I think you're presenting a false choice. We live in a society where an awful lot of money goes to things and people that don't particularly need or merit it.
What you mean to be saying is "accept the fact that without a radical change in how we view the purpose of employment and retirement, most people cannot . . ."
Basically, what's the goal? The goal right now is for each entity in the system to hold onto as much money as it possibly can. It's a company-first view of the problem, and therefore not one that really addresses the main point: People shouldn't be expected to work into their old age.
> I think you're presenting a false choice. We live in a society where an awful lot of money goes to things and people that don't particularly need or merit it.
That's why people don't have a higher savings rate. Most people are idiots when it comes to spending, the dumbest habit of which is increasing your spending on pace with increased in income. Okay maybe not the dumbest as it's even dumber when they increase it faster than income (ex: new job => new car with higher monthly payment v.s. difference in salary).
> What you mean to be saying is "accept the fact that without a radical change in how we view the purpose of employment and retirement, most people cannot . . ."
> Basically, what's the goal? The goal right now is for each entity in the system to hold onto as much money as it possibly can.
Why is the company holding onto anything? If you're working as an employee and want to retire one day, demand to be paid for the services you're providing now, save them up, invest them, and then it's yours to spend. Why have the company guess at how to manage that? It's putting an awfully lot of eggs in one basket as well as if the company goes under, your pension will take a hit as well (since no company actually has a fully paid for sinking fund).
> It's a company-first view of the problem, and therefore not one that really addresses the main point: People shouldn't be expected to work into their old age.
Why not? What else are they going to do anyway and why should they be granted N years of do nothingness just because they're old? Sure sounds like a ponzi scheme to me ...
> That's why people don't have a higher savings rate. Most people are idiots when it comes to spending, the dumbest habit of which is increasing your spending on pace with increased in income. Okay maybe not the dumbest as it's even dumber when they increase it faster than income (ex: new job => new car with higher monthly payment v.s. difference in salary).
It's also why megacorporations and a very small percentage of people have such immense amounts of money and give essentially nothing back for it.
> Why not? What else are they going to do anyway and why should they be granted N years of do nothingness just because they're old? Sure sounds like a ponzi scheme to me...
What is so valuable about forcing everyone to work their whole lives? Who benefits?
> It's also why megacorporations and a very small percentage of people have such immense amounts of money and give essentially nothing back for it.
Besides you sounding bitter and misinformed or changing the conversation to one about converting the USA to communism, I don't see how that's relevant to this.
> What is so valuable about forcing everyone to work their whole lives? Who benefits?
They benefit by providing for themselves and their families. They're not being forced to do anything (though food, shelter, and self preservation tend to be good motivators).
To flip your question around, why should they get a free ride because they past a certain age? I'm not saying people shouldn't retire, I'm saying that if they want to do it, they need to be realistic about what's financially involved and either save significantly more or realize they're going to be living off of rice and beans.
What I see at play here is a radical difference in philosophies.
For the record, I don't think any country or society owes you anything. If you want something, you should be prepared to work for it. That includes a goal like "comfortable retirement".
But I'm sympathetic to expectations that every individual learn money management and investment skills that are on-par with professionals. Exposing individuals to risk via complex variables such as life expectancy, investment strategy, and diversification is a sure recipe for a winners and losers type of scenario.
We want a system where the maximum number of people have the best probability of reaching a non-working retirement with enough accumulated assets to be comfortable.
You only need look at what's happened in Detroit to see how perilous it is to trust politicians or parties with divergent interests from yours with your financial future.
Your post is exactly right, this is a philosophical difference I have with the parent commentor.
> If you want something, you should be prepared to work for it.
This is the part I'm trying to get at. I agree with this statement, but with a caveat: There's a difference between "want" and "need." If you want some new jeans 'cause they look good, society doesn't owe them to you. If you need to buy basic clothing because you have none (or what you have is clearly insufficient, e. g., falling apart), it doesn't bother me to say society ought to provide that to you.
People see the idea that a sufficiently developed society ought to provide the very basics for all its members, and immediately assume that the only way to do this is some sort of draconian, single-party iron-wall communism. That just isn't true. In fact, there are already societies on the planet that get fairly close to doing this, and none of them are communist. (The "communist" ones tend to be some of the farthest away from this ideal.)
My question to you would be: How do you feel about making that distinction, and why?
"Want" and "need" is something that requires clarity and introspection. It is easy to confuse the two, especially ones that are deeply embedded in the psyche.
What's often the case is that there is a real need underneath a want, but that deeper, more essential need is not expressed in the same way as the want.
To use the jeans example, "'cause they look good", the deeper need will be somewhere along the lines of, needing to belong; needing approval of others; needing to feel a certain way. It depends on the person. Some people have a very clear idea of what these underlying needs are ... many of us humans, don't. Getting those jeans might temporarily satisfy the want, but without addressing the underlying needs, a person will now seek out something else in hopes to satisfy that deeper need.
As a tangent: there is a way to probe even deeper needs underlying those needs too. When done iteratively and radically honestly (which means going deeper than survival needs) across many different wants, there is a surprising result: it generally converges on single basic need. However, since this is probing deeper than survival needs, it isn't something that a society, technology, or a system can provide. It certainly won't be something that one can easily "work for".
My point is: I agree, societies and communities should look at providing basic needs. However, there are some things that cannot be addressed with material goods, as long as there is mass confusion. Withholding those material things don't necessarily help either.
It's interesting that you use a metaphor of "going deeper." The way I came to the same conclusion (that, at some point, all of us share a common goal) was to view the problem not 'deeper' but more and more abstractly -- you can get to a point where you've abstracted away any specific rung of, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
And while, yes there is a limit to how far we'll get without wide-spread introspection of our own thought-processes (as opposed to our thought-content), we could afford people the space to do so.
Thanks for the comments. Most of the below are tangential.
By "going deeper", I mean that there is a directionality to using awareness that is best described as "deeper", as that is the experiential signature. The methods I used involved dissecting the experience and emotions with awareness, usually by modifying consciousness. I was introduced to it with shamanic practices, but my usual method was developed through mindfulness meditation (to develop sufficient clarity) and chanting a specific Sanskrit mantra.
So for the jeans example -- to make it more concrete and use a real example, at one point in my life, I bought tactical gear. A friend of mine's even called it, "tacticool". To probe this with the my awareness, I'd rest my awareness on the actual emotions associated with "tacticool". When I was less skilled at this, this took a long time to familiarize myself with the different experiences that might arise from this. There are physical sensations, for example, that comprise of particular emotions, which form the sum of the actual emotional state itself. These are patterns of tension, heat or cold, etc. Then there are the emotional states, which has its own movement, texture, and are clearly _not_ physical. I eventually was able to see how this maps to thoughts. Any given thought will have an emotional basis, although some concepts are so pure (or abstract) that they have a very light footprint. I learned to tune my awareness of a given emotional state from the physical, through the emotional, and to the various narratives/stories it might carry. So when I dissect the desire and attachment to "tacticool", there are very specific images and emotional flows that come through it. There are aggregations of different emotional states, which in turn might be linked to other parts of the psyche. Examples arising when I'm probing this as I write this right now: wanting to be seen as a badass, tough, resilient, etc.; eschewing normal gear to set oneself apart; deeper still, the need to stand out, the need to stand apart, the _fear_ of not being seen, the _fear_ of being alone. I'll stop there; any further will sound too woo.
Further, any given emotion can be given form, even sentience in which one can then interact with anthromorphically. That is, there are shamanic/tantric methods that lets a particular emotional flow take form into a person which you can then have a conversation with about wants and needs. One in particular, detailed in Tsultrim Allione's _Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict_, goes one step beyond "wants" and the underlying "need", by asking for "how will you feel when you get what you need" (a neat NLP trick, going directly to the result).
Getting back more on topic: I agree about giving people the space to do that. However, I also think that in our race to modernity, we broke and severed a lot of traditional wisdom that helps in this very thing. In more communally-oriented societies, giving a tribe member space is likely more to be a given. (Sure, it depends on the tribe and the culture).
>For the record, I don't think any country or society owes you anything. If you want something, you should be prepared to work for it.
The idea behind Georgism is that people should own 100% of the value they produce while economic rents derived from land should belong equally to all members of society:
Curiously the idea of raising property taxes (e.g. rolling back prop 13) in order to shore up pensions is often met with stiff resistance on the basis that it's unfair, and that, presumably, society does owe some people economic rents.
I mean, not really, because neither of us have had our perfect capitalistic or socialistic society (if those are even the right terms) with which to test our philosophies.
No one mentioned communism. The status quo vs communism is also a false dichotomy; obviously many, many nations around the world have chosen something in between the contemporary American system and communism.
Over the last hundred years, we've decided, as a nation, we want to do better than "let every individual fend for themselves". We weren't comfortable with the outcomes--old people eating pet food, dying for lack of heating in the winter, etc.
And there are certainly many low-paid workers who simply can't save anything substantial for any retirement, ever. Assuming everyone can sock away money to live on for when they're just too old to work is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold (possibly literally).
I guess what I'm trying to say is, your discussion about "let them all fend for themselves" doesn't really fit here at all, because we as a nation moved beyond that decades ago.
Whether to move back to pensions, or improve 401Ks, that's an interesting question and worth discussing.
How about we just directly provide a safety net. The government can buy rent/food/medical if the market is cheaper or do it on it's own if not. (Force the market to compete with 'government inefficiency').
The common argument against this (to be clear: I think this argument is hogwash, but it should be mentioned) is that the government will then change laws to make it harder for market forces to compete. Which I find smacks of a certain kind of "but then we'll loooooose", but it is a concern, if generally low-impact.
> Besides you sounding bitter and misinformed or changing the conversation to one about converting the USA to communism, I don't see how that's relevant to this.
I didn't say that. I think you're leaping to conclusions. What I'm trying to do, to be frank, is poke holes in the assumptions you're making in the first post about how things are and should be. I'm not a communist (it's never worked as envisioned, and likely can't), but I'm getting pretty sick of the notion that our system as-is is the best one for most people. I want to have a conversation about ways it could either be made better, or what it could be replaced with.
> They benefit by providing for themselves and their families. They're not being forced to do anything (though food, shelter, and self preservation tend to be good motivators).
Again, this is a false choice. It actually is a couple of false assumptions: First, the idea that food, shelter and self-preservation are things that people must earn, rather than have a right to. Second, that people who are in a "do it or die" situation have any real choice, given that almost nobody would choose the "die" part of that.
> To flip your question around, why should they get a free ride because they past a certain age? I'm not saying people shouldn't retire, I'm saying that if they want to do it, they need to be realistic about what's financially involved and either save significantly more or realize they're going to be living off of rice and beans.
So, first of all, I agree with the notion that in the system as it is, one has to be prudent and thoughtful, one has to save money, one has to plan for oneself. We're in agreement on all that: With the world the way it is, it's important for each individual to plan and put themselves first. I fully understand how to work within the system we have to keep oneself afloat, and I'm not suggesting people shouldn't.
Why shouldn't people get a free ride for food, health, shelter? Why are those things things which must somehow be earned? I'm talking philosophically here, not practically. I'm not saying everyone is entitled to caviar and vegan d3 supplements on private yachts, but I don't understand the assumption that, given a society which could technologically provide basics for everyone, people shouldn't have them.
I'm not sure why your comments got downvoted. These are questions I have been asking for the past few years. I haven't come up with any satisfactory answers, other than that I see a lot of people strongly holding onto some narratives that don't seem to be working out well for people. I have not seen anything close to a satisfactory answer, though I see a lot of people making the attempt.
To address some of the other comments in this thread: this idea that someone has to earn the right to live has not, historically, been the norm. Pre-modern societies tend to lean more towards values emphasizing community rather than values emphasizing individuals. There is a lot to say about this, philosophically, when you start looking at how modernity changed things.
One of the weirdest notions of modernity is this idea that humans are at the apex, with the implicit narrative that what is current will always be the best. Human brain achieved higher intelligence than any other living organism on earth, therefore humans are the apex predators. During the colonial era, the colonial powers considered themselves civilized ... and everyone else were savages, somehow lesser. Now, there are certain ideologies (democracy, free market, capitalism) that are considered as the apex.
There is something very broken about modernity. I'm not suggesting pre-modern notions are necessarily better. I do think this narrative of 'being the best' has blinded our modernist sensibilities, and we have yet to find a satisfactory answer beyond modernity.
>That's why people don't have a higher savings rate. Most people are idiots when it comes to spending,
No, not at all. People have a low savings rate because they're poor: their wages are low compared to the cost of living. This is a systemic, economy-wide problem for the entire bottom 90% of the population. You can't save when you're facing "heat or eat" each month or trying to make student-loan payments before Social Security kicks in.
The entire 90% is not so poor that they can't save 10% of their income. It may be true at certain levels but not the entire 90%. It's about choices and so many people choose to pay for frivolous things like a cable or cell phone bill instead of saving.
I'm convinced so many people have fooled themselves into believing the government will cover their retirement shortfall. The problem is ultimately they are probably right but government doesn't have capital to cover the shortfall (not even actual social security obligations it seems)... so they are likely going to take it from the ones that have managed to save for their retirement, wait and see.
>government doesn't have capital to cover the shortfall (not even actual social security obligations it seems)...
If we eliminated the cap on how much salary is taxable for Social Security payroll contributions, all projected obligations and shortfalls would be covered. Social Security is being choked to death for ideological reasons, not starving naturally.
What you mean to be saying is "accept the fact that without a radical change in how we view the purpose of employment and retirement, most people cannot . . ."
Basically, what's the goal? The goal right now is for each entity in the system to hold onto as much money as it possibly can. It's a company-first view of the problem, and therefore not one that really addresses the main point: People shouldn't be expected to work into their old age.