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Americans should work past 65 to avoid ‘retirement crisis,’ says BlackRock CEO
(finance.yahoo.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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He’s not wrong and it’s not a money thing. It’s also not solely a US crisis. There simply won’t be enough people to do all the work, while a bunch of folks are retiring.
In fact the US is going to be better off than most since the millennials did their best in having families.
Most jobs are pointless ones, we can get by with far fewer laborers than we currently have. Implement a UBI and watch how many people quit and never work again.
It’s much more dire than that.
30% aren’t participating in the workforce right now. That’s going to increase to over 40% in the next 5 years.
Half of all farmers are at retirement age today.
When people retire they become a burden to the people that are not retired. They don’t simply disappear.
Also, you can’t take a programmer and put them into farming.
These are just small focused examples. Things are going to get really bad. The only way to fix it is a time machine that distributes wealth and housing to genx when they were young.
Another problem that countries will have from a depleted workforce is a lack of military personnel. Countries will not be able to defend their borders. Geopolitical instability will only get worse over the next 15 years.
Farmers love complaining despite the fact that a farmers job is nothing like it was before mechanization. We can't continue farming like we do, it relies too heavily on the fossil fuel industry and ignores too much the environment it depends on. However, agricultural science is so far ahead of where it was 150 years ago that it is almost unbelievable. Very few people have to farm to support our needs (especially if we stopped consuming so much meat.) You will also never be able to convince a person like me that there not being enough laborers to send them to war is a real problem.
Most countries don’t have the resources in their borders to produce everything they need. They trade for it.
You can’t trade with countries that are unstable. You also can’t trade if the trade routes are under fire.
The best example of this today is Hormuz but it extends beyond that single resource. Think about how many countries contribute to make a cpu, and what would happen if that got disrupted. Suddenly all the mechanization advancements in farming become a little more expensive, along with everything else.
China is experiencing some of the worst labor shortages today, and Taiwan will be within the blast radius of geopolitical unrest. Every advanced cpu is assembled in Taiwan, and depends on resources sourced from nearly ever country.
Perhaps the paradigm of nation states isn’t suitable to our climate future.
Oh and tach nomads that just wander wherever, not paying into the nation they reside in are? Someone has to pay and a social collapse would destroy that idea real quick.
A strong local community can fill all the unmet needs we have been trying in vain to cram into the welfare systems of nation states.
Indoor local farming is the future. Less water. Less blight. Less shipping. No reliance on the weather.
Well... That leads me to a dark line of thinking... Jobs that are actually worth something are constrained by resorces we have and could extract if we're going by a "what is nessisary" line of thinking and who can just be cut out of the economy, we can't magic them out of thin air, it's part of the reason why it's so popular, also UBI would never work without keeping it low and having it replace existing welfare structures and aggressive taxation of the 1% and 0.1% (something I am for but that's tough when your population is comprised of mostly economic laymen who Don't Wanna be tAXd. )
Besides capitalism being inherently inefficient, it incentivizes holders of capital to extract maximum monetary value from laborers. This means that, as capitalism progresses, more and more jobs exist for the sole purpose of enriching the owners of capital. If every job was a meaningful one, we could support everyone on the planet without everyone doing labor.
Oh I won't argue that base capitalism isn't a big waste machine, Iv never believed it was the end all be all, but the system needs to feed itself to keep going. UBI could work is funds are redirected carefully and kept as a booster and not as a full replacement. my only issue is convincing people of what has to happen to get that done.
While this is true the folks who would be delaying their retirement aren’t the ones doing most of the real, actual work. They’re likely in management positions and while that will help social security we’ll still have a huge shortage of health care workers
If these companies had been hiring and training juniors over the last couple of decades, there would be plenty of experienced people available to move into those senior positions as people retire.
The situation is worse than you think. There simply won’t be enough people.
The rate of retirement is already outpacing the rate of new workers by a lot. The rate is only going to get worse because we know how many people were born.
Immigration might be a way to deal with it. The US has been pretty good at using that. Outsourcing dumb production to other countries is another option, it’s what’s kept Japan afloat (Toyotas built in USA for example). But the problem is global. We didn’t have enough babies worldwide, and the boomers have started to retire.
productivity per capita has also been steadily increasing for decades. We have the capacity to produce more with less people, we just waste what's produced if it can't be sold for maximum profit.
Not enough people to make up for the loss, although it’s one reason why I don’t agree with datacenter bans. We’re going to need datacenters and llm’s to make up for a lot of missing workforce.