The richest man in the world has said that everyone needs to keep working well into their golden years for the sake of the greater good in the world. The richest man, Carlos Slim, mentioned that if the retirement age is increased to 70 then the struggling economies across the globe could improve. Slim is a telecom mogul in Mexico and he said that the current age of retirement was put into place during an era when people worked more physically demanding jobs and were dying at younger ages.
“We live in the knowledge society, so knowledge and experience should be valued,” he said at the Geneva telecommunications conference. “This is why a person’s work life could be increased.”
The fix proposed by Slim seems to already have begun in the United States as 25 percent of the middle class in the country believe that they will not be able to retire until they are close to the age of 80, according to a survey conducted by Wells Fargo back in November. On the contrary, a recent Gallup poll has said that Americans feel they can retire by the age of 67 on average. That age is up from 60 in the decade of the 1990s and 63 from roughly 10 years ago.
This is not the first time someone has suggested a higher age of retirement somewhere in the world. AIG CEO Robert Benmosche said earlier in June that the European retirement age will have to jump to 70 or 80 in order to relieve pressure from their pension systems.