They are doing. When the pension system was created retirement age was roughly equal to life expectancy. Life expectancy went up but retirement age never did, creating these super-long retirements for healthy people who could easily still work. That is where a lot of the wealth newly created by technological progress went.
This is a nice outlook from a vacuum. The reality is those perfectly healthy elderly people are still going to struggle to compete with the younger workforce who will be anything from more physically/mentally apt to just simply cheaper. So they’re probably going to be forced into retirement without the means to actually do it.
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
Older people can charge whatever price they want for their work. They can even undercut the young by exploiting their high rates of home ownership and receipt of pensions. Where I grew up there was a DIY supermarket famous for employing mostly retirees or older workers. And the elderly have the benefit of experience - there's a meme that employers don't want that, but it's not true. Employers love experience. What they don't want are bolshie activists who create trouble. Plenty of people out there who are willing to trade cooperation and experience for salary, and can thus easily outcompete youngsters who might be willing to do what's asked but don't have the experience to do it well.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
