【英语生活】你还是晚点退休吧

If 80 is the new 60, and 50 is the new 30, I'm a teenager again, looking forward to a bright future at university. I certainly had a thought-provoking tutorial recently at the hands of UBS's professorial George Magnus, one of the prophets of the credit crunch but also the author of a book about demographics, The Age of Aging.

The statistics about an ageing population are starting to become familiar: people are living longer and having fewer children, and this is true not only in rich countries but much of the developing world. But the implications are often misinterpreted. An ageing society is not, primarily, a demographic crisis. The problem is a failure to adapt – a failure that afflicts politics, management and society.

The simplest way to see this is to think again about what the demographic “problem” is supposed to be. It is simply that people are tending to live longer and longer, often in good health. That doesn't sound like a problem to me – are we supposed to prefer a world in which people die younger and younger?

But our institutions are adapting too slowly. Too many companies rely on a seniority system that, if not “dead man's shoes”, is certainly “retired person's shoes”; such systems struggle to deal with employees who no longer deserve or want the top jobs, but who could still be employed at a more “junior” rank. Final salary schemes, still popular in the public sector, amplify the problem, with their presumption that the final salary will also be the highest salary that a worker ever earns. The law offers no help: mandatory retirement on the sole grounds of age remains perfectly legal in the UK. Speaking as someone who once shared an office with an inspirational mentor more than 50 years my senior, I can affirm that on this point, the law is an ass.

Then, of course, there are state pensions, which are still paid out on the basis of age rather than ill-health, and at ages that have not risen to keep pace with our longer lives.

When Bismarck introduced the world's first state pension, 120 years ago, it was payable from the age of 70; few men would have lived long enough to collect it, although Bismarck himself was 74 at the time. Now, it is not unusual to collect a state pension for 20 years. Several countries are increasing the state pension age – most recently, Australia – but very slowly.

Much ink has been spilt over the question of financial sustainability: have we saved enough into our personal pensions, have our employers properly funded our final salary schemes, and has the government got enough money to pay state pensions in the future? All distractions, because no amount of financial engineering will solve the underlying economic problem of a small number of workers trying to support a large number of retirees. There are really only two solutions: we consume less, or we settle for a longer working life.

If retirement were not hedged about by an institutional thicket, these solutions would arrive without much fuss. Faced with labour shortages, companies would raise wages; meanwhile, as a large cohort tried to retire together, the price of houses and shares would fall, while annuity rates would also be miserly. Working a little bit later and enjoying slightly less of that long, long retirement would become a very tempting offer.

I sympathise with state and corporate paternalism in the world of pensions, because thinking on a 50-year timescale and coping with complex investments are two areas where our enormous brains often seem to let us down. Yet if these helping hands simply push us into premature retirement, we will have little reason to be grateful.
 

如果说80岁相当于新的60岁，50岁相当于30岁，我就又能回到青少年时代了，对大学生活的灿烂前景无比向往。最近瑞银(UBS)的专业人士乔治•玛格纳斯(George Magnus)的确给我上了发人深省的一课。玛格纳斯是信贷危机的预言者之一，但也写过一本关于人口统计学的著作：《老龄化时代》(The Age of Aging)。

有关人口老龄化的数据开始变得普遍起来：人们的寿命更长、子女更少，而且这不仅出现在富裕国家，不少发展中国家亦是如此。但其中隐含的问题常常被误解。老龄化社会本质上并不是一场人口统计学危机。问题在于无法适应这种现象——政治、管理和社会都深受其苦。

要看清这一点，最简单的方法就是再想一想人口统计学“问题”应该是什么。老龄化只不过意味着人们的寿命往往越来越长、而且通常身体健康。对我来说，这听上去不是个问题——难道我们应该更希望看到一个人口寿命越来越短的世界吗？

但是我们的体制适应这种现实的速度过慢。太多企业依赖于论资排辈的制度，如果这种制度算不上“人死才让位”，那也肯定是“退休才让位”。这种制度很难处理那些不再适合或不想要高职、但仍能以较“初级”职位留聘的员工。在公共部门仍然十分普遍的最终薪金计划(final salary schemes)加剧了问题的严重性——它们的假设是最终薪资也是员工拿到的最高薪资。法律没有提供任何帮助：在英国，仅以年龄为依据的强制退休制度仍属完全合法。我曾与年长我50岁、但极富启发能力的导师共用一间办公室，因此可以证实在这一点上，法律完全是胡扯。

当然，还有政府养老金，其发放标准依然是年龄而不是健康情况，而且领取养老金的年龄限制并没有随着人们寿命的延长进行调整。

120年前，俾斯麦(Bismarck)引入了全球首个政府养老金制度，当时其领取年龄为70岁。很少有人能活到那个年龄来领取养老金，虽然俾斯麦本人当时已经74岁了。如今，领政府养老金领上个20年已经不稀罕了。一些国家开始上调政府养老金的领取年龄——最近一个是澳大利亚——但进展很慢。

在金融可持续性的问题上，我们已经耗费了大量笔墨：我们为个人养老金缴纳的金额够不够、我们的雇主有没有为我们的最终薪金计划提供适当的资金支持、政府是否有充足的资金来支付未来的养老金？这些都是转移我们注意力的问题，因为金融工程的规模再大，也无力解决让一小部分员工赡养大量退休人员这个根本经济问题。事实上，只有两个解决办法：要么减少消费、要么接受更长的工作年限。

如果退休没有受到体制的束缚，那么这些解决办法就不会引起很多人的大惊小怪。面对劳动力短缺，公司将加薪；与此同时，由于有一大群人希望同时退休，房价和股价都会下跌，而年金利率也会低得可怜。多工作一段时间、少享受一些漫长的退休生活会成为一个非常诱人的选择。

我对政府和企业在退休金问题上的家长作风表示同情，因为在以50年为框架思考问题和处理复杂投资这两个方面，我们庞大的头脑似乎通常会让我们失望。然而，如果这些帮助只会促使我们提前退休，我们就没有什么理由心怀感激了。

译者/管婧