Re: NEWS: Ageing recession warning

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 30 2001 - 10:14:09 MDT


On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 03:14:35PM +0100, Charlie Stross wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 03:33:33PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> >
> > Notice that nobody has said that maybe the retirement age ought to
> > move up. So beside anti-aging treatments we might need anti-pension
> > treatments :-)
>
> It's already happened!
>
> In the UK, the retirement age for women has been increased from 60
> to 65. This was officially to bring the UK into line with anti-
> discrimination norms in Europe, but you'll note that the alternative
> options -- equal retirement for men and women at 62.5 years, or cutting
> the retirement age for men to 60 -- weren't adopted.
>
> Now the Blair government is talking about making the retirement age
> "soft" -- allowing people to draw private pensions at any age over 55,
> or keep working indefinitely. With the probable sting in the tale that
> the minimum age for claiming the state pension will be raised from 65.

This softening of retirement is probably the way to do it. It might
be too politically troublesome yet to increase the retirement age.

Here in Sweden I get the unfortunate impression that quite a few
forces want to lower the retirement age instead. And the idea of
volunteer activities of retired people as a solution of labour
shortage has been floating around - talk about the exact opposite of
the right solution! :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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