In many countries around the world, women enter retirement earlier than men: typically, the difference set is about 5 years. As women already leave work for their pensions, men remain part of the workforce.
As the retirement age grows for everyone, men thereby remain the most affected: with an average male life expectancy of 70,7 years, an average man is going to see about 5,5 years of retirement, as compared to 12,5 years for women that have both lower retirement age and higher life expectancy.
The most common official explanation is tying it to the average life expectancy; as people begin to live longer, they start to draw money from pension funds for longer, which means the rest of the population has to pay more in the form of taxes to refill them.
So, the point is exactly to minimize the amount of time people draw from the fund, reducing the strain put on it. Many have pointed out that it is possible to sustain the pension funds as they are, but this would require higher levels of taxation on the rich, and the rich really don’t like to be taxed and are likely to flee any given economy in search of a place that will tax them less.
This seems to be a flaw in the concept of pensions, not an indication that retirement age should be increased.
Pensions exist on the assumption that there will always be an increasing number of workers paying into them over time and that the number of workers will never shrink. They also assume that pensions will be taken for n number of years after retirement before the pensioner dies.
All these things are bad assumptions. They’re actually just wishful thinking!
A better system would be something like Social Security but instead of paying out based on how much you put in it would just pay out a universal income no matter how much you worked or how much money you made.
It should be a reward for reaching retirement age: You put in your 40 years or whatever time seems reasonable and from then on you’re guaranteed a minimum income.
Not everyone works. Not everyone pays into the system at all but this is fine! Should mothers who raised the next generation retain zero benefits for their work? Should their benefits be reduced because they gave up work for decades in order to raise children? No, that would be unjust and stupid.
If the rich don’t want to pay into these benefits they can go live somewhere else. That’s fine! It’s not like they’re spending their wealth anyway! If the wealth of the rich only grows that means they’re extracting it from the economy and not contributing!
It’s called a pyramid scheme.