Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Sacha,
in a particular time and context, yes
As all memories are. I don't have any of those about being elderly, though.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Richard Aston,
Your call for a " inter generational consensus" is a good one - one place to start - you have already Ben - is finding real respect and aroha - elder to younger, younger to elder.
I don't exactly know where to start. I guess the first one would be simply to admit that there is a problem with the current model, and to begin discussing what retirement is, what it means to people, and why it should be funded at all.
One for me is collective rather than individual.
That seems quite basic to the idea of all benefits. It's why the individualist focused parties are always against them.
one view is how will we look after our elders? Together. In harsher times we threw them out to die in the cold but lets be clear these are not harsh times by any means.
Yes, we have come a long way since the 1930s. Which makes the current crisis all the more urgent. If we've moved from the idea of destitution as a solution, what's our current definition of an acceptable life for those who can't provide it for themselves?
I think an important question is to look at the value that the elderly DO provide, too. Obviously this is different for different people, but some generalizations can be made.
It's clearly not about their enormous powers of body, for starters. What does their long life give them that the young don't possess in such quantity?
Bearing witness to history is another straightforward one, they're the people who saw it happen, that can still speak of it themselves. For instance:
As a "boomer" myself I struggle to speak for my generation - it wasn't - isn't - that unified. My friends and I were out protesting on the streets against the rise of individualism and materialism, against the rise of the economics-is-all model. Against my parents generation and my own. I was spat on for having long hair and many of us eventually jumped ship into communes and alternative lives as an antidote to despair. There was no consensus then.
It seems important to me that we remember that before we start hating on elders. My own parents were very angrily against tertiary fees, and especially against student loans. They did all they could to stop me and my siblings from getting one. Ironically, only with my supposedly wayward brother did they actually succeed. My father was furiously against asset sales and the privatization of education. And both protested vigorously against racist rugby.
Wisdom? This is a bit inspecific, but certainly an elderly perspective is something only the elderly can have. I can only imagine what it is like to be old, whereas they can remember what it was like to be middle aged.
Strong attachment to place. Typically old people are going to stick around where they are. Their roots are there. Moving the elderly is like transplanting an old plant, a shock they are often much diminished by. If it has to happen, it should be done with great care.
Dealing with suffering and loneliness. Many of their friends have died, their parents have died, their grandparents long dead. And they're often in physical pain and exhaustion, nearly constantly. We all have some of that, but it only continues to get more so as we get older. Inspiration on how to deal with that may come from them. I think we all learn about how to get old from our elders, usually picking the most graceful or engaged ones to model around. Yet it's easy to understand why so many are grumpy old buggers.
Any others? I don't want to make the whole list! I'm just getting tired here.
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Hard News: Schnapp Election, in reply to Russell Brown,
Also happy to be noted. I thought my effort lacked punch, and didn't hold too much hope. This 140 character business is taking some getting used to.
But I am coming around to Twitter. It's good for joking around, and a continual stream of interesting links.
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Cracker: Spotted, in reply to Richard Aston,
I remember the Ayn Rand wave - those people were scary, their shiny eyes and brutally cold logic turned me right off.
Yes, I was in there myself, and I wonder if it was profound moment of generational disconnect. "How the fuck did my son turn into a fascist?" would probably have been passing through my left wing parents' minds. And the silly thing about it all is that we little realized that by talking up neoliberalism we were actually talking our own parents out of feeling like they owed us anything, that of course neoliberalism plays into the hands of property owners.
There has long been a saying along the lines of "if you're not left wing by the time you're 20 you've got no soul. If you're still left wing when you're 40 you've got no brain". To me, it's quite the opposite. I felt that the saying for my generation should be "If you haven't considered being right wing by the time you're 20 you've got no brain, and if you're still right wing by the time you're 40 you've got no soul".
Perhaps that is because we're all having kids so much later now. Somehow I was so much more of a breadhead when I was a kid. I don't know if the times fostered that. It probably comes from having left wing parents. To choose the left was reflexive, required no thought. We really did flail around to find an alternative. Many chose environmentalism, but it turned many of us off precisely because it looked like being a hippy, something that had been cool in our parents time. It really did take the wisdom accrued over time to actually see what the traditional left was all about.
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We need the mass figures, but we also need individuals' experiences.
Quite. Islander's experiences aren't that unusual. The impoverished elderly exist, and they're part of the reason I don't like the term "intergenerational theft" and similar nasty connotations. I can't hate on my elders, however much they're the fiscally lucky generation, mostly by their own hands, and those of their elders.
I don't think how things have turned out was a conscious and devious plan of an entire generation. At least half of the baby boomers were pretty left wing, liberal, forward thinking. And the right wing ones weren't all that way just because they're bastards. Many genuinely believed that their principles worked better for all of society, including those younger than them.
At the end of the day, their crime is that they were wrong, that this path is unsustainable. Not just the purely economic path, but everything that drives it. Rather than blame, and promises of reprisals once they are out of power, the debate absolutely must include them, capture them, convince them. I know they're old, but that doesn't make them incapable of seeing reason, seeing that an unsustainable path towards economic ruin isn't really what all of their principles were for.
Also, my own generation is not without any blame. We have certainly lived on borrowed time too. The property boom would not have spiked as much as it did if younger generations weren't buying the houses on crazy loans from banks. We weren't forced to buy property like it was running out, putting it well beyond our own children. Generation Y doesn't even talk about buying property, it's just out of the question for most of them. And my own kids, whatever generation they are (Z?) are obviously as blameless as all children are, and it's well within our power to produce a better world for them.
Now is the time for sense to prevail and blame to be laid aside, and the underlying basic principles to reach some kind of intergenerational consensus, otherwise what's happening is only going to intensify.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Bart Janssen,
One of the problems I've heard mentioned about that massive pool of money is that there aren't a huge number of places to invest the money in New Zealand and still get a decent return.
There's plenty of traditional business. Much though I agree that science is a driver of change, it's not what people are mostly doing, nor could they. Most people do far more prosaic things, because other people want those things. Like serving coffee, or milking cows, or working sheet metal, or teaching kids, or selling advertising, etc etc. Some of those funnel into businesses listed on the stock exchange, and more local capital would be highly stimulatory.
I tend to agree that small sized companies invested in large numbers does tend to pay off more. But I also think more money invested in NZ into businesses has to make it easier for the small cap stocks to find their way to capital. That includes science/tech startups.
There should always be base funding straight from tax for scientific education and research.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But I do not believe that any such transformation will come from current economic theory, practiced by both National and Labour. So given the current economic structure I believe we should plan on not being able to retire 'till 67 or 70.
I think Labour's plank could very well be transformative. Compulsory savings in Australia have only been going for 20 years and they have over a trillion dollars socked away. We have hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in capital, the rising value of which incurs no tax at all. That can be transformed very rapidly with CGT. There are a great many other measures besides these that could be tried too.
Yes, the mainstream parties are generally conservative. But I'm taking a lot of heart that ideas as like CGT and compulsory savings have in a very short time moved from being unthinkable to being things we're discussing the ups and downs of. It confirms my view that we're in a teachable moment, and that the lesson could be from the ground up. I don't see why regressive ideas like raising the pension age need to figure, if we're complaining of a lack of vision from the major parties. That one shows a total lack of vision and compassion, in my opinion, and is simply a bribe to the baby boomers who won't have to suffer it. I actually don't think the baby boomers, on the whole, would agree with it anyway, so it's foolishly divisive, pissing off Generation X who are very soon going to start taking control of this joint.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to linger,
Should pensions then be linked, not to age per se, but to number of years in the workforce (counting from earliest job held)?
That discounts all* childcare and homemaking generally. An extremely female-unfriendly twist.
*ETA: Amend to "all unpaid"
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Absent of such a transformation of our economy I am fairly well convinced by the math that the retirement age has to rise.
I don't believe the economy can't be transformed. Quite the opposite, I think it will transform, whether we like it or not, and can't believe any math that thinks it can project human economics out 22 years.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I must make it clear that I'm not against pensions, and certainly not advocating they be removed altogether. It might not have been clear that I think lifting the retirement age is wrong, and my alternative wasn't abolishing pensions. Is that clear enough now?
We don't pay taxes to save for our retirement, we pay taxes in part to support those incapable of supporting themselves, whether it is because age or infirmity or disability.
I don't agree with your manifesto. I think some of the point of super was that taxes were saved for retirement, and it has been disastrous that no actual saving were ever made for it. Universal pensions are not given because the elderly can't support themselves. They have most of the wealth in this country, and are perfectly capable of selling some, or even all of it, to pay for their retirement, in hundreds of thousands of cases.
Pensions are given for reasons much more complex than you suggest. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, which is why I'm very happy this conversation is being had now.
At the same time, there needs to be a solution, so it warrants the debate and if it comes before the House
Absolutely. It's very much time for this, and there's nothing wrong with raising the idea of raising retirement ages, if only to make it clear what pensions are for, by elucidating the thinking behind them.
They have been in part a recognition of long service, a form of gratitude to our elders who fought for their freedoms, gave us our lives, our upbringing, our education, and often a lot of support after that. It is an acknowledgement that their ability to contribute to the most hard out productivity is declining, and also that by remaining in a competitive workforce they are often in the way of younger people who have considerable ambitions for business beyond the next few years, who have real reason to upskill because the skills will be valuable for a long time, and, simply put, whose time to run things has come. They are still valued, but pensions are offered so that they can pop off the labour FIFO queue and let kids in at the other end if they so wish. Which a great many do wish. Most people have declining interest in fully committed engagement with their work in their 60s, because they see the end of their lives approaching, and wonder if time in the office was what it was really all about.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the above, but I think it is a very real sentiment amongst the elderly, and some of the reason they vote for pensions. It's not all about them, some of it really is because it makes the system work better, and if it's better for them, that's good too.
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