> I think if you've put in 40-45 years for the man, you should be allowed to have some good 10 years for yourself. Travel, play golf, cross a continent in a camper or climb a mountain.
Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.
On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.
1. Denmark has a special retirement system for people who started work life earlier than normal, allowing them to indeed retire after some 45-48 years of work. All these rules are broken though.
2. These ages only affect a minimal government pension, and a massive tax saving on cashing out a specific, government approved retirement investment. If you wait to start receiving payments on that till retirement age, you avoid paying income tax of it. You can start earlier with worse taxation, or use regular investment types altogether. The overcomplicated tax system and its incentives are quite broken though.
3. Danish politicians still have a retirement age of 60 and a massive retirement package, so they can't deem retirement age and available funds to be that important...
> But if you don't have kids, it's easier to save money to fund your own retirement. Kids are expensive.
Empirical studies have found the opposite: if you don't have kids you tend to spend more on yourself, which means you have (on average) a higher life-style during working years which you take in retirement. A higher / more lavish lifestyle means you need higher income and more savings… which many folks with a lavish lifestyle generally don't do.
People with kids spend less on themselves and so are in the habit of a less lavish life-style and so need less savings in retirement because their spending habits are lower.
As a general rule if you have kids you need 40-50% of your working-age income in retirement, but you do not have kids you need 50-60%.
Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.
It did not. I'm just pointing out reality. Kids are expensive, and it's probably easier to save for retirement if you don't have any. Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything, and I have no problem working more and harder for them, but we don't live in the age where retirement depends on having kids anymore.
Maybe you meant to propose to change that, so only people with kids have a right to a government pension, which is certainly an interesting idea, but also doubly painful for people who wanted kids but were unable to have any.
Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.
Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.
If everybody suddenly stopped having kids, I think a lack of retirement would be the least of our problems. But you seem to feel as if only people who have kids are entitled to retirement, while people without kids don't have that right. And that's very much an opinion, not a fact.
It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.
I see this twofold: what happens if net outcome is negative. Who would pay for it?
The same argument could be made for children, but a counterpoint could be made that given family history outcome is more stable than with unknown immigrant.
On the other hand, there is VERY interesting idea: personal immigration responsibility. Just as „mail bride” look for immigrants you’d be willing to sponsor in exchange for retirement.
Probably there are 5 million problems but would put personal stake for sponsor. Limit to 2 per person and people would do a lot of research as their retirement would depend on it. The country might also gain because I’d expect that people would look for high-value individuals that would maximize their chance for well being.
Finally, this could be used to revive drying out regions: bind this to a country/state/administrative region and that could help shaping it in the future.
That's a great plan. Also make sure to deny citizenship to them and their kids, otherwise they'll eventually vote to stop paying your pensions. The glory of apartheid states of the past awaits us.
It would be hard to distill the fallacy of human fungibility into a purer form than this. If you’re say Danish, the kids you raise will be Danish. The immigrants won’t be Danish, they’ll be like the people from their country of origin: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran....
What makes Danish children productive is not their Danish blood, it's the culture and infrastructure that they operate in. The children of any nation would be equally capable.
As an immigrant myself, I find the second article silly. You import people according to your own criteria, and they arrive pre-raised and pre-educated. A larger proportion of them will leave the country before retirement age. It's a hell of a deal for a country, and that's why it's everyone's solution.
Immigrants are a much bigger drain on the country they are leaving.
A Dutch study found that non-western immigrants have a negative contribution even in the second generation: https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.
It’s not a “hell of a deal”—no European country is in the black from its investment in immigration. It’s a Dutch Tulip bubble. The Scandinavian countries, the most well-governed in Europe, have already done the math and started switching course.
You’ve mentioned before that you were from a third world country. (Bangladesh, was it? A 90% Muslim nation?) Yet I assume you believe yourself to be a net positive contributor to your country of immigration? That your children will help the native culture instead of hindering it?
According to his logic, his kids should thank their lucky stars that their mother is American by his definition, namely that she was raised here and her family has been here for many generations ....
Correct. They’ll be better participants in American democracy as a result. I’d much rather have almost anyone in her family running the country than almost anyone in mine, even though my family is a lot more affluent and educated. Their socialized habits and attitudes are far more suitable for participatory democracy.
Immigration is about the movement of large numbers of people. It makes no sense to think about immigration in terms of individual immigrants. 1 Bangladeshi immigrant could be anybody. 270,000 Bangladeshi immigrants (as we have in the U.S. today) is a group you can analyze statistically and draw conclusions about.
As to Bangladeshi Americans generally, they’re probably a net negative economic contributor. Their median household income is 15% lower than for white americans, and the real gap is probably even larger because they’re concentrated in high-income states (New York, California).
Though the situation in the U.S. likely isn’t as bad as the one in Denmark or the UK. The anchor population of Bangladeshis in the U.S. are people like my family who came over on H1, which is a very small (only 65,000 annually), unusual population (e.g., my grandfather studied medicine in London).[1] Family reunification dilutes the pool a lot in the U.S. But the pool is far more skilled and employable than the Bangladeshi immigrant pool in say the U.K. In the UK, only 58% of working age Bangladeshis are employed, and the poverty rate is 46%. Bangladeshi immigration to the UK isn’t a “great deal”—it’s reparations for colonialism.
[1] In the U.S., our priors about immigration from the subcontinent are based on immigrants from the 1970s-1990s, i.e. a small number of highly educated people who were already somewhat assimilated into Anglo culture from British colonial influence. Pre-H1B, they also tended to move to random places around the U.S. rather than concentrating in ethnic enclaves, which forced a greater degree of assimilation. So you think about guys like Ro Khanna, who grew up as like the only Indian kid in Newton, PA. That doesn’t reflect the kids growing up in Little Bangladesh in Queens today.
They'll be as Danish and any other Danes, just choosing to live life as they see fit.
>"And as a result, they won’t be nearly as economically productive as Danes, ", how does someone with a different religion, or choice for music make them less economically productive? Are you suggesting they don't know white collar skills? Or are less intelligent due to were they were born?
It’s a profoundly sad trend. Our obsession with nuclear families and individualism has led us to a point where raising a family has become financially impossible and unimaginable.
The immigration fix is analogous to quantitative easing. The problems are systemic, and turning a blind eye to them won’t make them disappear.
Honestly, we need to rethink capitalism. By promoting shareholder returns over the wellbeing of employees, companies are destroying the social fabric necessary for a healthy civilization.
Of course, the rise in costs and the widening wealth gap are equally to blame. This situation compels both parents to work, sometimes even holding multiple jobs, leaving them with insufficient time to raise children. This cycle continues until the next generation has no chance of affording their own home (or even a rental). How on earth are they supposed to raise a family?
Not unless you've raised 2 more workers to pick up the shovel while you're playing golf. You could, of course, rely on your neighbor's kids through taxes and pensions but when your neighbor thinks the same it becomes problematic.
On the plus side, if you did raise kids, you may negotiate your retirement with them even if the averaged government system stops working.