An issue I always have with early retirement is whether it is morally acceptable. When retiring early from a skilled profession you are depriving society of a big contribution you could have given, that was also expected and invested in by society. Utilising a power dynamic by having more money and knowledge to capitalise on other people exacerbates this issue.
How are you dealing with this? Are you of the mindset that you do not owe anything to society? That it is completely fair, as you earned that money and there is a perfect market that trades all aspects in a meritocratic fashion (e.g., delayed consumption should be gratified this hard)? Or that you were not just lucky to have the talents to earn so much money?
Look at it from the opposite angle, I’m opening up that position for the next person.
I personally never feel like I owe society anything. I’m fortunate to have a well paying job, but that doesn’t saddle me with guilt, but instead gratitude. I’m grateful for the opportunities I have, and I try to make the best I can with them. However, I do intend to become very active in causes without any expectation of pay. I also intend to start businesses and whatnot free from the obligation to make money, not because I feel obligated, but because it makes me happy.
Here are some causes I intend to work on:
- decentralized applications, like a decentralized (not federated) lemmy
- help people get out of debt
- make video games
- invest in small businesses on very favorable terms
And so on. I expect to be very busy once FI, but I don’t be busy with a regular 9-5. I don’t want to do it now because I’ll need to find a way to profit from it; once FI, profit isn’t necessary and perhaps unwanted.
Thank you for this mindset as someone who works under a person that could easily retire early but won’t (which is fine by me, mostly). My career’s vertical mobility and associated higher pay is stunted by this, as I do not wish to seek a different employer.
Did you think about if the decentralised applications will have an impact as high as you are currently providing for society? I would be really careful when evaluating if something does have an impact. If your decentralised platform never has any realistic chance to be adopted by mainstream the impact might be really low. Even for lemmy the impact might not be enough, as it might be too complicated for a normal person.
Making video games and helping small business by investing also seem like they have a low benefit for society and are more to be psychologically fulfilling for the early retiree.
Retirement does not mean you cease to contribute to society. It may allow you to develop new hobbies and passions, build or enhance relationships with family and friends, or give time to your community
Downtime may allow you to think deeply on what kind of world you want to live in, or travel may broaden your horizons and make you aware of issues you would like to address - you could become politically active, or contribute your efforts to a charity
You don’t have to do any of these things, but don’t write off retirement as an empty non-productive life stage. If it doesn’t bring you joy, you can always go back to work ;)
But I think most people will greatly reduce their output for society. Do you think that on average there will be an increase? I could imagine that some projects might only be realisable by retired and independent people, so that might actually outweigh the decrease. There could be a really fat tailed distribution that makes this good.
You’re begging the question, and I mean that in a literal way, it’s not an insult. You have assumed a definition of output as something that happens through participation in capitalistic endeavours
This effectively devalues any other form of output. What of the value to society of a grandparent spending more time with their grandchild. What is the value to the grandparent? The child? The parent who can now work extra hours?
There is enormous value to society in spending time with family, growing your own produce, exercising your body and mind etc. but many people sacrifice their ability to do those things for income during part of their lives, and change focus when the means are available
I did not assume that the output for society only happens through capitalistic endeavours. You are right that it is important to think about what is a contribution to society.
But in my -admittedly fuzzy- definition, and I think this is also the one most people really would apply, is that retired people usually will have less contributions even when considering time with family.
As an example you are saying growing your own produce is an enormous benefit. But in my opinion this is a really small contribution. Farming, even organic, is really cheap and decentralising on the scale of individual households is extremely inefficient and probably not even environmentally friendly due to the increased space and resources used by the inefficiency. It would be better to take a job at a company or NGO trying to improve the sustainability of current farming methods. Your work will impact millions of people and not just a few.
Taking care of your fitness, also won’t have a clear and big benefit for society. You might save the healthcare system some money per year lived, but you also won’t immensely change your fitness level just because you retire early. The money saved here might be optimistically 2000$ per year. 14000$ is the average cost in the US and you need to subtract everything that you can not prevent by your probably small change in fitness (inheritance, age, bad luck). Additionally most benefits here will be by living longer with the same total healthcare cost (with age you will get similar diseases). Therefore the benefit will be mostly reaped by yourself and not the others in society (but you are a part of society so it counts a bit).
Taking care of family might actually convince me :). In a utopian world I would also like everyone to work less and take care of family. But again the question here is how much value does this exactly give to society.
Is it really enough to compensate for the missed work contributions? Does it allow the society to still compete on a global scale so that it will not lose its values over time?
It sounds like we both value the intangibles, but are still slightly disagreeing on what they mean in this discussion. Having said that, it’s your discussion, your question, and I’m just trying to answer in a way that adds value
I don’t mind how you’ve picked apart my examples, but you have to acknowledge it’s still primarily through economic analysis. Output, competition, and cost benefit analysis all imply an economic lense
The discussion is getting pretty long, so I’ll keep myself to these 5 points:
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I don’t think everyone should grow their own produce. It comes across as a straw man (because I never said we should decentralise) and we always have to be careful not to say that what is good for one is good for all (see Idle Kantianism)
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Non-economic benefits are devalued through economic analysis. My mental health is improved, it’s physical exercise, the nutrient value is likely higher, it contributes to a local ecosystem etc. I agree that none of these has much economic value
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In the same way that economies of scale have efficiency value, specialisation and expertise in scientific and policy fields has efficiency value. Transitioning to research and policy simply because you have amassed capital will likely generate diminishing returns (even if you remain close to your industry/experience)
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Government can and should allocate resources to important issues. If we require more resources for these goals we can raise taxes, keeping more people working for longer, and achieving some measure of additional economic contribution per person
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A competitive society implies some other society against which we compete. Humanity has enough resources to raise the living standards of all. Why do we need to keep maximising productivity within separate societies if the problem is distributive?
I tried not to only focus on economic value in my counter arguments. I just wanted to use monetary value as a proxy for general value for society.
Regarding the transition to research and policy my argument would be that you will have more impact when taking a full time research position instead of retiring from the working world. I would still consider most research positions a part of the working world.
With a competitive society I actually meant that there are groups that will not support early retirees. These groups will dominate society after some time. An example might be China vs US. If many people in the US retire early, the US will not be able to compete and in the long run will stop existing together with all its values.
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I mean if you have enough money to retire early you have by the definition of capitalism provided more than you are taking by retiring.
Whether it’s moral is entirely separate, and would require judgement outside the confines of capitalism, which is not possible, because we don’t live by any other system.
Why is it not possible to think outside of the capitalistic system? Do you think we do not have enough data? I guess even observing the capitalistic system can show you that it is not just, by observing that there are unjust aspects in capitalism that an early retiree is abusing.
Firstly, I don’t think your contributions to society are limited to work. Spending time with hobbies also contributes, e.g. art, volunteering, or open source coding. You can also work a more enjoyable “job” in retirement, without feeling strangled by the paycheck.
We also already have enough production in society for everyone to be happy, and many people’s jobs do not actually contribute to society in a meaningful way, e.g. people who work at advertising firms. I think we should target the billionaires sucking up literally all the resources and seeing if “early” retirement is actually a problem at that point. People are working until they’re 70 right now, but maybe everyone could retire closer to 50 if we distributed our resources more fairly.
The issue is that it is immensely difficult to fairly distribute resources, due to not many wanting to lose their wealth for other people. Imo human history has shown that great wealth increase for the poor was often only possible by immense economic growth.
