The page I linked to actually has several columns for healthy life expectancy, with different definitions of “health”. I just picked the one on self-reported good health.
Other columns show:
no moderate or severe disabilities
no chronic diseases
good mental health
no “GALI(Global Activity Limitation Indicator) disabilities”, which apparently is a set of criteria used by Eurostat for “Healthy Life Years”, probably what is shown in the infographic you posted. But that column doesn’t go further back than 2018, so it doesn’t show much historical development yet.
I guess none of those definitions means exactly “healthy enough to work full-time” (from shoving pencils to climbing scaffolds), but the CBS data does show that increased life span correlates with increased healthy life span.
This is indeed a problem especially for some jobs. That’s why there are investigations on early retirement for such jobs after 45 working years, which many workers in those fields may reach in their early 60s.
For office jobs I think it depends on how valuable your experience is. If your job takes 1 week to learn for a newcomer, then yes, your employer would rather replace you with a 25 year-old. Then again, they could have done so 20 years earlier.
I agree with this, however we would need another indicator, WLE (working life expectancy) indicating how many years your cognitive and physical abilities allow you to work full-time and be competitive.
Obviously, WLE < HLE < LE. We know that HLE and LE are correlated, you seem to assume that WLE and HLE are correlated but this is not obvious.
I think it will be very difficult to come up with one number that fits all professions from concrete braider to notary. Or would we have one WLE per group of professions?
Collective employment agreements (negociated between worker unions an employer unions) in some branches here have regulations to reduce the work burden for older (~56+ yo) employees. For example, an increasing amount of payed leave, increasing reduction of night work, or reduced working time with less reduced salary and full private pension build-up.
Such things are not nationally regulated here by the government, but branch by branch by employers and unions.
Even if your experience is valuable, technology and new things are coming in way too fast. Could you suddenly learn to use a computer effectively if you were 60 back in the year 1998 if the job demanded that?
Let’s say that you are a designer, or an architect and suddenly they tell you “your hand-drawn plans are wonderful, but there is this thing called AutoCAD that we would like you to learn. It involves a mouse and a computer and a keyboard. No, not a live mouse. No, not a pocket calculator. No, not the musical instrument.” (rest assured this is not a totally imaginary dialogue)
You might be awesome and still be good at your job, but your mental capacity of learning new things is now much smaller. Along with your time and patience for it. Even on things you already know and like.
E.g. how likely do you think it is that you will go from 3 dan to 7 dan, when you are 65, even if you do put in the effort?
Now imagine someone telling you that it is time to hit the equivalent of 3 dan in chess and you being 65 and they tell you “hey, you are so good at Go which is harder, chess will be a breeze for you, eh?”
Now imagine that it is not your hobby, but your job, your income and your life depends upon you reaching 3 dan in chess, at 65.
Fun times, eh?
As far as I am concerned I know ain’t doing that and I think that now that we are younger, it would be very prudent to have alternative plans in case the age requirements go way too high or in case the pensions do not exist at all by then. Most of you live in more organised countries where you can at least have reasonable time to react or cope with any changes, so maybe you can be more calm about that, but here you honestly - and quite literally - do not know what the next day will bring, so you either prepare or you wake up one day and they tell you “oops, we changed our minds and that’s your problem now. Byeee!”
I don’t know how wide-spread this problem is, but yes, some senior workers who never kept up with advancing technology since they graduated would eventually encounter problems like that.
But the pension age here changed gradually from 65 to 67 from 2012 til 2024. I don’t think this relatively minor and slow change would cause a huge increase in problems like this. Even without raising the pension age this problem would exists.
The employer also has an obligation to keep their workers up-to-date with technology used at work, changing safety regulations and whatnot. It’s in the employer’s own interest to maintain effectiveness of their skilled workers, so I think they are generally not hesitant to do that (except companies involved in low skill work and maybe small companies that barely manage to stay afloat).
Still, some employees (many of them not even old) don’t like it when things change and avoid learning and using new technology. In that case maybe they can be transferred to a different job where their skills are still useful, while not depending on the new technology, or they can be retrained to do something else within the company. If there is no solution like that available, then I guess that employee may be laid off. Usually a judge (kantonrechter) will then obligate the employer to pay the employee at least some 3 months of salary as compensation.
There are worker shortages in many sectors here while unemployment is very low (3.5%), so employers are generally in competition with each other to attract and keep skilled workers and invest in maintaining/improving their skills. Unemployment here is actually highest among younger people, not older people.
I don’t know the situation in the Netherlands but in France, although the unemployment rate is also much higher among 15-25 year olds than among 50+ year olds,
the number of unemployed among 50+ year olds is higher. The reason is that not many 15-25 year olds are active (a large proportion are studying).
50+ unemployed people have been unemployed for 23 months on average, compared to 9 months for 15-25 year olds.
It seems to be similar here. Older employees don’t get laid-off much, but when they do and they lack education/skills that employers desire, they may stay unemployed for years.
From what I can find, currently 1% of our work force is long-term unemployed (2+ years), of which about 1/3 may be 55+ yo.
By itself, long-term unemployment may reduce their self-esteem and over time also erode skills they had, and employers tend to be more circumspect about hiring long-term unemployed, so they can get stuck in a vicious cycle.
Municipalities usually have programmes to help those people to find a job. And this is their own interest, because the municipality needs to pay them welfare when their unemployement benefit stops after 2 years. Unemployment benefits [70% of your last salary] are paid from a fund filled by all employers (i.e. not from taxes).
It depends. Apparently a 60+ hour work week is not uncommon in South Korea. That definitely seems like a rat race to me. An average work week in the Netherlands is ~30 hours.
The European country where people work relatively long weeks and also for many years (closest to a rat race?) seem to be Iceland with 38.6 * 45.8 = 1767 work score, compared to 30 * 41 = 1230 work score for the Netherlands, which seems to be a bit below average.
Or to just see a sneakpeek of what will happen to you. After all, can the fate be really changed?
What’s somewhat curious is that a lot of people seem to be fine with whatever’s going on. Even on what seems important issues millions of people give wrong answer, or more often don’t care. It’s as if tons of people embraced Jordan Peterson and are busy with their own rooms. I mean everyone reads news and such but then why relaxed attitude.
I remember meeting a former roommate of mine few years back. I already figured the country is going somewhere very wrong. And he was like, no, it’s going great, life is better and better. I wonder, doesn’t he see what’s going on around? So if there’s anything good about recent special operations is that it’s a very clear indication that we walked into a bog. “I told you!” I wanna scream. But actually nothing much changed and in all likelihood a lot of people didn’t change their mind. So they got me there, admittedly.
Greece is soon going to enter in its 14 year of “economic crisis” status, which - after all those years - should be called decline/decadence. A crisis is something fleeting that ends fast. 14 years is way beyond a “crisis”. But linguistics aside, what more can happen here?
We could collapse a bit more, I guess, but as the local saying goes “the wet cat doesn’t fear the rain as much”.
The “dry cats” however in other European countries might have a much harder time if what happened here in a 14-year span, knocks on their doors and needs to be implemented in a shorter timeframe.
War is not going to happen here in the foreseable future (even though there is fear-mongering each year about it, but that’s just to scare the old people to vote for some hard-liners), so I guess “business as usual” with the slow decay of the country on every level.
It’s as if tons of people embraced Jordan Peterson and are busy with their own rooms.
Don’t remind me of Wordsaladson … he got bored with his field and now has moved on to talk about everything in which he has no idea about, since he has a significant following of vapid morons that believe anything he says is gospel.
From religion, to economics, to fuel and renewable energy, to war, to AI, to geopolitics, to climate change.
On almost anything you might imagine, there is a Jordan Wordsaladson video about it and it is usually so ignorant that (combined with the comments from the viewers) it is bordering on the absurd.
Those are now the minority … hardly “everyone”.
Have you been to a funeral? What happens there? Most relatives gather round afterwards and drink coffee or some liquor and say to each other “aah, what is life?”, “we come and go”, “we live to die”, “we are wasting our time with every day trifles instead of focusing on what is important” and a lot of things along those lines.
And what do they do next day? Does anyone take all that and say “time to actually do something and change our lives for the better!”
Nope.
Why?
Daily life is a treadmill and the more things you take up, the less you can change/improve.
Mortgage, work timetables, investment, buildings, car payments, wife/husband, kids, parents, things you want, things other people want … those - and a lot more - are binding people to do the next day what they did the previous day.
And that answers your question.
You read the news.
They are important.
Life-altering important like the death of a relative.
But what can you really do? Nothing (most people think).
So they do exactly that and keep on with their lives and days.
As a very smart song about depression says:
“This is not how you planned it
Not the life you had in mind
Winding days have spiraled into years
And the past is long resigned”
[…]
Is it too late for a new day?
Is it too late to cross the line?
Is it too late for a new way
Shine down the light?
For a lot of people the answer is “yes, it is too late”.
The rise of people getting drunk or getting into therapy or strong medication to treat mental conditions, is not accidental. The futility of “the every day life” plays a huge part in it.
I looked up allowances for MPs and ministers in the Netherlands.
MPs get ~124k euro and ministers ~180k euro.
Modal income in the Netherlands is 40k euro, so MPs get about 3 times modal and ministers about 4.5 times modal.
You’ll typically make an MP level salary when you’re a senior accountant, a notary or a military general. You’ll typically make a minister level salary when you’re a medical specialist, a director of a large hospital or a captain on a commercial airline.
Those are undeniably good incomes, so some say national level politicians are only in it to line their own pockets (“zakkenvullers” = pocket-fillers). Then again, in the private sector you’ll find much higher salaries at the top levels. CEOs of larger companies can make millions per year. Even some TV presenters make much more money than MPs or ministers.
AFAICT there are no special pension benefits for MPs and ministers, for getting re-elected or otherwise. They do get some kind of unemployment benefit when their term ends and they are between jobs, but I feel it’s not extraordinarily better than the regular unemployment benefit (80% of allowance for up to 3 years vs 70% of salary for up to 2 years). In the private sector you can find more lucrative unemployment benefits at higher management levels, like 100% for up to 5 years.
There have been incidents in the past about some MPs making dubious expense claims, but investigative journalists seem to be quite keen on exposing such cases. Parliament usually deals with such cases by adjusting its own rules to make things more transparent and verifiable, trying to restore lost trust of the public.
I used the term “state” pension in earlier posts, but perhaps that is not a good label for the “universal” part of our pension system, because the state does not pay it from taxes or otherwise (in principle at least). The state merely provides the legal framework for it. This is similar to how some other systems are organised here, like unemployment benefits and (part of) public healthcare.
Such systems are all well and good, as long as income and expenditures for each fund are kept in balance. But with the universal pension fund, there has been a growing imbalance since 2000 (due to increasing life expectancy) and the state has been making up for the deficit ever since. At this point 5% of the state budget is taken up by this, which is pretty significant.
With health care, there is a similar system of various entities that fill “funds” to cover health care expenditures. The financial burden is shared between households, employers and the state, but the system is quite complicated. Below is a diagram of the money flows in our health care system. Numbers are millions of euros. Blue are financial contributors (households, employers, state) where the money comes from, green are health care providers where the money goes to. Purple are funds, orange are legal categories/channels.
During the past 20 years, the state’s health care financial obligations takes up a increasing portion of the state budget (due to changing demographics and advances in health care). In 2000 it was only 5% of the state budget, but in 2023 it has reached 27% of the state budget. And health care costs are expected to keep growing by around 3% per year in the coming decades.
I’m not an economist, but I expect some overhaul is needed in the coming decade to deal with this trend somehow before it breaks the state budget. This may give rise to protests and no doubt (new) populist parties that will call whoever governs and dares to do this nazis.
In France, the salary of an MP is 5841€/month (or 70k€/year). They used to have an advantageous pension system before 2018 but now they get the same benefits as other public servants. They get unemployment benefits, the amount depends on their situation but it cannot exceed 57% of their allowance for 36 months.
I can’t find information about benefits while in office (electricity bills, rent etc). Do they get their residential bills paid while in office?
They do in Greece, along with lots of other expenses, which explains the choice to become even a low-level politician instead of, say, remain a high-level hospital director.
Also, if they get elected and serve even for the shortest period, they get pensions, something that is impossible in the job market.
I’m no expert on this, but I don’t see how residential bills would relate to doing their job.
MPs can declare expenses made in relation to doing their work. But the rules for these tend to be more strict for Dutch MPs than for MEPs (for example). In fact there has been some outrage here about excessive benefits MEPs have, with abuse and lack of oversight. The Dutch population and journalists have a pretty low tolerance for fraud, corruption and abuse of tax-payer money.
But if an MP lives far from The Hague (like a 2+ hour drive), I can imagine it’s practical to rent some small living space near parliament to stay overnight and save travel time (MPs make long working days sometimes). I assume declaring bills for that as work-related expenses would be accepted if it’s just normal expenses for a regular studio apartment or something like that (but again, I’m not an expert, just extrapolating from what I’ve seen in the past). I think it’s similar to my employer sending me to do a 3-day course in Amsterdam: they would pay the course, a hotel for me to stay and travel costs (if they exceed normal commute expenses).
However I don’t think declaring bills for renting a luxurious mansion near The Hague would be accepted. And in the unlikely case it is accepted, journalists would find out quickly and call them out for it.
