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Lumifer comments on On not getting a job as an option - Less Wrong
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These are different issues.
This subthread is basically about estimating future returns from diversified stock portfolios and whether S&P returns for the last few decades provide a good baseline for that.
You are talking about the stability of life and about whether saving money is useful if there's a chance your country will be smashed into little bits.
By the way, a much more likely scenario for a Western country is not losing a major war but having a hyperinflation episode. In this case the guy with the savings loses all, while the guy with a job is much better off.
You raised the issue of survivorship bias at the country level and gave the example of a country wiped out by a major war. So I explained why, if you're adjusting the expectations of a retiree to account for what that sort of event could do to their investments, you also need to adjust the expectations of a non-retiree, who will also be hit hard by it.
Hyperinflation is indeed a good example of something that could hurt the retiree a lot worse than someone still working, but it seems to me that it depends a lot on (1) what form the retiree's savings take and (2) what causes and consequences the hyperinflation has. For instance, if investments in the stock market lose a lot of their (real) value in a hyperinflationary episode, I'd expect that to be accompanied by a lot of job losses -- so the worst case for a retiree with a lot of stock-market investments is also bad for someone still working.