So I'm reading a fair number of articles talking about how millennials should not expect to retire at 60.
This age seemed reasonable to my parents.
Statistics I've encountered show that the average life expectancy has gone up since 1960s in the US – from 70 to 76.
Life expectancy in the US has actually dropped recently from 78.
Contrasting this against the GDP per capita over the same time frame, even adjusted for inflation, we can see just an absolutely enormous increase, like a 6 to 7 times increase.
So considering this data. I feel like the goal of any society should be to reduce the retirement age. You know, we all are supported by an AI robot workforce and have flying cars and jetpacks. This has always been the goal.
To see a retirement age increase while GDP/capita also increases doesn't seem to make any sense. I would expect that as technology/infrastructure allow for higher and higher levels of productivity we would to see retirement ages come down.
Now of course, the reason I brought up life span average is that one might say that, because people are living longer, these long lived elderly are straining the economy to such a degree that the younger generations are unable to produce enough to support them.
I just don't see it. The average life span has increased 6 years. The average GDP/capita has increased 6+ fold.
It looks to me like a failure of a society when it's retirement age increases, or, fails to decrease.
Why are we seeing an increase?
Further, why aren't these articles framing the phenomena (of a generation retiring later than the one before it) as anything other than a systemic failure of societies institutions to achieve one of its basic goals?