Global Retirement Limbo: How the World Keeps Moving the Pension Goalposts
Raising the Bar on Senescence: How the World Decides When You’re Too Old to Be Useful
By Our Correspondent, presently between retirement homes in Geneva
GENEVA — Somewhere in the Swiss cantons, actuaries are chain-smoking over spreadsheets that predict when, precisely, the average citizen will shuffle off the mortal coil. Their findings, translated into policy, set the “state pension age” (SPA) — that magical threshold where the state decides you’ve officially exhausted your economic utility and may now be permitted to starve politely. Around the globe, governments are nudging that threshold upward with the delicacy of a pickpocket at a funeral.
In Japan, the SPA has already sprinted to 65, with talk of 70 being “aspirational” — a word that here means “good luck finding a centenarian barista willing to foam your cappuccino.” Tokyo’s logic is brutal but consistent: if the average citizen lives to 85, two decades of paid shuffleboard seems excessive. Meanwhile, the French threw a months-long tantrum when Macron proposed moving retirement from 62 to 64, as if two extra years of spreadsheets were a human-rights violation. (They eventually settled on 64, but only after the largest protest turnout since the invention of the baguette.)
Across the Atlantic, the United States keeps its SPA at 67 for anyone born after 1960, a date chosen with all the scientific rigor of a horoscope. Congress periodically threatens to raise it to 69 or 70, then remembers that elderly voters are both numerous and heavily armed. Instead, Washington performs the bipartisan ritual of “kicking the can down the road,” a sport at which it already holds the world record.
Emerging economies are not spared the arithmetic. Brazil’s Bolsonaro tried nudging retirement past 60 and was reminded, via nationwide riots, that Carnival is not the only time Brazilians know how to shut a city down. South Africa, where life expectancy still bears the scars of Apartheid and AIDS, keeps the SPA at 60 but quietly hopes most citizens will oblige by dying earlier — a cost-saving strategy economists delicately call “demographic self-selection.”
China, ever pragmatic, has adopted a gendered SPA: 60 for men, 50–55 for women, depending on whether you spent your best years soldering iPhones or merely supervising the soldering. Beijing now hints at parity — 65 for everyone — because nothing says equality like forcing grandma to tighten screws on a Lenovo assembly line until her knees give out.
The real dark comedy lies in the subtext. Governments insist raising the SPA is about “dignity in work” and “harnessing the wisdom of age,” which is PR-speak for “our birth rates collapsed and we forgot to save money.” The International Labour Organization estimates that every extra year tacked onto the SPA saves treasuries roughly 1% of GDP — the fiscal equivalent of finding loose change in the sofa, except the sofa is human cartilage.
Technology was supposed to rescue us: robots would do the heavy lifting, letting silver-haired creatives sip matcha while dispensing brand wisdom. Instead, algorithms learned to fire people faster than any middle manager, and the gig economy turned “retirement” into a quaint synonym for “permanent side-hustle.” Uber’s fastest-growing driver cohort is septuagenarians who thought they’d be touring Tuscany, not shuttling drunks through Tulsa at 2 a.m.
Even the Nordics, those perennial A-students of social policy, are hedging. Sweden links SPA to life expectancy, creating a dystopian feedback loop: the healthier you get, the longer you must toil. Picture an 85-year-old Swede power-walking to the Volvo plant, earbuds blasting ABBA’s “Money Money Money,” while a screen in his glasses reminds him he needs three more quarters for full pension credit.
And yet, humanity adapts. South Korean grannies take up competitive esports; German retirees retrain as wind-turbine technicians; British pensioners become Airbnb hosts, renting the very bedrooms their grandchildren can’t afford. The global SPA is less a finish line than a moving horizon, forever receding like a Tarkovsky film but with worse lighting and more forms to fill out.
In the end, the state pension age is the world’s most polite insult: proof that we have conquered premature death only to invent bureaucratic immortality. Raise a glass — preferably something high in calcium — to the new golden years: fewer gold watches, more golden handcuffs.
