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elharo comments on Why is it rational to invest in retirement? I don't get it. - Less Wrong Discussion
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The richest country, the United States, does no such thing. Poverty among the elderly is a big problem here. I have two friends in the 70+ region, who are trying to skimp by on around $1000 a month in Social Security + medicare and food stamps. One is currently homeless. Both would like to find a job, but neither is medically able to work any more. And these are people who worked for a long time. Not everyone gets as much from the U.S. government as they do. I have another elderly friend who is selling her apartment in NYC and moving to Iowa to have enough money to live on.
I also have a few more retired elderly friends who are quite well off. This is because they were successful in their careers (some very successful) and saved a lot of money along the way. I can think of one other who's still actively working at a high-paying job.
The goal is to end up like the happy, well-off retired folks and not the ones living out of their cars or on the street.
The United States is actually only the 8th richest country by per capita income (PPP adjusted).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ListofcountriesbyGDP(PPP)per_capita
(No active link because of the damn parentheses)
You can escape parentheses with a backslash, like so:
[Wiki link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)
producing:
Wiki link
(You also need to escape underscores if you want to avoid toggling italics in body text, but it's not an issue in the destination field of links.)
Thanks for the correction. I will update my thinking going forward.
And $1,000 a month in social security plus food stamps valued at $200 plus Medicare valued at $680, you get pretty close ($1,880) to $2,000 a month from the US Federal government.
I just realized that without knowing the costs of living in USA, these numbers don't mean anything to me. (I made cca $2000 a month in my previous job, and being homeless was never a risk.)
Well, if living abroad is an option, send these poor people to Slovakia, and they will live like... well, not like kings, but perhaps like junior computer programmers.
The extreme poverty line is around $1.25 a day, and the poverty line at around $2.50. They are well above both. By global standards, they're not poor; merely relatively poor to other Americans (which is to say, not poor at all)
Good luck finding any place in the United States you can live in for $1.25/day. Minimum wage is livable >90% of the time, but Nigerian wages are not.
Cost of living needs to be considered. It costs more to live in the United States than Mexico. Someone who's living on the street, and eating out of garbage cans, or who is hungry because they can't afford to buy food is objectively poor. And yes, this sort of poverty exists in the United States; and it disproportionately occurs among the elderly.
That is already PPP adjusted. Here is a good blog post on the subject by Will Crouch.
Even PPP adjustment doesn't tell the whole story. It's not legal to live like you're in a Harare slum in the US, whether you're willing to or not.