate change today, at "only" 1.1C of warming.

So "us" sounds more like the minority wealthy northern nations, not the majority poor southern and equatorial ones. Believing those numbers will get better by 2050, when we'll have another billion humans to care for while simultaneously breaking the 2C red line doesn't require a belief in science. It requires a belief in divine intervention.

[Zeitghost]

26. Yes

And those people largely suffer under inept economic systems and corrupt governments. It is not a lack of resources or technology world wide.

Climate change presents challenges, but will also open up untapped agricultural areas at higher latitudes.

The world will see 8 billion people soon, it will never see 9. Population decline is going to be the major issue of the next 50-100 years.

[Meowmee]

4. Everything else is superfluous?

No it is not.

[mnhtnbb]

16. I agree. The comment does not include the beneficial aspect of arts:

theater, dance, music, painting, literature...all of which contribute to the well being not only of the artists who conceive and produce the work, but those who enjoy it.

Not at all superfluous in my book.

[Meowmee]

22. Yes

And what about science, engineering and many many other fields.

[malaise]

6. What a great post

[Scrivener7]

9. All true! Great post.

[JI7]

12. Yes, but that would require changes in our lifestyle

[hunter]

21. We need to turn our cities into attractive affordable places...

... where car ownership is unnecessary. That would go a long way to reducing individual environmental footprints.

My nephew lives in San Francisco and walks to work. He and his partner briefly tried the suburban commuter lifestyle and hated it, moving back to the City as soon as they could arrange it.

People who think urban lifestyles can't possibly be attractive never ask why it costs so damned much to live in pleasant densely populated urban neighborhoods.

My wife and I live in a dense suburban environment in a small city where the primary business is agriculture. 40% of the school kids here don't speak English at home. Many of our neighbors are not the typical "nuclear families." These homes are full of grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles. Even if parents are working there is usually someone around to watch the kids. My wife's sister lives down the street from us and child care duties were often shared.

Our kids went away to college and never bounced back home except to visit. I guess there wasn't enough here that interested them. They live in big exciting cities, close to public transportation, except for one of my nieces who is a biologist living in government housing in a National Park, and another niece who is saving up money to buy her own home. I doubt you could sell either one of them a "traditional" white suburban lifestyle.

[multigraincracker]

3. I was lucky, worked hard and had no debt and retired at age 52.

I knew it and planned for it. Not for every one, but nice to be able to. Most of those I worked with could not afford to. Many retired on disability. It was hard and dangerous work.
I think it depends on what kind of work you do.

[DFW]

5. Retirement means something different to every line of work.

If you're a bricklayer and have busted your ass all your life, I can well imagine that at 62, you've had it. If France, a country with millions of superfluous paper pushing bureaucrats, even 64 is too early for people who have spent a lifetime telling people "no," having no insurance worries in the world, never worked in the private sector with an incentive to be productive, and for whom interrupting a coffee break is a bigger sin than murder, I have no sympathy. It's all different.

As for me, I joined my outfit at age 23, have spent most of my professional life traveling, learning, trying to outwit bad guys (and occasionally help catch them). I'm usually in a different country every day (three per week is light for me). Coming to you today, for example, live and in color from beautiful Barcelona in Catalunya, back to Düsseldorf tomorrow, a 2 hour flight. I'll turn 71 in a few days, and retirement is a dirty word, since it for me it would mean a death sentence--a cruel, slow death by boredom. I'm trying to slow down, but I can't find a replacement. If there's anyone out there who wants a job that pays a decent six figure salary, has a minimum six week paid vacation, and involves a ton of paid European travel, the post is still open. Only a few minor non-negotiable requirements: You need an EU residence and work permit, the ability to detect counterfeit money dating back a couple of millenia, good social skills, and you must be able to speak and write, at a minimum, English (NOT Republicanese), French, German, Spanish, Dutch, one Scandinavian language, and either Russian or Polish. Italian and Catalan, and the ability to at least read Japanese numerals would be helpful, but are not mandatory.

I have had to re-arrange travel, navigate around urban obstacle courses during the strikes, and have heard the angry words of working people whose lives were disrupted by the strikes. My wife listened to the tears of a single-mother German (they are striking in Germany and Belgium, too) waitress who lived outside the town where she worked, and had to blow her total day's take home pay on taxis to and from work in order to keep her job. She wasn't concerned with retirement at all. She was concerned with making her rent and feeding her children. The marchers in the streets have their cause, but their tactics aren't championing all working folks by any stretch of the imagination.

[Emile]

7. I don't think people are living that much longer. Infant

mortality rate is lower and gives the mirage that people are living longer.

[Zeitghost]

18. That is part of it

But the average lifespan for those that make it to adulthood is also increasing due to healthcare advances.

[Crazyleftie]

8. Total nonsense

by the time I reached 65 I was already burned out.
By that age, and I am sure with most people, health issues started impacting my life.
Yes, I may reach average life expectancy, but the quality of life is slowly deteriorating.
Increasing the retirements age because of longer life expectancy is a ludicrous argument.

[Demsrule86]

14. And you can't get a job usually and are tossed out like garbage from the one you had.

My Husband has Neuropathy...progressive. He walks with a walker. He was a quality engineer. We applied for disability a year ago and we just won. We had to get out of the Ohio SSDI bullshit and get into federal court. Now even if he could work which he can't, you can't have a walker on a factory floor. I had flipped a house in 21 and we had some savings...most people can't survive that long and give up, or my lawyer told me they die waiting. Hubs is 61. If you sit behind a desk that is one thing but many folks have difficult physically taxing jobs. Also, even paper pushers will likely lose their jobs and have trouble finding another starting in their late 50s. Age discrimination is rampant.

When his last job heard he needed another surgery, even though he was on company disability and Family leave, he was fired... the job was eliminated on a Friday. On Monday, they advertised the job. We complained to EEOC. The company has been charged...still stalling but we are in mediation now. I know some like to complain about the ACA...but without Medicaid expansion, I think my husband would have died. Still, it has been a year. We were very fortunate.

[JCMach1]

23. Age Discrimination is Rampant- this right here is a big part of the problem

[DFW]

25. Most European countries have laws that the USA does not. It makes a huge difference here.

Whenever you read that U.S. unemployment numbers are super low and better than those of Europe, it is often a direct result of the difference in labor laws. European employers are extremely reluctant to hire an employee on unless they are completely convinced that employee will work out for a very long time. The reason for this is that once a six month "trial period" has passed, to fire an employee after that point will cost the employer a lot of money. Huge severance packages kick in that were enacted to protect employed people from exactly what you mentioned--getting tossed aside like an empty soup can. This has indeed often made many an employer very reluctant to fire an employee in places like France or Germany, because these severance packages are huge. Employers, of course, adapted. In Germany, some employers have practically no permanent employees at all, but instead have nothing but continuous trial employees who don't get the job, but can "apply" again for another six month trial when their current one ends. This also keeps the employment numbers down, as employers know they will get hit for big payouts if they hire someone who turns out to have been a big mistake, but only after a period of longer than six months.

As usual, at the end of the day, the theories and the statistics are only numbers on a paper when it comes to any individual's story. The fact that the ease of firing of an employee in the USA statistically means he or she can find other work in boom times doesn't help at all if you're the employee being fired, and nothing is available. In Europe, the great employee protection laws are useless if, especially in hard times, you have no chance of becoming a full-time employee in the first place.

It's never all one way or all the other. My wife was a social worker here for decades, and her specific job was helping to retrain and place long-term unemployed people back into the work force. It was a challenging, unappreciated, time-consuming and spirit-destroying job. Alcoholics, ex-cons, illiterates (yes, Germany has lots of them, often clever dylexics who were never diagnosed as kids, and shoved upwards in the school system so the teachers wouldn't have to deal with them), immigrants who never learned enough German (or were fluent, but got asylum, and pretended not to be able to master the language), the reasons their cases landed on her desk were numerous. Some really wanted work, some spent years trying to avoid it, no one case was easy to categorize. Even my wife's immediate employer wanted her out toward the end, because with her superiority, she was "costing too much," and he wanted cheaper, younger blood. The translation was that she knew too much about his corruption (getting charges to do jobs at his house for free in exchange for uncontested continued benefits), and about his inefficiency as a boss. Since she knew this, she was careful not to give him reason for an official complaint. He ended up negotiating a severance package when she hit age 60, and then whined for 18 months afterward how much it cost. When the 18 months were up, she had no more health insurance, and I had to take over her health insurance payments (about $600-650 a month) so that she was covered until she hit age 65, and her German version of Medicare kicked in. All the "everything is free in Germany" people somehow never offered to foot the bill. Luckily, I could and did, because she got a really horrible form of cancer at age 64, and the insurance I was paying for had to, by law, cover every aspect of her treatment. It was a cancer that is ALWAYS fatal except in that one case in ten thousand where it was discovered SO early (practically by accident) that it hadn't spread. She was that one in ten thousand, the only reason I still have her with me today.

All in all, my wife did better under the German system, but in part because she IS German, and her job had given her decades of training in how to navigate it.

[JI7]

11. As long as they have a good vacation/time off policies

I think it's fine to raise the age .

[Demsrule86]

15. I do not. It is not fine.

It is a way of getting rid of it.

[dsc]

17. I am guessing that a decent amount of the increase in life expectancy

was a drastic reduction in death among children. 1956 was only 11 years after WW2 and France was probably still rather poor relative to today and vaccines were still not as much of a thing for many common diseases. That said, a 62 year old retirement age is likely hard to sustain.

[madville]

19. It's all just math in the end

Money in, money out. If they want to keep the current age, then either raise contributions and/or decrease benefits. Or raise the age and maintain benefits and contributions. It’s a simple concept, but in the end everyone will pay for it one way or another.

[karynnj]

20. A more complex analysis could be really interesting

In addition to the difference in expected years after retirement, there could be a big difference in the proportion of workers who survive to retirement age. Note that BOTH of these factors increase the costs. It would be interesting to model the likelihood of workers who would have retired in 1956 vs 2020 to survive to that age.

This does not change the fact that a significant proportion of people hitting retirement age physically can no longer do what they did in their 40s. Additionally, age discrimination is real and for many it is not really their choice to keep working. I don't know what the answer is as the simple answer of increasing payroll taxes to help fund higher expected costs would be very onerous on people already struggling to meet their needs.