Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: The Retirement Age

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: The Retirement Age: “Raising the retirement age is a strange prescription for countries suffering from mass youth unemployment…

…If you have a country — Greece, say, or France — where youth unemployment is very high, it’s strange to decide that raising the retirement age is the cure for your economic woes…. A jobless person in their twenties living on social assistance is a sad case. A jobless person in their sixties living on social assistance is retired, which is a perfectly respectable thing to be in life. Retired people are happy and unemployed people are sad…. Somebody has to work and pay the taxes so that others can not work.

Young people, generally, would rather have a job than a social assistance check whereas older people would rather have a social assistance check than a job. This is what makes it so odd to look at a country with high youth unemployment and decide that what’s needed is a higher retirement age…. The larger point is that raising the retirement age is an idée fixe of the global elite. I recently read an IMF report about Finland… a great country with a world-class education system, the #3 least-corrupt government… other strong fundamentals. But they’ve run into a very non-mysterious economic problem — Nokia has gone to shit. Somehow the IMF’s solution to this is that Finland should raise its retirement age…