9 ms·

Why does raising the retirement age hurt young people?

41 points by daveland 1y ago

daveland 1y ago
Full Title : Why Does Raising the Retirement Age Hurt Young People? What Would It Take to Start/Restart Their Careers? Turns out trying to get people to retire later is a bad idea
- rvz 1y ago
  Governments and career politicians do not care and will do anything to try to make the situation worse.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Nah. FDR and the reorganization or the government and the economy, JFK/LBJ and the great society. Lincoln. There have been good folks.
- general1726 1y ago
  Unless you are having state pensions and taking money from taxable population and giving it to pensioners. This group keeps getting bigger thanks to constantly improving medical care, while taxable population is getting smaller thanks to declining birthrates. Cutting pensions would probably cause massive riots, so raising retirement age is only logical way forward to keep this social pyramid scheme alive a little bit longer.
  - conception 1y ago
    There are lots of ways. Looking at ss specifically - https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ Social Security will be solvent over the next 75 years, but 16% of the gap between spending and revenue remains in the 75th year, meaning the program is not yet sustainable. YOUR POLICY SELECTIONS % OF GAP CLOSED Slow Benefit Growth for Top 20% Of Earners 11% Limit Spousal Benefits for High Earners 3% Create Minimum Benefit at 125% of Poverty -3% Means-Test Benefits for Higher Earners 16% Tax All Wages Above $400,000 67% Apply the Payroll Tax to "Cafeteria Plans" 10% TOTAL 104% And I increased benefits.
    - general1726 1y ago
      There are also lot of ways how to sabotage this especially if you are a political party aimed at pensioners and your whole program is "we will increase pensions" which is more and more common in Europe. As amount of pensioners grow, their political power does too and their interest in future of the country is about zero. Why should they care, it is not their future.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    This is another reason why market based, self directed, retirement accounts make far more sense than pensions: they scale with production. With pensions you have the option of pissing people off or crushing the people who are working (whether that's the company or the working population of the state.)
latentsea 1y ago
Ah yes, the mental anguish of knowing you'll never retire because you'll either die before retirement age or they'll just keep pushing it up, so that you do.
- gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
  To be fair, the original SS age was at the high end of the actuary tables. As science extended life, society failed to move the line of retirement.
  - betaby 1y ago
    To be fair, at that time personal taxes were not at that level and sales taxes mostly didn't exist.
    - clipsy 1y ago
      Taxes on the very wealthy were dramatically higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.
        majormajor 1y ago
        It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts. Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either. So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them? Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax-rates-in-the-1950s-if-not-what-was-the-reality-compared-to-today-the-claim-that-the-top-1-of-earners-in-the-1950s-paid-a-91-tax-rate-is-based-on-the-statutory-top-marg/ https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.
pelagicAustral 1y ago
Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...
- gigatree 1y ago
  I would look at the real value of the dollar before assuming the real value of it went up. With how bad [actual] inflation is/will be, it wouldn’t be surprising if your pension actually dropped in real value.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Pension? Job? What’s that like? /s
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  For the last 10-odd years I've been putting money away / aside, making regular small contributions to investments for retirement, such that I think I'm somewhat ahead of my age cohort. And yet, the more I look at it, the more I get the feeling that I might still have to get lucky to be able to retire at retirement age.
jmyeet 1y ago
All of this is by design. You get: - Lower taxes for the ultra-wealthy - People working longer to make the ultra-wealthy slightly wealthier; and - Younger people getting padi less, again making the ultra-wealthy slightly more wealthy. The entire policy and government appratus of the US in particular is designed as a massive wealth transfer from the poor and young to the old and wealthy. There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. Other than of course the wealthy would have to pay slightly more in taxes. I can't find it now but I saw an article talking about all the social and policy ideas that unwittingly got tested in the Covid pandemic. The effects of giving money to poor people (it's not the moral hazard it's made out to be), how schools increase the spread of disease and a whole host of others.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  > There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. There is, though. The 60+ year-olds wanting to retire spent the last four-to-six decades racking up a metric crapload of public and private debt. Not only did they spend a lot, they seriously weakened the ability for revenues to cover said debts. Severe bureaucratic handicapping of revenue agencies, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now. Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created. [1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-each-year-due-to-unpaid-taxes/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
lenerdenator 1y ago
At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs.
- reactordev 1y ago
  I think they reverse mortgaged it.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    More-or-less, but... It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
- Buttons840 1y ago
  Why do you want the debt paid off? The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years? What happens if we don't pay off the debt?
  - missedthecue 1y ago
    Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend. The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential. Situations like Japan are even more dire. A small increase in the interest rate results in a HUGE increase in interest expense at 260% debt to GDP ratios. Worse, their population is naturally shrinking a million people a year on account of their decades-long birth rate implosion. Hard to outgrow that.
    - maxerickson 1y ago
jmclnx 1y ago
For the US only: Because due to the current brain dead policies of the GOP in the US, life expectancies in the US are falling. So instead of storing up Social Security by making the ultra rich pay their fair share, people who do real work to enrich these people will have to work longer. That means they will have a shorter and less healthy retirement. Now, I am guessing about 40% of people in the US will never be able to retire. I know a couple in that situation right now. The GOP has been trying to kill of Social Security for almost 50 years, I fully expect they will succeed in 10 years or so.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  The growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid entitlements is unsustainable.
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
Interesting claim - let's see if it passes the sniff test. It's very unlikely that we are actually currently at an ideal retirement age on the margin where a move in either direction hurts. If raising the retirement age hurts young people, then lowering the retirement age probably helps young people. Does that sound correct to you? Would lowering the retirement age now help young people?
- nemothekid 1y ago
  >Does that sound correct to you? Yes? I'm not sure if I'm missing something you think is obvious. Lowering the retirement age will open up high seniority jobs that younger people can now promote into. You can see this in congress - despite millenials being in the 40s now they are rarely seen in high level political positions due to boomers and older sticking to their jobs.
  - brandonmenc 1y ago
    > Newly elected Representatives in the 119th Congress had a median age of 47.8 years. > Similar to the House, the incoming class of Senators in the 119th Congress was also younger, with a median age of 50.4 years. > The average age of Representatives is 57.9 years.
- felipeerias 1y ago
  If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them. However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes. In Spain, for example, the social security has a large structural deficit that gets covered by large taxes on salaries, taking money from other social services, and sovereign debt. In other words, young workers are forced to support retirees through means that make it much harder for them to build a future of their own. This system is kept in place because pensioners are a huge 1-issue voting block that no political party wants to antagonise. I believe that this is somehow downstream of cultural changes that have made all of society more individualistic and self-centred, incapable to work together for a common future.
andsoitis 1y ago
"There's no solution except higher birth rates or rapid productivity growth."
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  or a slowing of progress or a regression of the current lifestyles to which most have become accustomed. The peeling off of some of the more recent layers that have been applied, made possible due to the abundances provided to western society by its ownership of the advanced industrialisation and information ages.
alephnerd 1y ago
The Israel example doesn't pass the sniff test. While Israel didn't build the next "Intel", it built the next Cisco (Palo Alto Networks), Symantec (Wiz), Akamai, and it's own "Intel" (Tower Semiconductors), and Israeli VC has absolutely cornered the Enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. Yet, concentrating on business creation seems to ignore the fact that high value industries like much of tech just don't generate that much employment. The high-tech sector only represents a little over 11% of overall employment in Israel [0] Median gross salary is around $2800/mo [1] yet tech salaries are around $10,000/mo [2] While the tech industry is extremely prominent in Israel, it isn't a major employment generator. Most Israelis don't work in tech and are impacted by extremely high CoL - Israel has some of the highest cost of living among OECD countries [3] This article posits that additional industrial policy can help rebuild large employment industries. While I am strongly in favor of industrial policy, most high value industries are high value EXPLICITLY because they are heavily automated or have low headcount requirements. Industrial policy for the sake of generating employment simply doesn't work when high value jobs have significant barriers to entry (no, not everyone can code and not everyone can synthesize biopharmaceuticals). [0] - https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-tech-employment-status-report/ https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-t... [1] - https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9B%D7%A8-%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%95-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A6%D7%90-%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%9B%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%97%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A7 https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%... [2] - https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760 https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760 [3] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data
WalterBright 1y ago
I'm very skeptical of this. It smacks of burning half your crops so the price of the remainder gets bid up. We can also examine it by pushing it further. What if the mandatory retirement age was 30? The wages for those under 30 will be higher because of supply and demand, but they'd also have to support all those people over 30 who are not contributing anything to the economy. In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace. More specifically it would lower the standard of living for everyone, if you don't count free time.

41 points by daveland 1y ago

Full Title : Why Does Raising the Retirement Age Hurt Young People? What Would It Take to Start/Restart Their Careers? Turns out trying to get people to retire later is a bad idea

rvz 1y ago
Governments and career politicians do not care and will do anything to try to make the situation worse.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Nah. FDR and the reorganization or the government and the economy, JFK/LBJ and the great society. Lincoln. There have been good folks.
general1726 1y ago
Unless you are having state pensions and taking money from taxable population and giving it to pensioners. This group keeps getting bigger thanks to constantly improving medical care, while taxable population is getting smaller thanks to declining birthrates. Cutting pensions would probably cause massive riots, so raising retirement age is only logical way forward to keep this social pyramid scheme alive a little bit longer.
- conception 1y ago
  There are lots of ways. Looking at ss specifically - https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ Social Security will be solvent over the next 75 years, but 16% of the gap between spending and revenue remains in the 75th year, meaning the program is not yet sustainable. YOUR POLICY SELECTIONS % OF GAP CLOSED Slow Benefit Growth for Top 20% Of Earners 11% Limit Spousal Benefits for High Earners 3% Create Minimum Benefit at 125% of Poverty -3% Means-Test Benefits for Higher Earners 16% Tax All Wages Above $400,000 67% Apply the Payroll Tax to "Cafeteria Plans" 10% TOTAL 104% And I increased benefits.
  - general1726 1y ago
    There are also lot of ways how to sabotage this especially if you are a political party aimed at pensioners and your whole program is "we will increase pensions" which is more and more common in Europe. As amount of pensioners grow, their political power does too and their interest in future of the country is about zero. Why should they care, it is not their future.
- msgodel 1y ago
  This is another reason why market based, self directed, retirement accounts make far more sense than pensions: they scale with production. With pensions you have the option of pissing people off or crushing the people who are working (whether that's the company or the working population of the state.)

latentsea 1y ago

Ah yes, the mental anguish of knowing you'll never retire because you'll either die before retirement age or they'll just keep pushing it up, so that you do.

gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
To be fair, the original SS age was at the high end of the actuary tables. As science extended life, society failed to move the line of retirement.
- betaby 1y ago
  To be fair, at that time personal taxes were not at that level and sales taxes mostly didn't exist.
  - clipsy 1y ago
    Taxes on the very wealthy were dramatically higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1935
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      But there were a lot of deductions and shelters and nobody actually paid those rates except maybe Elvis.
      - majormajor 1y ago
        It would be nice if you shared some extensive numbers to quantify that before I take your word for it. Like total government tax revenue vs upper-percentile incomes and upper-percentile incomes vs actual realized income tax percentages. Like, "here is what the median person making 5M in 1955 paid as an effective rate, this is how many of those people there were as a percentage of the population" and the equivalents for the inflation-adjusted people today. Let's look at some of those deductions too - did a 90% top marginal rate in the 40s cause people to make societally useful donations to get deductions? That could still be very beneficial compared to buying bigger yachts. Top-end compensation has gone through the roof compared to "regular" worker compensation since we started cutting tax rates on the rich. And we also have no shortage of deductions and shelters today either. So why shouldn't we raise the rates back to at least reduce the consolidation and government revenue trends that have happened since we lowered them? Here's one quick source that 5 seconds on Google turned up - https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax-rates-in-the-1950s-if-not-what-was-the-reality-compared-to-today-the-claim-that-the-top-1-of-earners-in-the-1950s-paid-a-91-tax-rate-is-based-on-the-statutory-top-marg/ https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax... - estimates suggest that top earners in the 50s payed a 42-45% effective tax rate vs today's 26-28% effective tax rate. That's a pretty giant difference! Interestingly, despite that, the top 1% paid a bit smaller of a fraction of total tax income (30-35% vs 40% today) suggesting that it may have helped spread the money around so that the 2-5%, 5-15%, etc parts of the population were relatively better off compared to the top 1%. Less of the top 1% hitting the top marginal rate suggests that it's a rather useful incentive for keeping your salaries less obscene.

pelagicAustral 1y ago

Oh, this is so incredibly coordinated to what I was doing just a minute ago, which is checking one of my Pension funds and realizing it recovered from a massive hit back in March. I was thinking about how futile the whole thing is... I just know this money will never be mine, and I will work until I die (if I'm lucky enough). Oh well, I guess better get some sleep, back to the office tomorrow...

gigatree 1y ago
I would look at the real value of the dollar before assuming the real value of it went up. With how bad [actual] inflation is/will be, it wouldn’t be surprising if your pension actually dropped in real value.
reactordev 1y ago
Pension? Job? What’s that like? /s
sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
For the last 10-odd years I've been putting money away / aside, making regular small contributions to investments for retirement, such that I think I'm somewhat ahead of my age cohort. And yet, the more I look at it, the more I get the feeling that I might still have to get lucky to be able to retire at retirement age.

jmyeet 1y ago

All of this is by design. You get: - Lower taxes for the ultra-wealthy - People working longer to make the ultra-wealthy slightly wealthier; and - Younger people getting padi less, again making the ultra-wealthy slightly more wealthy. The entire policy and government appratus of the US in particular is designed as a massive wealth transfer from the poor and young to the old and wealthy. There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. Other than of course the wealthy would have to pay slightly more in taxes. I can't find it now but I saw an article talking about all the social and policy ideas that unwittingly got tested in the Covid pandemic. The effects of giving money to poor people (it's not the moral hazard it's made out to be), how schools increase the spread of disease and a whole host of others.

lenerdenator 1y ago
> There is no reason why the wealthiest countries on earth can't afford to let people who are 60 years old retire. There is, though. The 60+ year-olds wanting to retire spent the last four-to-six decades racking up a metric crapload of public and private debt. Not only did they spend a lot, they seriously weakened the ability for revenues to cover said debts. Severe bureaucratic handicapping of revenue agencies, means that an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in tax go uncollected every year in the United States alone [1]. Imagine what the federal deficit looks like if the US had to borrow a few hundred billion less each year. It's far from zero, but it's better than it looks now. Retirement isn't a right, it's a math problem. For most of human history, if you lived long enough to get too old to do labor, you were expected to do something (usually helping with childrearing or teaching skills to younger generations) in order to lessen the burden of your existence to others, mainly your family. Now that most labor isn't actually physical and people are living longer, there's less excuse for doing nothing for 10+ years off of savings besides just wanting to. Unfortunately, given the size of deficits in lots of Western nations and the stagnating wages of the younger generations, those retirement accounts are becoming more attractive as a way to pay off debt that the people holding those accounts created. [1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-each-year-due-to-unpaid-taxes/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

lenerdenator 1y ago

At this point I just want the debt incurred by the electoral decisions of the last fifty years paid off. If that means retirement gets pushed back, well, shrugs.

reactordev 1y ago
I think they reverse mortgaged it.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  More-or-less, but... It's not just the age at which the government lets you claim OASDI and Medicare. It's also the fact that in the US at least, we've basically set up the entire economy around the idea of paying retirement/pension funds first and foremost, C-suites second, and the people creating the actual value third.
Buttons840 1y ago
Why do you want the debt paid off? The debt has been growing for 50 years, has life gotten worse during those 50 years? What happens if we don't pay off the debt?
- missedthecue 1y ago
  Eventually the interest payments crowd out most other government spending, or require significant across the board tax increases to maintain current levels of spend. The US is currently at $1T+ a year in tax revenues that instantly go right out the door toward paying bond interest. It will likely be $2T within 10 years, even fewer if rates don't come down in that time. It's compounding and therefore exponential. Situations like Japan are even more dire. A small increase in the interest rate results in a HUGE increase in interest expense at 260% debt to GDP ratios. Worse, their population is naturally shrinking a million people a year on account of their decades-long birth rate implosion. Hard to outgrow that.
  - maxerickson 1y ago

jmclnx 1y ago

For the US only: Because due to the current brain dead policies of the GOP in the US, life expectancies in the US are falling. So instead of storing up Social Security by making the ultra rich pay their fair share, people who do real work to enrich these people will have to work longer. That means they will have a shorter and less healthy retirement. Now, I am guessing about 40% of people in the US will never be able to retire. I know a couple in that situation right now. The GOP has been trying to kill of Social Security for almost 50 years, I fully expect they will succeed in 10 years or so.

WalterBright 1y ago
The growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid entitlements is unsustainable.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

Interesting claim - let's see if it passes the sniff test. It's very unlikely that we are actually currently at an ideal retirement age on the margin where a move in either direction hurts. If raising the retirement age hurts young people, then lowering the retirement age probably helps young people. Does that sound correct to you? Would lowering the retirement age now help young people?

nemothekid 1y ago
>Does that sound correct to you? Yes? I'm not sure if I'm missing something you think is obvious. Lowering the retirement age will open up high seniority jobs that younger people can now promote into. You can see this in congress - despite millenials being in the 40s now they are rarely seen in high level political positions due to boomers and older sticking to their jobs.
- brandonmenc 1y ago
  > Newly elected Representatives in the 119th Congress had a median age of 47.8 years. > Similar to the House, the incoming class of Senators in the 119th Congress was also younger, with a median age of 50.4 years. > The average age of Representatives is 57.9 years.
felipeerias 1y ago
If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them. However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes. In Spain, for example, the social security has a large structural deficit that gets covered by large taxes on salaries, taking money from other social services, and sovereign debt. In other words, young workers are forced to support retirees through means that make it much harder for them to build a future of their own. This system is kept in place because pensioners are a huge 1-issue voting block that no political party wants to antagonise. I believe that this is somehow downstream of cultural changes that have made all of society more individualistic and self-centred, incapable to work together for a common future.

andsoitis 1y ago

"There's no solution except higher birth rates or rapid productivity growth."

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
or a slowing of progress or a regression of the current lifestyles to which most have become accustomed. The peeling off of some of the more recent layers that have been applied, made possible due to the abundances provided to western society by its ownership of the advanced industrialisation and information ages.

alephnerd 1y ago

The Israel example doesn't pass the sniff test. While Israel didn't build the next "Intel", it built the next Cisco (Palo Alto Networks), Symantec (Wiz), Akamai, and it's own "Intel" (Tower Semiconductors), and Israeli VC has absolutely cornered the Enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity industry. Yet, concentrating on business creation seems to ignore the fact that high value industries like much of tech just don't generate that much employment. The high-tech sector only represents a little over 11% of overall employment in Israel [0] Median gross salary is around $2800/mo [1] yet tech salaries are around $10,000/mo [2] While the tech industry is extremely prominent in Israel, it isn't a major employment generator. Most Israelis don't work in tech and are impacted by extremely high CoL - Israel has some of the highest cost of living among OECD countries [3] This article posits that additional industrial policy can help rebuild large employment industries. While I am strongly in favor of industrial policy, most high value industries are high value EXPLICITLY because they are heavily automated or have low headcount requirements. Industrial policy for the sake of generating employment simply doesn't work when high value jobs have significant barriers to entry (no, not everyone can code and not everyone can synthesize biopharmaceuticals). [0] - https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-tech-employment-status-report/ https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/press_release/2025-high-t... [1] - https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%A9%D7%9B%D7%A8-%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%95-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A6%D7%90-%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%9B%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%97%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%99-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A7 https://www.xn----1hcmgxnk8ede.co.il/%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%... [2] - https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760 https://www.bizportal.co.il/general/news/article/20017760 [3] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/data

WalterBright 1y ago

I'm very skeptical of this. It smacks of burning half your crops so the price of the remainder gets bid up. We can also examine it by pushing it further. What if the mandatory retirement age was 30? The wages for those under 30 will be higher because of supply and demand, but they'd also have to support all those people over 30 who are not contributing anything to the economy. In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace.

Jensson 1y ago
> In the net, early retirement will lower the standard of living of those still in the workplace. More specifically it would lower the standard of living for everyone, if you don't count free time.