Should the retirement age be raised to 70?
'Not raising the retirement age will have serious ramifications for the majority of lower-income South Africans who don’t have a private pension fund'
In 1881, Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of united Germany, designed the concept of “retirement”. The ideal time, he said, would be 70 years of age. Back then, people simply didn’t retire. If you were alive, you worked. It was a revolutionary idea given that the life expectancy of a German worker was around 45. Bismarck, and others who followed suit, didn’t expect workers to outlive their retirement savings. But with the phenomenal advances in medicine, increased longevity is now a reality which poses a serious welfare challenge. The Baby Boomers retirement conundrum is a story which has been widely told. A largely American concept, Baby Boomers refers to a generation of people born in the 1940s to the early 1960s. The term was coined because the US saw a dramatic increase in the number of births after World War II – quite literally a baby boom. This generation has reached the traditional retirement age of 60 to 65 and yet are reluctant or unable to retire. The effect of thi...
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