Retirement seems like a pretty crucial process in the economy. If we set things up so that people can’t retire, that will slow down the process of getting the next generation into their positions.
I do know some folks who have, instead, semi-retired (go in one or two days a week). People at the end of their careers have lots of experience to pass on. And it seems to keep them active and healthy. I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.
> I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.
If I had to hazard a guess I would say that most people in this position feel like they should get paid 50% of their previous salary for doing 20% of the work (and limiting their scope largely to mentorship rather than IC work), and with the combined scope reduction of both time and work performed, their employers would rather pay them even less than what a strict accounting of hours worked would indicate.
Not to mention the fact that if your organization is so lop-sided that you only have experts near retirement and juniors who actually need 20% or more of their time being mentored, you're facing an existential staffing crisis.
It's funny that the companies I've seen do this productively all have "other justifications" for doing so.
But effectively, yes, they're keeping high-performing older talent around so some hard won lessons rub off on the youngsters.
I always thought companies should spend more time broadly categorizing employee allocation. E.g. this year you're going to be 20% mentor, 20% strategic advice, 60% IC
Everyone wears multiple hats in a healthy company, and part of the ageism problem is that the only management-visible hat is "work produced."
Ahh, welcome to the small boat and commercial marine industry (basically kayaks to 150’). Your last paragraph perfectly encapsulates our situation. We’ve had decades of youth going into university instead of trades, which I’m not saying is a bad thing, just we haven’t had the numbers. And we are a very niche trade so low numbers to begin with.
I work at a small trade school as the training coordinator and this is something I come up against every day. Our employers locally desperately need people but have no one to spare for training. It’s a really vicious cycle. As an example we are running a pre-employment program in January for youth. It’s a great program, 8 weeks long, the students are paid by the govt, they get employment readiness skills, tool skills, job shadow at four different businesses for a day each, and then have a two week work experience at one of the locations. The employers get paid too! Out of 18 original employers, 10 have backed out citing too busy. Yet they are all scrambling to hire people.
I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years. I’m off the tools now because I want to support my fellow workers and have them learn the safe way to work, also my knees haha. But seriously though, we’re all struggling with way too much work and not enough people, and the experts are retiring.
I don’t think a reduction to 20% work on the part of semi-retired employees means that the juniors need 20% of their time being mentored. Some people might just want to do full retirement, so it won’t be 100% of the former population working at 20%, and if the company is growing then presumably the next generation of employees should be larger.
Have a look at a population pyramid, especially for countries without mass immigration. There isn’t much of a next generation. When people retire they become dependents. Each worker will need to support an increasing number of retirees.
If a country has a plan to become smaller, I guess I can see why they’d need to stretch out their current workforce for a long as possible. The US, which is where I live, I think plans on growing until we find a hard barrier that we can’t power through.
The US isn’t immune to this, merely better placed. Projections are that the US will move from 3 workers per retiree to 2 workers per retiree by 2050. (You can project these things pretty well as the new generation is already born.)
It's funny because there are careers that have figured out the kind of lower-work senior roles you're talking about -- doctors and lawyers come to mind right away, with surgeons who work 1-2 cases a week and senior partners who come in to consult for a month here and there.
And various types of consulting. I know a few semi-retired people in the IT realm who retired on the early side and still do some work on the side. The key is that you're sort of doing your own thing on your own schedule. Which doesn't describe most people at the average tech company.
Certainly for senior people there are probably one dayish a week roles that don't even have to happen every week. But now you're still essentially talking about being a consultant.
Those jobs have a fixed supply of graduates set the the Bar and AMA accrediting medical schools (and law schools but that is less clear to me, but anyways law school is very prestige based so kind of moot if a 3rd tier law school expands enrollment). Other fields have no body policing the incoming employee population.
> I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.
It's a little secret that actually many young people don't want to be mentored nor is it in the interest of companies. In contrast to the common narrative that older people are of great value to enterprises because of their experience in reality it's much better not to make use of it but let younger people make all mistakes again (often there also a lot of newer mistakes to make because technology or some other circumstances changed).
(I am being a bit sarcastic here but there's also truth to it).
I'm trying to think of what those might be. Assuming you already have employees and a payroll system, I think maybe only worker's comp insurance would be considered a fixed cost. Maybe the cost of a notebook computer or other device, if required. Employees who are less than half time usually don't have to be offered retirement plan options or mandated sick leave/vacation (although here in California, it might apply at all levels, I haven't checked).
Maybe the cost of a notebook computer or other device, if required. And business cards, if anyone still uses those. What else?
edit: possibly some training costs, depending a lot on the type of job and the previous experience of the worker
Also it’s just work to hire, manage, administer another enployee. Fiddling around in Justworks one extra time per month. Creating an email address. Etc.
I don't think it's so much the costs as it really only makes sense for people who bring specific capabilities that aren't easily replicated and they can apply those without a lot of coordination on a fairly loose and non-intense schedule.
That just doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees.
Most people shouldn’t worry about how to work till retirement.
Life expectancy trends have reversed and I suspect will worsen with more climate and zoonotic disease crossover, antibiotic resistance; though maybe mRNA cancer vax will balance that out.
But the author is Canadian, working for the CBC, which I don’t think suffers from the ageism in most of corporate America. But if you are post retirement age, you are expensive and will be a target for employers because you certainly have lower future potential value by definition and there will be at least assumptions about reduced productivity.
Outside of doctor/lawyer where people admire experience, maybe nearing retirement folks can work as teachers or walmart greeter, but high paying jobs will be in short supply and favor the young. If AI further quelches job creation, it will be even harder for old people to keep working.
> But the author is Canadian, working for the CBC, which I don’t think suffers from the ageism in most of corporate America
About half the article is about ageism in Canada as an enormous barrier to working past 64. If anything what the author describes sounds worse than anything I've heard in the US (but maybe that's because I'm too young to see it yet).
> Every generation lives longer than the one that came before—nothing new there
No, that's completely wrong and this is a lie that keeps being repeated. Life expectancy has only been increasing because child mortality has decreased to almost zero. The upper end has not shifted much at all.
Also, as the article rather eloquently points out, elderly retired people continue to the economy in many ways, just not by drawing a salary. They spend plenty of money, provide free child care for people who are still working, volunteer, work part time...
The original comment said that every generation lives longer than the one that came before, and then gp said that that was a lie that keeps being repeated and is only infant mortality improving.
Someone then replied with data showing that life expectancy is getting longer even setting aside infant mortality, to which you replied that the difference was that reduced mortality at age 60 adds mostly unproductive years, while reduced mortality at age 0-1 adds mostly productive years.
My question was how that has any bearing on the question in this thread of whether or not people are living longer? It wasn't clear to me at least without more info. Or maybe it was just an unrelated tangent. But that lack of clarity is why I asked.
In most models, falling child mortality is responsible for about half of the life expectancy growth in the past 150 years. But the other half is indeed longer lives at all age groups[1]. So I don’t think this is a lie, or even misleading (since the author made no claim about non-childhood causes being disproportionate).
> On average across all population subgroups, people who survived to age 50 were expected to live over 8 years longer in 2000 than in 1940, corresponding to an increase in e50 from 23 years in 1940 to 31.3 years in 2006, or an average rise of 1.3 years per decade.
An 8 year increase in life expectancy at age 50 (from 73 to 81.3) seems like a pretty large increase over the span of 60 years.
I’d be more interested to know what the change in healthspan is, though. Living longer is less interesting to me than living longer in good health without worsening pain and disability.
Where do you get that information? I realize that the reduction of infant mortality has been a major factor in the change in expected lifespan, but there have also been gains in expected remaining lifespan at 65.
For example, this study reported on in 2018:
The researchers looked at birth and death data for people above age 65 from 1960-2010. They found that the average age of death in those who live to be older than 65 increased by three years in every 25-year period, which means that people can expect to live about six years longer than their grandparents, on average.
Furthermore, this trend continued at a relatively stable pace over the entire 50-year period and in all 20 countries that they analyzed. Factors like medical breakthroughs caused minor fluctuations in how quickly lifespans increased, but these variations averaged out over time
I get what you are trying to say, but your figures are a bit off. In the last few centuries (outside of war/famine/et), if you made it to "adulthood" (depending on the statistic 15-20 years old) and were male, you had a reasonable likelihood to live until "old age" (late-60s to early-70s).
The problem is making it to adulthood wasn't straight forward. Until the 20th century, your likelihood to make it to adulthood was only 50/50. There even if you made it out of infancy, child labor, disease, food affordability, etc., were all major causes of death. Making it to adulthood meant that you were lucky or privileged.
Now for calculating retirement ages for individuals who were adults when they started working, sure, the life expectancy has basically been flat. Maybe a few years of uptick, but nothing substantial like it seems looking at the overall stats of going from 45 to 75.
> Life expectancy has only been increasing because child mortality has decreased to almost zero. The upper end has not shifted much at all.
A change of five to eight years makes a material difference in actuarial terms when you have to plan for retirement:
> In 1920–1922, Canadian men who had lived to age 65 could expect to live for 13 more years, and women could expect to live for 13.5 more years (to age 78.0 and 78.5 respectively). The expected total life span of 65-year-olds was substantially higher than life expectancy at birth: 19.2 years higher for men and 18.0 years higher for women.
> In 2009–2011, 65-year-old men were expected to live until they were 83.8, while 65-year-old women were expected to live until the age of 86.7. This means that from 1920–1922 to 2009–2011, the life expectancies of 65-year-olds increased by 5.8 years for men and 8.2 years for women. This is a much smaller gain than the 20-year increase in life expectancy for newborns during this same period.
Starting at 65, the odds of hitting an age of 90 are worth considering when doing planning:
> Assume we have 1,000 relatively healthy 65-year-old men. The chances of their staying alive at least until their 80s are quite good. More difficult, however, is avoiding critical illness – very serious conditions such as heart attacks, life-threatening cancers, stroke and Alzheimer’s. (There are 14 classifications in all.) While more than 500 of these men will survive until age 90, only 39 of them are expected to avoid a critical illness by that age. Of the 41 survivors at age 100, none is expected to be free of critical illness.
Are we talking about the top 5% or the top 0.01%? Because it seems to me the top 5% is definitely going up. I don’t think people regularly aged to 8x in the 1500s (mostly due to higher prevalence of disease).
The article talks about the dependency ratio in depth, including why it's not a perfect metric: aging people tend to disproportionately do work that is not tracked, e.g. volunteer work and caregiving.
> Fewer than a quarter of retiring Canadians have a defined benefit pension plan
The move from defined benefits to self -directed and -contributed retirement plans seems like a ticking time bomb.
We know most people's financial literacy sucks.
And the original reason for social security was that we don't want old people to suffer in poverty.
Well... when people inevitably mismanage their own retirement, or suffer the whims of the market without the benefit of sophisticated pooling or hedging... we're going to be looking at that again. (Arguably, already are)
A life of work isn't something you should be able to lose as quickly as you can.
> I think we just got too far away from the natural order where elders cycled out of the workforce and assumed family oriented duties.
In a previous natural order, 3+ generations of families lived in close proximity and the labor of families was shared across grandparents, cousins, siblings, aunts & uncles.
The numbers in the article are quite alarming for some countries - 49.9 out of 100 Canadians dependent (so one dependent for every 2 workers according to article) by 2075, or 77 out of 100 for Japan by 2075.
This seems like such a critical issue that governments around the world will need to have significant societal changes - at the moment this doesn't seem like something that tech or biotech will be able to solve simply.
the "significant societal changes" are immigration.
as you can't change the birth rate overnight, and even if you could, it would take ~20years for the kids to begin earning, there needs to be a short-term solution. and that is immigration.
good thing immigration is so popular in rich western societies at the moment.
The problem is when the country can- or does not have any influence of what kind of immigrants they get. Not every country can get the best. In the case of Denmark for example, the immigration has been shown a net negative[0]. And you have to admit it is weird to live in a society with a self destructing culture, where foreigners are used as breading rabbits.
If they aren't qualified, then you have to train them. If they don't have your values, you have to integrate them. That is complicated, takes a lot of effort and costs a lot of money. Everyone who thinks anything about the problem is cheap or easy is delusional.
What is the alternative? Just let the population age?
For much of the developed world, the ratio of retirees to working age people is going to get a larger, causing economic difficulties across age groups.
Healthcare for the elderly will put huge strain on government budgets.
With the young struggling to afford housing with fulltime work, I find the authors disappointments about not getting those lavish vacations obnoxious.
Companies need to figure out how to keep the retiring around, a few days a week part time. There is a wealth of experience that gets lost . Companies are all in on AI but they're happy to let their pretrainined business domain finetuned trillion parameter models walk out the door.
Ageism is a thing. But most people want to wind down at some point. And that business domain knowledge probably leaks away over time. Certainly part-time work can be a thing. But to the degree it requires working together with other people it can be hard to manage, especially for a semi-retired person that wants to go on multi-week vacations.
I think you may have misunderstood me. It's not an age-related thing. If I only spend a day or so a week working in a domain, I am going to become less familiar with that domain as things change over time. It's certainly happened to me as my roles have shifted.
Doesn't mean I forget everything about a space but I'm certainly less current if I spend 1 day per week than if I spend 5 days.
> “This is where our destitute end up, in these government-run facilities.” According to a 2019 report by the National Institute on Ageing at Toronto Metropolitan University, long-term care costs are expected to triple from $22 billion to $71 billion by 2050. “It will be the equivalent of the modern-day Victorian poor house for our old,”
I would love to hear why old ppl don't choose to voluntarily end their life. What good is a life spent in 'poor house for the old' .
seems kind of an obvious strategy to end your life but maybe will to live trumps all commonsense even in old age?
>I would love to hear why old ppl don't choose to voluntarily end their life.
1) It's physically and psychologically hard to end your own life
2) You aren't going to feel old, you'll just feel like you do now, but with an achey body and some brainfog.
3) A society that encourages old people to shuffle off this mortal coil is probably a bad one
> I think this because declaring our loved ones extinguishable crosses the fattest line there is.
Maybe its just a social taboo and not a real line.
most old ppl caring for elderly fulltime want their parents to be dead though.
I've seen this personally in family members who totally transformed into different human beings in a good way once they were freed of the burden of caretaking. I could sense their hearts jumping with joy and relief when their parents finally passed away.
Is this an Effective Altruism thing, or some other Silicon Valley trend? The amount of times I've seen it suggested that non-productive members or society should be euthanized on HN is so much higher than I would have ever thought it would be. And people always say something similar how it's just a taboo, but if you think rationally you'd naturally off everyone who isn't making money. I'm always curious how they arrive at that line of thinking.
> family members who totally transformed into different human beings in a good way once they were freed of the burden of caretaking.
The burden of caring for aged parents is heavier now. A primary reason is the absence of the extended families that we're evolved to live in. Modern pressures to scatter families means that a 12 person burden is being born by 1 or 2.
Similarly, raising children is more difficult than it was historically. Murdering our burdens may be an expedient solution but I feel there are less catastrophic ways out of this.
>> I think this because declaring our loved ones extinguishable crosses the fattest line there is.
> Maybe its just a social taboo and not a real line.
I disagree. In any agecide scenario, adults won't consent and would be murdered. Murder is a bright line. Advocating the murder of people we love is an even broader, brighter line. Crossing that devastates human bonds.
>> I would love to hear why old ppl don't choose to voluntarily end their life. What good is a life spent in 'poor house for the old' .
The old age is considered prime meditation time in the shaolin monasteries.
Even if you live in poor conditions, exploring the realms of your subconcious in meditation is seen as an end goal. See Jhana stages to achieve in meditation.
We should as a society encourage and normalize assisted suicide in old age when they aren't happy anymore. Why suffer everyday with no chance of it ever getting better just do some mediation nonsense.
For one, there are lots of old people who aren't living with assisted or long-term care. For another, everyone's quality of life metrics are different: there are a lot of people who would be content to live through decades of poor health, provided they can otherwise do things that matter to them (see their relatives, read books, etc.).
Voluntary suicide probably should be an option for those who don't want to continue their lives. But it doesn't evaporate the underlying problem, since many people (very reasonably) want to continue their lives through infirmity.
Christians consider that a sin and thus a barrier to "heaven" in the afterlife.
I don't believe this, myself, and can see myself considering this in a few decades. I'm in my 40s now, hopefully I have maybe two decades of good-ish living left. After seeing shit like Alzheimers destroy people I loved - I don't want to go through that myself or burden other loved ones.
OP says “voluntarily”. Nobody has to kill themselves, but it seems like a lot of older people aren’t particularly happy in the last few years of their lives, kept alive by increasing drugs and machines, sometimes the mind long gone. Seems awful to extend life beyond the point of enjoyment, and an option to end things seems more humane than forcing people to continue.
Maybe? It sounded to me like it was in the context of them being a financial burden, like you should want to off yourself once you become expensive for society, or it's a bad strategy to keep existing if you're going to be poor or something.
Trying to do everything at once may not be practical. (Now-retired) Actuary Fred Vettese released a book a for those in the 20-40 age range on balancing major life expenses during that time period (mortgage/rent, kids/daycare, retirement), and he concluded that is was 'fine' if one didn't get a chance to really save for retirement during that time period:
> In a nutshell, the 30 idea is a rule of thumb financial planners can use to guestimate how much young couples starting off on their financial journeys need to save for retirement. Rather than state something like save 10%, 12% or 15% of your gross (pre-tax) income each and every year, The Rule of 30 views retirement saving as occurring in tandem with daycare and mortgage repayment.
> From the get-go, Vettese suggests young couples allocate 30% of their gross or after-tax income to those three major expenses: Retirement savings, daycare costs and mortgage payments. However, when starting out, they may have to save less in order to handle payments for daycare and the mortgage. Since daycare expenses are temporary after a few years or so (depending on how many children a couple has), once that expense has finished, they can ramp up the mortgage paydown and/or retirement savings. And if—ideally five years before retirement—the home mortgage is paid off, then couples can kick their retirement savings into overdrive by allocating a full 30%, or more, solely to building their retirement nest egg.
If you’re Canadian, and buying a house in the last 5 years, I think keeping those expenses to 30% of gross income is a dream out of reach for the vast majority of people. In larger markets where incomes are higher, mortgages alone are well over 30%.
This isn’t charitable: even besides the author’s case, there are all kinds of factors that make people retire (injury, new familial obligations, being forced to retire for legal/pension/political reasons).
I do know some folks who have, instead, semi-retired (go in one or two days a week). People at the end of their careers have lots of experience to pass on. And it seems to keep them active and healthy. I wonder why we haven’t seen a growth in 1-2 day a week mentorship roles.