Revised retirement age

kidmugsy

mgdavid wrote: »

No it's not. it's based on observation of the past. You've picked out heart disease to supprot your point but that is but one of very many causes of death.

No, it's based on observation of a very narrow segment of the past and one that corresponded, for instance, to the golden age of medicine, with the discovery of antibiotics and so on. It is, as I say, essentially irrational.

kidmugsy

Linton wrote: »

Sure there are Armageddon scenarios which could cause massive rises in the death rate. That is the only thing that could prevent average life expectancy continuing to increase.



Any advances in medical science will add to life expectancy, so offsetting to some extent the rather less likely in my view disaster possibilities.

Your first point is merely windy assertion and your second ignores, for example, the possibility that some medical advances might yet prove deleterious. You don't know and I don't know but at least I acknowledge that I don't know.

hcb42

mumps wrote: »

Just thought I have also had a pay freeze for 2.5 years. Can't see that changing in the near future.

A lot of us are in that situation unfortunately, state of the economy etc. In fact I will have gone 4 years myself.



The bottom line on the pensions side is that we are an ageing population, living longer, and we have to work longer to pay for that time in retirement. No one likes it unfortunately, but the reality is action needed to be taken, and like anything, some people will have a shorter period of adjustment.

I am 44,F, and started my first FT "real" job, with final salary pension etc in Oct 1987 at age 19. I remember reading back then that for employees joining the scheme after November 1987, female retirement ages would be the same as mens. Obviously a work pension, not the government scheme, but a clear early indication that I would not be retiring at age 60 and pension reform was inevitable.

mumps

hcb42 wrote: »

A lot of us are in that situation unfortunately, state of the economy etc. In fact I will have gone 4 years myself.



The bottom line on the pensions side is that we are an ageing population, living longer, and we have to work longer to pay for that time in retirement. No one likes it unfortunately, but the reality is action needed to be taken, and like anything, some people will have a shorter period of adjustment.

I am 44,F, and started my first FT "real" job, with final salary pension etc in Oct 1987 at age 19. I remember reading back then that for employees joining the scheme after November 1987, female retirement ages would be the same as mens. Obviously a work pension, not the government scheme, but a clear early indication that I would not be retiring at age 60 and pension reform was inevitable.

Yes we all knew about the first changes, the problem for many women in my age group is they have imposed a second change with little time for us to adjust. I think the two changes make this really difficult as whatever I or other women my age say about the second change we get the first change quoted back to us.

Dunroamin

gingerkat wrote: »

We had pensions in place, but redundancy due to company closures (twice) stopped them in their tracks and the subsequent growth has been pathetic. What should have been final salary schemes died with the companies and the totals are risible.

Between changes to the SPA and the fiasco over private pensions, so many people have suffered a double whammy. 15 years may sound like a long time, but if you pay into a pension fund for only 15 to 20 years, the payments have to be huge if they are to make any difference. It takes much longer than that to build up a worthwhile pension. It's simply not a practical option to put every penny into a late-start pension scheme.

Surely one of the advantages of an increased pension age is that it gives you longer to pay into a private or occupational pension?

Linton

kidmugsy wrote: »

Your first point is merely windy assertion and your second ignores, for example, the possibility that some medical advances might yet prove deleterious. You don't know and I don't know but at least I acknowledge that I don't know.

The people whose death will determine the life expectancy figure in 20 years time are already mostly aged around their 60's now - that's simple mathematics. Barring a new deadly infectious disease, a third world war or some other really cataclysmic event, their life expectancy is already largely fixed by their genes and what they have done for the past 60 years. And what they have done for the past 60 years has on average been less deleterious to health than those dying today. One important example is that 40 years ago nearly half the adult population smoked, now its down to about 20%: figures from here. So even assuming no medical advances average life expectancy will increase until a large majority of the population are no longer at risk of smoking related illnesses.

Some medical advances may well prove deleterious, but unless it's a medication that is applied to a sizable % of the population with catastrophic ill effects that have not yet been seen it's pretty irrelevant to the figures. To postulate that medical advances from here on will overall be deleterious to life expectancy seems close to a tin foil hat prediction.

Of course one doesnt know anything for absolute certainty about a time as close as tomorrow or even the next ten minutes. Does that stop one making reasoned predictions and acting on them with a very good chance of being right?

jamesd

kidmugsy wrote: »

Your first point is merely windy assertion and your second ignores, for example, the possibility that some medical advances might yet prove deleterious. You don't know and I don't know but at least I acknowledge that I don't know.

Have you even looked at the study I pointed you to?

Start by looking at the Ischaemic heart disease line in this table and observe the way the death rate from that form of heart disease is correlated with smoking. Now look at graph F1 from another study and observe the rapid drop in smoking since 1950 along with the corresponding decrease in lung cancer death rate (which you've seen from the first table is also correlated with heart disease death rate).

The simple fact is that smoking increased in the period before 1950 then decreased and the effect on mortality correlates with both prevalence and duration of smoking, for both heart disease and lung cancer.

This is not the sole cause but if you're after causes, it's one of the big ones for both parts of the story you've presented.

It's certainly possible that smoking rates could increase or that other things that are similarly deadly could happen but that's not likely to substantially reverse the reducing mortality rate trends unless it's a truly dramatic event. Which isn't impossible, just unlikely.

atush

the possibility that some medical advances might yet prove deleterious.

sorry, but struggling to think of a single medical advance that has been 'deleterious' to LE.

I can think of a few (such as gender selection of children) that are and have been very bad for female populations in the developing world. China and India have ticking time bombs of too few women and girls of marrying age.

kidmugsy

"Barring a new deadly infectious disease ... other really cataclysmic event": it's very easy to imagine a new viral disease that stops well short of "cataclysmic" and yet kills a lot of people. The Spanish Flue did after WWI, for example. To assume that life expectancy must keep roaring ahead seems to me to be just thoughtless complacency.

jamesd

Some of the COX-2 NSAIDS may have had a deleterious effect, increasing the chance of heart attacks and strokes. But it's a fairly small effect, not a massive one, and the population most affected was already relatively old, since arthritis is a major use case for them.

Thalidomide was another one that had somewhat broader consequences and as a result of that we have more caution about drug use in pregnant women and children.

Kidmugsy, such things are possible, but for contrast note that the England and Wales death rate is the lowest its ever been. See the overall England and Wales death count of around half a million a year and the long term downward trend. It's not impossible for something to upset that - say BSE long term consequences or something related to AIDS but more readily transmitted, or an unusually potent flu. But to have a long term effect on death rates it can't be a one-off event, it needs to be something ongoing. Like smoking or obesity, perhaps.