[felipeerias]

If pensions depend exclusively on what each person has contributed during their working years, then lowering the retirement age might theoretically help young people by opening up more senior positions for them.

However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

In Spain, for example, the social security has a large structural deficit that gets covered by large taxes on salaries, taking money from other social services, and sovereign debt.

In other words, young workers are forced to support retirees through means that make it much harder for them to build a future of their own.

This system is kept in place because pensioners are a huge 1-issue voting block that no political party wants to antagonise. I believe that this is somehow downstream of cultural changes that have made all of society more individualistic and self-centred, incapable to work together for a common future.

[davidgay]

> However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

If one accepts this hypothesis, then raising the retirement age is good for all previously-working people, as they now have less people to support and more workers providing that support...

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Taken to its logical conclusion one could even argue that ending government backed retirement pensions entirely and letting people make their own decisions is the best idea.

Some people might plan to work until the day they drop, which is obviously a laudable goal. It's good to contribute to the economy.

Others may purchase an annuity for a target date years or decades in the future, which pay out in basically the same way as social security tends to.

Some (maybe most) would just save more for retirement, because they know if they don't no one will.

Realistically I suspect most people would hedge their bets dynamically go for a combination of these things. Which isn't all that different from the current system, where SS despite being over 20% of the federal budget is considered by most to be woefully inadequate even in the current day for a retirement plan.