Sunday, May 2, 2010

Are Retirement Ages Going to Increase?

Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed provides a table of the average retirement age for a number of countries and posits:

I would love to be able to peek into 2020 and see what the following chart looks like then, but I will posit one general guess: Every solvent country will average age 70 or over.
Below is a chart showing details of the table in blue, along with the average life expectancy for each country (interesting that there does not seem to be a strong relationship between retirement age and average life expectancy).



I can't say that Paul will be wrong (he very likely is right), but I think there is a "better" (in my opinion) alternative. Rather than work longer, why not "require" less goods / services and enjoy free time more?

In other words, why not become more French?

Source: OECD / Wikipedia

4 comments:

  1. "Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn't have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district."

    This was taken from the article of paul krugman you're refering to. I don't think he has ever been to paris suburbs...

    Btw about retirement, Sarkozy is reforming it right now because the system is becoming very dangerously insolvent.

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  2. Really?.... France? That must be a joke. PK is a DB.

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  3. not exactly french, but the idea that life is more important than work.

    i understand this is coming from the guy who works 70+ hrs / week and in his spare time blogs about the economy / financial markets, but sounds enticing to me...

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  4. A focus on life instead of consumption allowed me to retire at 49. It can be done without much fuss.

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