

America's CEOs Want You to Work Until You're 70 - ttar
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-18/americas-ceos-want-you-to-work-until-youre-70#r=hpf-s

======
shawnee_
The interesting edge case is that people like my dad -- who did sheetrock for
a living -- would never _ever_ have been able to make it to age 70 to retire.
He knew the odds were slim that he'd make it to 67. He passed away in 2004 at
age 54; my tribute to his memory: <http://bit.ly/11K2Dsb>

It's kinda disgusting that "America's CEOs" just don't think about and don't
care about people like him. . . they and their minions that theoretically
_can_ make it to age 70 from behind a desk forget that the buildings they work
in and the houses they live in were physically built by people who need and
deserve to retire, too. But "America's CEOs" and others who are hellbent on
accelerating _their_ path to early retirement see only the numbers.

~~~
briandear
Perhaps someone shouldn't be trying to hang Sheetrock until they're 70. You'd
think, after 20+ years of hanging Sheetrock, a person could start his own
Sheetrock hanging company and hire others to do the labor. I have little
sympathy for those who took their entire lives without any sort of ambition to
advance. It's not my job to pay for the retirement of other people. It's the
individual's job to take care of their own life and responsibilities. However,
we obviously need a safety net to protect those who might become disabled but
the safety net ought not be the primary means for the able bodied to take care
of themselves at retirement.

~~~
ttar
Blaming the victim, favorite American pastime.

Wait till it's your turn, oh you who think you are immortal.

------
jseliger
The title is deceptive—"The Business Roundtable" is just doing simple math,
because the fundamental issue is demographic: people are living longer and
having fewer children. In the next 30 years, it simply won't be economically
feasible to support a huge number of old people if all of them retire or
attempt to retire at 65.

~~~
gnosis
Of course it's economically feasable. It's just a matter of priorities.

Congress managed to come up with 8 trillion dollars for the Wall St bailout at
the drop of a hat, and 3 trillion (and counting) for the Iraq/Afghanistan
wars. On top of that, the US manages to spend more on its military than the
rest of the world combined.

To say that it couldn't come up with the money to support its own citizens in
their old age would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

~~~
jerf
The problem is, it isn't about money. The government has all the money it
needs, the government can print money if it needs to.[1] The problem is that
all these old people will need _goods and services_ , and no amount of
legerdemain with mere money can get around the fact that those goods and
services must actually be produced, and the people producing those goods and
services are therefore not producing other goods and services.

When you hear that statistic about two workers per retiree or whatever, don't
just be thinking about money; that's the _output_ of those two workers
putatively going to support the retiree, and what's leftover going to power
the economy.

As convenient as it can be to analyze problems in terms of money in normal
life, when it gets to these really big "structure of society" problems the
abstraction starts to get in your way again. Many of the characteristics of
money are downright deceptive; one may save $100 today, but $100 of, say, corn
today is not going to feed any retirees 20 years from now, it'll just be a
rotted mess. Goods and services store poorly; they need to be matched up
producer/consumer in something more like real time. Money is a great
abstraction over that, but a still a secondary phenomenon compared to that
real-time match up.

Of course, we can indeed support quite a few retirees... if one adjusts their
standard of living down a long way. If it's OK for them to dial 911 and for
nothing to happen, we've got more than enough wealth to support all kinds of
retirees. Start specifying out a "good" first-world life style, though, and it
becomes problematic again.

The problem is not, in absolute terms, a "lack of money"; the problem is that
we've made promises about the _quality_ of the retired life that are going to
be very difficult to keep with small single-digit numbers of goods and service
providers, while at the same time having enough of a productive economy to
produce the wealth that will make it possible to keep those promises. Money is
a very poor lens to analyze this problem through.

(Personally I don't believe the problem to be as hopeless as it seems, as
there are still some avenues for significant per-worker productivity
enhancements, mostly in terms of significant improvements in robotics.
However, it must be observed that with our current set of promises, we 20-,
30-, and probably even 40-year olds are effectively all-in with our
retirements on that hope, because if tech were to stagnate at current levels
the current set of promises is probably mathematically infeasible.)

[1]: I'm not saying this is good or desirable, btw, it's just part of my point
about this not being about money.

~~~
dasil003
But tons of people are unemployed and we are not suffering any shortage of
goods or services, so I don't understand how structural issues are applicable
to this problem. Are you saying that if everyone magically got their social
security checks regardless of government insolvency that the economy would not
be able to support that additional purchasing power?

~~~
jerf
What I'm saying is, money doesn't matter if we make promises to retirees that
require three workers per retiree to fulfill and only two workers per retiree
physically exist. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, retirees
can not draw on more resources than physically exist. And you have to leave
enough left over for the rest of the economy, too; those two workers can't be
100% allocated to retirees, because they also need to eat, provide shelter for
themselves, ideally provide for some sort of family so there's someone there
to pay for _their_ retirement, also pay taxes so there's still a government,
etc, etc. Money can only choose from the _possible_ set of economic
allocations, not the impossible ones.

And the higher-level point is just that when it comes to this sort of big "how
shall we structure society?" questions, thinking in terms of money affords bad
logic. In particular, people can't resist straight-line interpolations based
on current prices, as if prices don't change and we have an infinite pool of
resources to draw on at unchanging prices, so it's just a matter of scaring up
enough money. That works in your day-to-day life, it's not how it works at a
societal scale.

~~~
dasil003
You're just rephrasing your original post, but you're not offering any
evidence of why you think the burden of retirees is going to be so
overwhelming. Why are retirees going to require an "impossible allocation"?
Seems to me if demand increases then prices go up. Sure it starts to break
down at extreme cases, but why would a marginally increased body of retired
people be such an event? We do not have a shortage of workers at all, and the
trend is to produce more stuff with ever fewer workers.

------
glesica
It's really sad to see how selfish people are (or have become). I wonder if it
is a subtle result of the seemingly permanently-lousy economy.

This is a problem for all of us and we should solve it as a group, in a way
that hurts as few people as possible. What happened to solving hard problems
with innovation and intelligence? Why are so many people so ready to throw in
the towel and abandon ship, taking whatever isn't nailed down on the way?

------
rayiner
The solution to medicare isn't to remove younger, cheaper people from
eligibility, it's to remove older, more expensive people from eligibility. The
math is shockingly obvious on this point.

~~~
rtkwe
Except that runs counter to (a large portion of) the point of Medicare, which
is to provide assistance to the old. (Yes it's also for low income households,
but it's also a lot aimed at the elderly as well.)

~~~
absconditus
Actually, Medicare is for the elderly and people with disabilities. Medicaid
is for families with low incomes.

~~~
rtkwe
Ah, I stand corrected. Never used or really been exposed to either service.

------
rsheridan6
They might be overestimating the capabilities of the 65+ crowd. A lot of them
aren't capable of working. I used to work in a call center where I talked to
AARP members, and a lot of them aren't even capable of leaving the house. I
know this because they told me. You may not have been aware of this because
they don't talk to anybody but call center workers.

I don't have the numbers but I'll bet there are more people whose working days
are behind them at that age than most people think, because those people don't
get out much, or at all.

Of those who can still work, they are probably a lot who are good for a few
shifts a week but couldn't work a full time job with benefits and a living
wage.

------
transfire
I have a better idea: remove the payroll tax cap, you cheap sons of bitches!

------
k_kelly
It still has to be remembered that many people don't live to 70. Even today
people working in hard manual labor and black men in general are pretty lucky
to get to 70.

People who are healthy and able to work should not be living on retirement
simply because they have reached 65, but neither should someone die at work
because their life was harder to begin with.

------
mc32
I'm not a CEO by any stretch of imagination and I want people to work till 70.
I want to be able to work till 70 (from a physical standpoint). I mean,
unless, everything becomes robotized, automated and we all get reverse taxes.

~~~
Evbn
Now you are talking like a communist. The robots will earn money for the
owners of the capital that invested in their construction. You can work in the
shale fields scrubbing motor oil out of rocks until you die of lung cancer.

~~~
mc32
Not sure where it is my thoughts coincide with theirs --all I meant was that
if ordinary job tasks (outside of research and a few other highly intellectual
areas) are 'done for us' by robots or become automated, and (most) people
would not want to do that same job for that same capital then reverse taxes
would be necessary, since few people would be 'earning' a living. However,
people would have to find some way to fulfill their lives. Watching TV or
going on global treks is not going to fulfill lives. Maybe I'm just
pessimistic, but I think great amounts of people with too much time on their
hands become counterproductive and I don't have an idea of how that would be
solved. (Just heard about another Muni bus getting torched after the 49ers won
their _playoff_ game.)

~~~
chii
> people would not want to do that same job for that same capital then reverse
> taxes would be necessary, since few people would be 'earning' a living.

why would reverse tax (which i assume means the gov't pays you money) be
necessary when many jobs become robotisized? Those people who are made
obsolete by robots will have to find another way to create value - if they
don't they either will have to survive on the dwindling social welfare (which
seems to have to be lower as the number of people claiming them grows), or
have to rely on family members. The unspeakable option which you allude to is
to tax the owners of these robots (who invested their capital) to pay the
reverse tax to those who the robots have replaced - i cannot agree with that
option because its very unfair.

~~~
mc32
>why would reverse tax (which i assume means the gov't pays you money) be
necessary when many jobs become robotisized?

Correct. Because people will become obsolete as primary workers for most stuff
but will still want to have things (I mean luxuries, as opposed to
necessities).

>The unspeakable option which you allude to is to tax the owners of these
robots

I'm thinking of a time after this. When robots produce robots --when
capitalists become much less necessary. The building of things would be more
about 'should we?' rather then 'who'll build?'.

~~~
chii
I was reading this <http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm> a while ago, which is
quite apropos for this topic. Unfortunately, i really don't see a path from
the current era, to the future you describe (which is to say, i hope it would
happen, but i can't see a way forward that will make it happen).

------
joelberman
I'm 66. I first retired at age 59 from a tech job with great benefits and
healthcare for life. Got bored out of my mind, and went back to work at
another tech company. Retired last July. By October I was again ready to work
and am now working in yet another tech company.

I have no idea how long I will live, and I do intend to retire when my wife
reaches 65.

Some of you make it sound terrible that someone is working at age 66. I am
really happy working.

(I could get by without working, but it is very nice to have an income stream)

------
saosebastiao
Well, they can't say they didn't see it coming. They have known since the
1970's that Social Security and Medicare were on unsustainable paths, and they
repeatedly chose to pass the buck. What I want to know is if Millenials are
going to get so fed up with it that they just cut them off completely. I mean,
why would they ever want to pay 20+% of their salary for ever and ever, just
to support the pathetic lives of those who repeatedly chose to fuck them over,
and get nothing in return (or rather, negative returns)?

------
beedogs
Average life expectancy for men in the United States is 75.

Enjoy those last five miserable years, guys.

~~~
nieksand
It's a bit more complicated that that.

The at-birth life expectancy for males is currently 75.5 years. But that
includes everything that kills younger people:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+usa...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+usa+male)

The life expectancy for a male who has reached age sixty becomes 81.2 years:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+60+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+60+year+old+usa+male)

In comparison, the at-birth male life expectancy when Social Security started
in 1939 was 63 years:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+usa...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+for+usa+in+1939)

------
jacques_chester
My Dad is almost 70. I guess this gives me standing to drop some unhelpful
anecdata.

At this point he's holding on to unlock accumulated Long Service Leave, which
will occur in June.

I suspect he will get a job after he has Retired. Why? Boredom. Working hard
is _ingrained_ in the man. He is terrible at idleness. He can do it for a day
or two (and no man alive is better at a good afternoon kip), but then he
wanders the house like a restless poltergeist.

I expect he'll take his decades of hands-on electronics wisdom and work part-
time at a local TV repair place. Just to keep himself busy.

As for the meat of the article -- which really is about trying to forestall
the Greece-times-a-zillion excitement that the future of US fiscal policy
promises -- I don't know what to say.

You guys are going to find that tough. In Australia we've had compulsory
retirement saving (superannuation or colloquially "super") since the 1980s.
Australians have now accumulated well north of a trillion dollars of assets
against their retirement.

Is it perfect? No, it's riddled with problems. But in terms of forestalling a
fiscal nightmare it's one of the most far-sighted reforms ever introduced.

~~~
_dps
> Australians have now accumulated well north of a trillion dollars of assets
> against their retirement.

Out of curiosity, could you elaborate on how this is implemented practically?
Social Security, on the face, presents itself a lot like this but is really
just a combination of a payroll tax and an entitlement program (i.e., there's
no saved money anywhere that's _yours_ ; there's just the expectation that the
government will pay out some benefits at the right time). Depending on your
political worldview you could say the same about Americans, or you could also
say that they've accumulated nothing in SS because SS (per the supreme court)
does not legally guarantee any sort of payout and doesn't hold any securities
tradeable on an open market.

If I had to design such a system myself, I'd personally go with forced savings
of roughly the size of the current payroll tax in the form of actually-owned
_marketable_ government securities in individually named accounts, with a
separate entitlement program to partially support those for whom retirement is
still out of reach. If the Australian system looks anything like this, as
opposed to how the US has designed Social Security, I tip my hat to them for
practicality :-)

~~~
rayiner
There is no "saving for retirement." As a practical matter, all forms of
financial savings for retirement are at their root getting the working
generation to give part of their production to the non-working generation. The
American system does this directly through a tax. The Australian system does
it indirectly by mandating savings in private financial instruments that
achieve the same essential transfer.

~~~
94c3
i understand why social security is like this. why are retirement vehicles
like 401ks and IRAs like this? for the young but well paid worker, do you
suggest not saving for retirement?

~~~
rayiner
Of course not. I'm just pointing out that at the end of the day, if you want
to allow a significant portion of the population to "retire" you have to
confront the same basic issue: those people aren't drawing down on goods and
services they stashed away while they were working, they're taking away part
of the production from the working generation.

That's the universal constant of old people--it was true even back before we
had retirement systems and the elderly were taken care of by their kids.

~~~
jacques_chester
You seem to think that money in an interest-bearing bank account or a mutual
fund is the same as cash under a bed. It's not.

You also seem to think that the size of the economy fixed and that allocation
is a zero-sum game across time and space. It's not.

Thus you are conflating welfare schemes with savings schemes.

They're different.

~~~
chii
> money in an interest-bearing bank account or a mutual fund is the same as
> cash under a bed.

of course they aren't the same. But in aggregate, the reason investments work
is because down the line, somebody is producing goods/services, and some of
the profit of those production is paid out in the investment. In the scenario
where there are too many retirees, this fails, because who is actually going
to be creating the value that the investment accounts pay out?

Imagine there are W workers, and R retirees, where W > 2R (2 workers per
retiree). If suddenly, half the workers retired, then now there is only 1
worker per 2 retiree. If they demand the same amount of goods, what would
happen?

I predict rampant inflation as demand outstrip supply - sure the investment
account might pay out handsomely, but that's a lie, because the cost of living
will rise (remember, lots more mouths to feed, way less people doing actual
work), and the poorest suffers first.

------
arcosdev
America's CEOs can go fuck themselves

------
SilasX
Oh, look honey, more equivocation between "working" and "not receiving a
government entitlement check"!

"That's nice, dear."

But, but it obscures clear thinking on this issue!

"What else is new?"

------
pasbesoin
So... we have more automation than ever before, and the solution is to make
"everyone else" work longer so that all the benefits can be showered on these
few privileged.

I expect that a lot of people who actually, really invented and developed this
largess, would be disgusted with their attitude. And with what has happened to
American society.

P.S. Yes, my statement is a bit simplistic and ignores the global context.
But, confined to American society, I think my rebuttal has validity. And even
on a global scale, I don't think I'm being disingenuous. U.S. senior
management seems just as inclined to be exploitative abroad as domestically.

My comment also ignores increasing lifespan, but I don't think current
discussion around increasing retirement age is being honest on that front.
Rather, it seems to be another component of advocacy for a regressive
distribution of society's expenses. (Also, lifespan increases seem to be
slowing -- even regressing, in some cases -- and becoming more divergent
(again?) based on affluence and economic opportunity.)

P.P.S. It's all the more hypocritical, when I think about it, in that many of
these CEO's companies actively (if circumspectly) discriminate against hiring
anyone over 50 -- or even in the upper 40's.

In today's world where "no job is secure", and where corporations seek to
control ever-more of the marketplace, how would they propose to reconcile
this?

------
briandear
Real simple. Don't want to work for the 'man' and retire at 70 -- start your
own damned company. Learn how to invest. Buy real estate. Do something. If you
don't want to work until your 70, don't let yourself be dependent on the
government (or your employer) for your retirement.

Nobody is forced to be dependent unless they allow themselves to be. Many
people own a car and a nice TV yet very few would be willing to put $30,000
down on buying their first rental property or invest in starting a company.
It's easy to just let the government or an employer be your 'daddy.' It's much
harder to take responsibility for your yourself and your own future.

~~~
pekk
Real simple - unless you don't have significant capital to invest in stocks,
real estate or starting your own company, all of which pose varying degrees of
risk that you will fritter away your nest egg and end up with nothing to
retire on. $30,000 is not a small quantity of money for most families living
paycheck to paycheck (US median income $44k) with 30-year home loans. Nor is
it a large quantity of money to invest with.

If you happen to reach your late 50s without having already invested a fair
bit and you still aren't making a lot of money, griping about the government
isn't going to help you as much as dumb old social security. If that's what it
takes for some people to survive, I'm not criticizing them for it just because
I've had a much easier time.

