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Lumifer comments on On not getting a job as an option - Less Wrong Discussion
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On the one hand, this is an important issue and shouldn't be ignored if you're planning for your retirement.
On the other hand... Let's think about a scenario where you've worked hard and saved hard until (say) the age of 40, and then 10 years later there's a national catastrophe on the level of losing a major war which wipes out all your savings. You are, indeed, going to be in trouble. But so is someone who's been working for pay all that time: they've lost all their savings too, and probably their job. Either position's going to be pretty terrible.
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.