this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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50% of Americans Can't Afford Their Lifestyle in Retirement: How to Avoid That Fate (finance.yahoo.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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It's a bit of a clickbait-y headline, but thought I'd share this here as a reference for folks who are thinking about their long-term financial plans.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago

If half of Americans can't afford to retire, is that a lifestyle problem or an economy problem?

I'm part of a generation that will likely be obligated to work until they die. We're not buying houses. We're not having families. We're 'killing' industries because we don't have the money to spend like our parents did. The well is dry and we are thirsty, and their response is to tell us we should have saved the water we were never given.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I’ve accepted that barring some massive inheritance or other windfall I will never retire and will probably not have a meaningful improvement in my standard of living.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

My retirement strategy is to keep my cortisol levels manageable and hope for a complete economic upheaval. If you're willing to burn your health now for the promise of some corporation tucking you into bed when you're worn down and can't do it anymore, I've got a bridge to sell you in Florida.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's hard to justify putting more than the minimum into retirement savings when you expect the world to be dramatically different in 20 to 40 years. Not even accounting for climate change, long-term economic models show a collapse of the current system within a few decades.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'd like to see those models. I don't think they're anything more than the pessimistic guesses that have been made for millennia.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

From what I understand, the models say that a combination of overpopulation and increasing pollution will cause significant food scarcity. Here's an article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon

Most articles try to be optimistic, but seeing as we just completely overshot the Paris Climate Accord targets, I have no hope of curbing pollution or climate change.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A single study from 50 years ago that indicates slowing of growth before 2100 is not a good argument for the collapse of the current system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, I'm not going to spoon feed you every relevant article possible. There's plenty of info online - I recommend looking into how the heating of the ocean and changing pH is going to destroy marine life.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not asking to be spoon fed. I'm telling you that there are no credible models that substantiate the claim you made previously about the collapse of the current system in a few decades.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Food scarcity has been used as an argument before, it lead to WW2 among other things. And yet, technological advances have kept increasing crop yields several-fold, leading to a population increase that wouldn't've been possible otherwise. There is still food scarcity... for some, while in other places populations keep growing.

Technically, "overpopulation" is at worst a self-correcting issue: it just leads to excess deaths.

Pollution and climate change will lead to more of that, and in an ideal world we'd like to fix it all... but unless we get (cheap) fusion energy soon, to enable climate correction on a massive scale (terraforming)... what we should remember is that, once upon a time, all of humanity was made up of about 10,000 individuals, and we seem to all descend from a single female individual (mitochondrial Eve).

I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.

As a likely part of those 99.999%, we can try and fight that fate, but realistically, what can most of us do anyway? I can play the lotto, and if I win donate most of it to research (and hopefully not some scammer), but otherwise, what else?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you think those billions of people will die quietly? Do you think the global supply chains will survive such massive civil unrest? Do you think supermarkets will be able to keep shelves stocked? How will cheap electronics, cars, produce, etc. be available if the exploitable labor sources of poor countries are in chaos?

The global society we live in today will collapse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Those billions of people, will go with a "boom", that for sure. As to who will cause that "boom"... I'm less sure, but it seems likely that some military might have a hand. They might call them "special anti-riot operations", since "extermination" has a bad ring to it.

Supply chains are getting more automated by the day, from the robots of 20 years ago, to the AIs of 10 years ago, to the potentially AGIs of maybe right now. Supermarkets, cheap electronics, cars, produce, etc. wouldn't be needed in the same amounts with a much reduced population, meaning a much lower production could still meet demand, with no need of exploitable human labor, just some even more exploitable robot labor would be enough.

The global society we live in today, thanks to technology capable of replacing everyone, can contract a lot without actually collapsing. Maybe not all the way to "0", like some doomsayers propose, but surely a million sounds like a viable number.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.

There's a line of thinking that if we backslide far enough (i.e. lose the Internet, lose electronics, and lose electricity generation), there's no coming back to this point. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without easy-to-extract coal and oil. Today's reserves require a fairly high level of technological advancement to access.

For what it's worth, I don't think that humanity is going to hit that point of no return.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If half of Americans can't afford to retire, is that a lifestyle problem or an economy problem?

I'm part of a generation that will likely be obligated to work until they die. We're not buying houses. We're not having families. We're 'killing' industries because we don't have the money to spend like our parents did. The well is dry and we are thirsty, and their response is to tell us we should have saved the water we were never given.

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