Old people in Japan should commit mass suicide says Yale professor
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Hmmh. I'm not very educated on Estonia but I believe you're also amongst the European countries with very low fertility rates. I'm not a big fan of US American ideas about society but you have a good point with the 401k. The tax exemption is a nice idea. And I also think the current workforce shouldn't pay for the current pensioners. It should be a fund and an investment.
By the way, the americans also pay like 10%-15% for their retirement if the internet is correct. So your 12% doesn't look far off if that's the entire number. But I'm likely missing something here.
And there's more. Demographics also weighs down on a healthcare system and maybe a few other things as well.
Demographics also weighs down on a healthcare system and maybe a few other things as well.
Yeah, they quadrupled the cost of ER visits here, from 5 EUR to 20 EUR, to stop people from going, as the system isn't doing too well. Supposedly one reason is that a lot of people go for no reason (which is funny because the stereotype is that an Estonian man doesn't get a single checkup unless his wife orders him to)
Anyway
I’m not a big fan of US American ideas about society but you have a good point with the 401k. The tax exemption is a nice idea. And I also think the current workforce shouldn’t pay for the current pensioners. It should be a fund and an investment.
Long ass rant incoming
We have something similar in Estonia tbh. Used to be mandatory for people born after a certain year, but now you can opt out and if you do you can't rejoin for 10 years which is even worse.
Essentially, 2% (now upgradable to 4 or 6 voluntarily) of your pre-tax salary goes to a fund of your choice, and the government puts in another 4% (comes from your own social tax - if you opt out of the system, your employer pays 4 percentage points less social tax).
The conservatives delivered on their promise of bringing everyone freedom and making the formerly mandatory fund opt-out, so 23% of people who had those funds, withdrew everything immediately (you can withdraw 3 times a year and 152k people aka 23% of people this affected, did so in the first withdrawal period). By now it's over 250k withdrawals. What effect did this have on society? Well, property prices that already rose during covid, rose even more obviously as a lot of people used newly unlocked funds to make a down payment on a mortgage (understandable use case tbh). Secondly, it means that in the future, all these people are dependent entirely on the national pension system, so either they're completely fucked, or we're going to have to start collecting more money off the people who DO work.
Personally I plug my numbers into my bank's pension prognosis calculator and assume there's a 6% rate of returns (low for a composite fund consisting of multiple index ETFs I'd say) and I maximize my contribution at 6%, it tells me more than half my eventual pension is going to be from the now-voluntary fund, called the "second pillar". The first pillar, or national pension, contributes less than half. This is based on the assumption that the national pension keeps rising at the same rate as it has been.
If I were to choose to max out tax-free contributions into the third pillar as well (this one has no government matching, but does come with deferred taxation (you get to claim back on your tax return) and once you're old enough, you get to withdraw the funds with a smaller income tax rate, or get monthly payouts, also with smaller income tax rate), that would actually overshadow the prognosis for the second pillar, making the national pension less than 30% of my total pension. Assume a 10% return (average long term return of the S&P 500 for an example), and my prognosis is 8x that of the national (first pillar) pension prognosis.
So the question is, how are the people who get a third or less of what I should theoretically get, going to live? Am I going to have to pay more taxes out of my pension to fund those who volunteered out of a system where they were going to get tax-free investments with free government matching?
With forced investments, I feel we literally were going to have close to the best of both worlds: Universal coverage AND self-funded retirement.
The constitution says that everyone HAS to be guaranteed a retirement, so either the young are going to pay significantly more tax (disguised as "employer-paid" taxes of course), or our retirees will live on scraps. All because the conservatives delivered on their populist promise of letting people live better today at the expense of tomorrow.
All those prognoses are of course only predictions based on 1) national pensions rising, 2) my salary rising (the model actually uses a smaller YoY raise than I normally get in my career), 3) global stockmarkets not going to absolute shit. So it could all go wrong and maybe my retirement will also be worth nothing. But just in case, I shifted my funds to one that includes more EU based ETFs and fewer US based ones.
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You first, buddy
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Orrrr (and this applies to most western countries in the near future too) they could maybe kinda consider not creating conditions in which its fucking impossible to have kids?
As someone in a western country now inconceivable! Heck we still have a good portion of Americans who complain about the living standards but will stay home in November or actively vote for things like deporting immigrants like that magically fixes the over arching problem
56 is the median age for home buyers in 2025 and it’s been this way for a very long time.
We’re as doomed as Japan honestly we just happen to encourage immigration lol. So I agree with you.
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Pro-life website. The article is probably not worth reading lmao.
wrote last edited by [email protected]EUTHANASIA / ASS SUICIDE
Their proofreading skills check out.
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Actual Japanese here, even within the dark humor context, I wholeheartedly agree with Yusuke Narita.
It's precisely the gerontocracy in Japan why the nation is heading extremely far right. The aging oppressive population needs to retire, vacate, and leave the younger generation capable of making their choices. We are the lowest GDP first nation because of elders oppressing.
I'm glad Yusukeさん is in the 🇺🇲, but I’m afraid he’ll be deathcamped soon.
I'm thankful 28 folks read the article correctly. Fuck oppression.
People tend to conservadorism as they age, due to cognitive decline and loss of plasticity of the brain. It's a global phenomenon and usually make them make bad decisions in regards to what's best for the public or public interest.
That's why I think there must be age limit to occupy public lidership roles.
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Does he see the same solution for old people everywhere, or just Japan? Seems like anyone can become a professor nowadays. There used to be standards, dammit!
Being generous to him, few places have such a stereotype of people being willing to take his advice as Japan. By which I mean, for 90% of the world, stating his opinion is even more pointless.
On The Other Hand, maybe he just wanted to try to get people to do it for his own gratification, and picked the most vulnerable targets he could think of.
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I know this is meant to be a joke but it is incentive.
We you meaning "pertinent" or "appropriate"? Incentive has always been a noun in my experience.
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We you meaning "pertinent" or "appropriate"? Incentive has always been a noun in my experience.
*insensitive
️no idea what I was thinking
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*insensitive
️no idea what I was thinking
Your subconscious was farming those up-doots.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Aren't we all committing mass suicide already tho? I mean, have you looked at earth lately? I mean I want to kill myself as much as the next person, maybe more, but if we are ranking demographics that should go first, my vote is for the rich not just the elderly
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Aren't we all committing mass suicide already tho? I mean, have you looked at earth lately? I mean I want to kill myself as much as the next person, maybe more, but if we are ranking demographics that should go first, my vote is for the rich not just the elderly
It's more of a murder/suicide
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It's more of a murder/suicide
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yes you are right. I think there is a bell curve of murder culpability that starts at jeff bezo's wedding and ends at children starving to death.
No that's wrong bell curves measure the mean and that would just be the working class. Idk what I'm trying to describe. Jeff bezos should volunteer to lead the first human expedition to set foot on the sun. There makes sense now -
Oh yes! Anything but immigration!
But seriously, I feel like this is the broad sentiment of Japanese and the non-Japanese alike. Anti- immigration right applaud Japan for "keeping their country theirs" (as if ethnic Japanese aren't the ones who came later and displaced the local Ainus already living there), and not going on supposed national suicide, unlike the West. Not having enough babies is tantamount to suicide anyway. The narrative then becomes: either allow immigration and go on national and cultural suicide; or don't allow immigration and not have enough babies, which is still considered national suicide. Either way is committing national suicide.
I am not naive to think that immigration has no baggage; but at the same time, if countries want to increase birth rate, then increase the wages and standard of living for young people and families to encourage more people to marry and raise families. However, the elites aren't going to do the former because they don't want to disappoint their shareholders. If they don't want to do that, then allow more immigration, which they also don't want to do.
I completely sympathize with the Japanese view about immigration. Their society has a lot going for it which is held up by the culture. And diversity would lead to a tragedy of the commons in many cases, like keeping public spaces clean.
However, sacrificing your elders is not exactly Japan’s culture either.
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Aren't we all committing mass suicide already tho? I mean, have you looked at earth lately? I mean I want to kill myself as much as the next person, maybe more, but if we are ranking demographics that should go first, my vote is for the rich not just the elderly
In the grande scheme of things, philosophically speaking, maybe.
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Does he see the same solution for old people everywhere, or just Japan? Seems like anyone can become a professor nowadays. There used to be standards, dammit!
Remember ‘dinosaurs’ by Jim henson. Yeet grandma in the swap
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In the grande scheme of things, philosophically speaking, maybe.
Well that works for me. The life of the mind is all I have anyway.
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Aren't we all committing mass suicide already tho? I mean, have you looked at earth lately? I mean I want to kill myself as much as the next person, maybe more, but if we are ranking demographics that should go first, my vote is for the rich not just the elderly
no
proof provided in your continued posting on lemmy
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Does he see the same solution for old people everywhere, or just Japan? Seems like anyone can become a professor nowadays. There used to be standards, dammit!
wrote last edited by [email protected]it's a lot less controversial when phrased as euthanasia should be an option as a part of palliative care ...
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no
proof provided in your continued posting on lemmy
Oh that's just to ameliorate the insanity; I'm fully resigned to the inevitability of my death and factual nature of my contribution, however minor it may be, to our collective demise
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Pro-life website. The article is probably not worth reading lmao.
Doesn't sound very "pro-life" to me. But then their self-identification was always a severe misnomer.
