Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
Yes, humanity is full of various societies that do things differently. These ideas aren't disney-fied - they're just accurate representations of the fact that people care for each other, most of the time.
I appreciate your anecdote, but here's a few counter-examples:
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
One caution there; if you read the small print, they're using PPP figures. Which is definitely better than using nominal figures, but doesn't account for anything. In particular, it doesn't account for transfers, either direct (social welfare payments) or indirect (subsidised healthcare, housing, childcare etc etc).
Not to say it's a useless figure, but it can mislead (especially for lower income people, where healthcare costs and childcare costs, say, might be literally 0 in some countries, and a huge part of their income in others).
And obviously for people trying to do the FIRE thing in particular, healthcare costs are likely to be a very big deal; for those in countries like the US where most people get healthcare through their job, that's an additional consideration that people in countries where it's done by income-based subsidised insurance, or free-at-point-of-use systems, don't have.
"In particular, it doesn't account for transfers, either direct (social welfare payments) or indirect (subsidised healthcare, housing, childcare etc etc)."
I believe your claim may be incorrect:
"Depending on the country and year, the data refers either to income (after taxes and benefits) or to consumption, per capita."
I think they are trying to place a dollar value on healthcare and childcare provided by the state and incorporate it as "income". I might be misunderstanding. It seems like a very imperfect science, but about as good of an effort as anyone has made.
