We don’t need to delay retirement

In today’s Autumn Statement the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer announces an increase in the retirement age. The young people of today will have to work until 70. I shall try to explain why it is completely unnecessary.

There has been much discussion, since the financial crash, of the ‘need’ for people to stay in paid employment longer before receiving retirement pay. The reasons usually given are these.

1)

We are living longer so people receive their pensions for longer, and these have to be paid for somehow.

2)

Elderly people need more care from the health and social services.

3)

There is increasing economic competition from other countries.

(3) is utterly iniquitous. Who decided that we have to devote ever-increasing efforts to economic competition against other countries? Most of us do not have the slightest desire to do any such thing. The very idea is an invention of the ruling classes. When other countries threaten us we need to do something about it, but we are not under threat. We have international trading and financial systems that oblige us to keep up with innovations in other parts of the world, but we don’t have to have those systems. We could do with less competition, more cooperation.

The other two reasons are true: we are living longer and the elderly need more care. However the amounts of work involved are small fry compared with the total amount done. The real problem is that we have inherited an attitude to work which has developed since the Second World War and now makes no sense at all.

At the end of the war there was a shortage of jobs and a shortage of resources. What was needed was a system to get people doing the things that would meet other people’s needs. They did it by a variety of means, including rationing. The way they measured success was by economic growth.

Economic growth means simply that the Gross Domestic Product is getting bigger. The statisticians add up everything everybody in the country has spent and everything they have been paid. If the total exceeds last year (offsetting inflation) we have economic growth. If it’s less than last year, we have recession or depression. It’s that blunt an instrument. As a tool for measuring whether people’s needs were being met it served a purpose from the end of the war until the middle of the 1970s. Until then there was a rough correlation between economic growth and improved quality of life. Since then, economic growth has not improved the quality of life. There are two main reasons.

1)

It only measures the total amounts spent and earned, not how the money is distributed. As long as the distribution of wealth was comparatively equal, with a top rate of income tax at 95%, an increase in the total amount of money in circulation might well benefit large numbers of people. Now, with rapidly increasing inequality, it does not. If the economy grows, and the increase of wealth accrues only to those who already have too much, nobody benefits.

2)

It only measures how much money we spend and earn, and there is a limit to the value of spending and earning. When we have enough physical things, most of us prefer to devote our efforts to other dimensions of life. Going for walks, enjoying the company of friends and meditating do not normally contribute to the economy but they often contribute to the quality of life.

Successive governments have responded to this obvious fact by inventing ways to keep the economy increasing, even to the detriment of the quality of life. To make economic growth the be-all and end-all of national economic policy is absurd; but we live in an age of absurdities. New technologies keep putting people out of work. We could have a society which benefits from them by reducing the amount of work we all have to do; instead, unemployment goes up until new jobs are created. The creation of new jobs is considered a good thing because people without jobs have very little money and count as welfare scroungers.

So we have grown used to the see-saw between new technologies dispensing with jobs, and new jobs which previously didn’t need doing at all. The ‘need’ for them is an artifice created by the commitment of successive governments to economic growth. To put pressure on individuals to contribute to the economy, the poor are deliberately impoverished to make them look for more and more paid jobs.

What have we lost?

1)

A proper balance between work and leisure, in which everybody has something to contribute but nobody’s contribution is excessive.

2)

A proper sense of vocation, in which everybody’s job can be seen to be a contribution to the common good.

3)

A proper distribution of the good things life provides, so that everybody’s needs are met and nobody has too much.

As is so often the case, we cannot challenge the dominant values of our society without also challenging their atheist foundations. What do I mean by ‘proper’? I mean that there is such a thing as a good life, which brings sustainable happiness to oneself and to others, and reflection on the nature of life will help us to see how we have been designed for it. If, on the other hand, there is no such thing – if my idea of what is proper is just my idea, because we all create our own values – then there is no alternative to the present direction of travel. The values ‘we’ create are bound to be the values of the ruling classes. Our future will be one of ever-increasing slavery, as we are forced to spend more and more of our lives offering sacrifices in the worship of today’s dominant god, Economic Growth.

There is an alternative.

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