7 Comments

• Duncan 4th Mar '11 - 11:05am

  Interesting in itself. But as I have said previously on here it would be nice for the Lib Dems to engage about the debates surrounding the so-called Boomer generation.

  The other parties have at least engaged, that it is likely to prove divisive is no reason to say nothing.

• Timak 4th Mar '11 - 12:23pm

  My grandmother was one of 10 children.

  Their “average” age of death was about 30 but 6 died before the age of 5 and the 4 who survived all lived to about 75.

  Generally the human body lives for about 3 score years and 10 – just like they did 2000 years ago.

  Still if you tweet that enough you might be able to campaign for lower pensions.

• Matthew 4th Mar '11 - 12:41pm

  Good statistic Mark but misleading for the point (I assume) it is meant to be make.

  A large part of the reason the average age of death for men was 42 (I read the stats correctly) is, as Timak says, due to the high death of babies/children. The life expectancy of someone who was aged 14,so entering workforce, was about 66, so 1 year over retirement age. So still a big difference, but not as big as it seems.

• Stuart Mitchell 4th Mar '11 - 6:45pm

  Going beyond the average, there is a large disparity in life expectancy between social classes and areas – when you look at the “good health” figures, the gap is even more dramatic, with professional people enjoying around 12 years more good health than manual workers.

  In other words, people at the bottom only live for a few years beyond retirement, and are likely to have failing health before they draw any pension at all. This is why I am dead against any increase in retirement age – such an increase would bring new meaning to the word “regressive”.

• Mark Pack 4th Mar '11 - 11:13pm

  Matthew: There are of course two ways of reading the implication of the number – the negative (oh no! pension funding crisis!) and the positive (progress!). I find it enlightening to see which of the two people assume I must be intending by using it; says quite a lot about them often 🙂

• Ian Sanderson (RM3) 5th Mar '11 - 11:57am

  There may be a lot of reasons for increased life span, but they include better public health, improvements in medicines and surgery and wider availability of best practice to the population.
  What we do have to do is find a better pattern to careers and to make good use of older workers in the workplace. This has been an issue for decades. However, shielding behind a fixed retirement age has been a technique for putting off personnel management decisions because “old Jones retires next year”.
  The accepted way of proceeding has been to promote a worker throughout his career, so that the peak of the career is achieved just before retirement. It ignores changes in personal powers or outside pressures that may affect the worker’s performance at any time, but sometimes with age. The conventional response to this has been to downvalue the worker when this occurs. A better approach would be to value a worker for their qualities rather have esteem attached solely to grade and salary.
  Another problem is ageism; sometimes people are uneasy working with those of a different age-group, especially if the subordinate is older. This has to be addressed.
  My essential point is that we should not see this only as a financial problem, but also as an opportunity for better personal relations, better use of people and better job satisfaction.

• Daniel Henry 6th Mar '11 - 8:43pm

  How hard would it be to have two seperate retirement ages?
  Perhaps lower it to 60 for someone who had done at least 20-30 years of manual work?
  And perhaps 70 for someone who’s worked more exclusively in white collar jobs?

  Though the means testing might turn out to be a bit of a nightmare…