Denmark is set to have the highest retirement age in Europe after its parliament adopted a law raising it to 70 by 2040.
The retirement age at 70 will apply to all people born after 31 December 1970.
Having relatives that died when they were 70 and seeing stuff like this is quite depressing.
My ex’s grandma slept 5 hours a night, worked a full time seamstress job and cooked and cleaned and raised her kids and grandkids. She enjoyed just 1 year of retirement before Covid hit.
Yeah, we need to make sure to live our life now and do what we want. Work less, live below our means to save up, take a chance and travel or whatever it is one wants to do, if we are able to. Don’t postpone it. I’ll live my life as if I won’t get a retirement at all.
The main economically meaningful aspects of “retirement age” in Denmark AFAIK is that:
- You get entitled to receiving the public, state-paid pension.
- Private pension schemes that vest at this point or later are tax deductible. (you still pay taxes when it’s paid out, but due to the progressive tax code you end up paying less)
By far the most relevant of the two is the latter, as practically everyone is covered by pension schemes included in employment contracts.
As such you can still retire any time you want, but it will be more burdensome for you to it earlier than at the age sanctioned by law.
In the US medicaid starts at 65, but you can get lucky and have workplace pension that start early. You only get “full retirement” with Social Security/state pension if you wait until 67 and many wait until then. Which seems similar to Denmark.
No, it means only people with good pensions can retire early. Incidentally, this is by design those with high wages since those are the basis of earning pension. However, the ones that may actually need to retire early due to the stress of hard menial labor are not in this group of high earners.
In effect we will see people at offices doing easy work close their pc’s and have an office retirement party at an age of 65 that poor Olga of 70 years (or more) will have to clean up.
Since 2006, Denmark has tied the official retirement age to life expectancy and has revised it every five years.
What a depressing law. Progress should mean less mandatory work, not more.
At the moment progress is desperately trying to keep up with rapidly increasing life expectancy among the world’s poorest, that’s not a bad thing but that’s also why we’re seeing so much progress but we’re not seeing the benefits much, in the developed world our life expectancy increased long ago and the result of all that progress has mostly normalized in our society and expectations, but we make up a very small percentage of the world’s actual population. Now that it’s their turn, there’s a lot of people who aren’t dying like they used to and as a result they don’t just want food, they want lights and electricity and running water and roads and cars and phones and houses and opportunities, and on the whole we want to give them access to those things and bring them out of poverty but it’s just a lot to do in only a few generations. Demographics get really wild when you start to understand their relationships to larger scale things like economics and world population, and these kind of demographic changes have serious consequences when applied across literally billions of people. It gets less depressing if you make a point of appreciating the very real progress that has been made to billions of peoples lives around the world. Yeah there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, but we seem to prefer to talk about that and the actual, measurable good stuff doesn’t get much acknowledgement.
Based on projections from demographics, most of the countries in the world should be in really good shape in about 50 years, population growth should level off, and we should be able to share the benefits of progress worldwide. At least if civilization hasn’t collapsed into a new dark age, and we haven’t turned the planet into an oven, nuked each other out of existence, written the Earth off and fucked off to Mars, or found some other creative way to destroy ourselves by then. So at least there’s like a 0.1% things will work out alright.
I’m not sure how the demographic transition in developing countries relates to retirement age in rich countries.
capitalists gonna capitalist.
Denmark has the best labor laws in the world.
They also invented capitalism. So, you know…
I… Think that’s the UK you’re thinking about.
Capitalism’s been around in various forms for a while, but the rise of specific types of capitalism are attributed to specific countries and their influence. The Dutch East India trading company was the first to establish what we know as “Finance Capitalism”, which was out of Commercial Capitalism. This is largely what the Dutch are still using today. A form of Capitalism that can also contribute towards socialism, but not in the way a Marxist government would.
It is one of the earliest forms of Capitalism that’s still alive today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Finance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance_capitalism
Ancient Mesopotamian: “am I a joke to you?”
what of that time was capitalism?
I can’t hear you over the sound of your shitty copper, Ea-Nasir!
Agreed. Also wondering what companies are employing people that long? In other European countries, companies wont hire people 50+ cause they are deemed too old, inflexible and expensive. I really wonder, if companies in Denmark are different in that regard.
Right bcz 70 year olds are known for being spry young chickens in great physical health.
Let’s see them force a bunch of 69 year olds to work cause I know I would just fart in their direction if they tried.
They’re not going to “force” you to work. You always have the option of just starving to death.
FreedomTM
There’s nothing stopping Danes from saving and retiring whenever the hell they want
Nothing but rabid inflation and declining earning potential
This is what the anti-immigration right wanrs to do to you, folks!
“I’ve paid my taxes all my life. There should also be time to be with children and grandchildren,” Mr Jensen told outlet DK.
I can’t speak to the history of government supplied pension in the EU, but in the USA, our version (Social Security) was never meant to provide “a time to be with children and grandchildren”. The expectation was that most people would die before being unable to work, and Social Security provided a means for the elderly that lived to be housed and fed until they died. Social Security was designed to prevent living elderly from being in absolute poverty never to provide a time of respite before eventually dying.
The quote says it should, not this was meant to
There absolutely can be with savings outside of government pension to make that “the children/grandchildren” time, but current government based systems aren’t generally designed and built for that today.
If he, and the rest of that society want that, it will likely mean substantial tax increases. If that populous is fine with that, then it should be pretty simple for lawmakers to make those changes into law. Given that “the children/grandchildren” time not only isn’t in law currently, and that lawmakers are increasing the retirement age to 70, it doesn’t sound like there is support from the voters for that change.
People want to enjoy the Benicios, but not face the consequences. I think people should have financial education so as not to depend on the government and I understand Denmark’s decision, because if a solution is not applied, they could be ruined by pensions.
we need more robots!!!
For Greenland too?
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