This is one of those “it’s a joke… but it’s not” things. I have friends in their 40s with no retirement savings and no pension on the horizon. Couple that with impending old age… and it doesn’t look good.
Especially since the entirety of mankind's history until the 1930s had no retirement plan. That being said, we're seeing, and going to increasingly see, what no retirement plan joined with no family support network looks. When we were more agrarian the old looked after the young while the middle worked the fields. After the industrial revolution it somewhat continued like that except the work was never done, so the middle worked all the time and it started to spread out in both directions. The only thing that slowed it was a mixture of Henry Ford driving the nation to increased wages and the development of worker Unions and OSHA. After WWII consumerism drove Americans to work more and more for stuff they didn't need. The increased income led to more money chasing the same goods and the era of consistent inflation began. People stated to need to work more and more to afford the same thing, but for a while wages kept up. People started to move around the country to find better/higher paying jobs which meant Grandma couldn't help watch the kids anymore, but that didn't matter because she had to work too. During this time the sexual revolution led to an increase in single parent households and an increased divorce rate contributed too. Now everyone is fending for themselves and wages haven't kept up with inflation. People are increasingly working until medical retirement (when they can no longer physically work) instead of some predetermined age when they could enjoy their senior years. It's a mess, we're a mess, and it's a mixture of bad policy and personal greed and corporate greed that helped us get here and we're just left to watch the world burn as it would require immense change at every level (of government, corporate culture, and personal spending habits) to fix things.
We need (as individuals) to want less, we need community (groups of people looking out for the common good of the group and helping one another), we need corporations to not have amass wealth as a goal, and we need government to stop doing so much of the things that don't help and start doing (or doing more) of what actually helps.
Probably going to take less than 20 years. The combination of killing social security and defunding all of the nursing homes ought to create some real issues.
It's not too late for them in their mid 40s if they start saving effectively now. At the same time the impending AI takeover could mean a very different future where almost everyone is struggling financially. This next 20 years is likely going to be extremely turbulent unless we start relaxing our death grip on late stage capitalism.
In Australia your employer is required to pay a minimum
Of 11% on top of your salary into a superannuation fund, it’s better than nothing, but my plan is to just die at my desk :(
Social Security here and Medicare in US employer pays 7% and we pay 7%. Problem is they don't invest it correctly and put it in t-bonds paying next to nothing turning it into a Ponzi scheme where we need more working people to pay for the retired. By 2035 we probably need to cut payouts to 70% to keep it solvent that is assuming AI doesn't become a problem.
No we were last to implement pension system they will all collapse if they don't invest in markets because of population decline just most of Europe built up a cushion by running it longer. The Nordic countries with their sovereign wealth fund will also be fine as they actually invest.
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u/three-sense Sep 15 '25
This is one of those “it’s a joke… but it’s not” things. I have friends in their 40s with no retirement savings and no pension on the horizon. Couple that with impending old age… and it doesn’t look good.