经济学人下载:要么70岁退休,要么破产!

Most governments are already planning increases in the retirement age. America is heading for 67, Britain for 68. Others are moving more slowly. Belgium allows women to retire at 60, for instance, and has no plans to change that. Under current policies the mean retirement age by 2050 will still be less than 65, barely higher than it was after the second world war.

大多数政府已经计划提高退休年龄。美国准备提高到67岁，英国准备提高到68岁。其他国家的行动更加缓慢。比如，比利时的女性60岁就可以退休，而且并没有计划改变这种情况。根据目前的政策，到2050年，平均的退休年龄将仍然低于65岁，与二战后的退休年龄没有什么差别。

Because life expectancy continues to rise—people in rich countries are gaining a little under a month a year—even the American and British plans are inadequate. In Europe the retirement age should be raised to 70 by 2040; America, with a younger population, can afford to keep it a smidgen lower.

由于预期寿命持续增长——发达国家的人们的寿命每年增长不到一个月——美国和英国的计划也还不够。到2040年，欧洲的退休年龄必须提高到70岁；由于美国的人口较年轻，退休年龄可以稍低一点。

Working longer has three great advantages. The employee gets more years of wages; the government receives more in taxes and pays out less in benefits; and the economy grows faster as more people work for longer. Older workers are a neglected consumer market, as our briefing on the media’s ageing audiences explains (see article).

工作更长时间有三大优势。受雇的人可以多领取几年的工资，政府可以获得更多的税收，减少福利方面的开支，更多的人工作更长的时间，经济增长就会更快。正如我们有关媒体的老年人观众的精粹所述，较年老的工人是一个被人忽视的消费者市场。

Yet too many people see longer working lives as a worry rather than an opportunity—and not just because they are going to be chained to their desks. Some fret that there will not be enough jobs to go around. This misapprehension, known to economists as the “lump of labour fallacy” , was once used to argue that women should stay at home and leave all the jobs for breadwinning males. Now lump-of-labourites say that keeping the old at work would deprive the young of employment. The idea that society can become more prosperous by paying more of its citizens to be idle is clearly nonsensical. On that reasoning, if the retirement age came down to 25 we would all be as rich as Croesus.

但是许多人将更长的工作时间视为一项忧虑而不是一个机会，这不仅仅是因为他们将继续工作。一些人担忧，工作岗位将不足。这种误解曾经被用来辩称，女人应该主持家务，养家糊口是男人的事。经济学家将这种误解称为“劳动总量固定”。现在劳动总量固定论者表示让老人继续工作会使年轻人无法就业。为公民提供更多的养老金，让他们无所事事，社会就会更加繁荣，这种想法显然荒唐的。按照这种逻辑，如果退休年龄降到25岁，我们都和克罗伊斯（注：吕底亚最后一代国王，以财富甚多闻名）一样富裕了。

Raising the official retirement age is only part of the solution, for many workers retire before the official age. Martin Baily and Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, reckon that raising actual EU retirement ages to the official age would offset the impact of an ageing population over the next 20 years.

提高正式的退休年龄只能解决部分问题，因为许多工人都提前退休了。华盛顿特区的皮德森研究所的马丁??贝利和雅克布??克柯佳德推算，将欧盟的实际退休年龄提高到正式的退休年龄将抵消今后20年老龄化所带来的影响。