Technology

Well they'd certainly own less, that's for sure. Corporate profits would've gone down

There is no way you could say this with certainty. Why would corp profits go down... I could as easily say they'd go up (people have more money because their wages are keeping up so they spend more blah blah. Your taking at least 40 years and suggesting you could predict what would happen if they were fundamentally different.

Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time

Sure, but we don't have a lack of food problem, or a lack of housing problem. We have distribution problems. It doesn't take one person to farm all day to feed a family anymore, we can feed thousands with one persons labour now. We have the houses, the ownership is concentrated.

The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth

Right, we don't have 0.01% holding 10% of total wealth, we couldn't possibly be spreading that out more evenly. We don't ask children to go down to the mine, we put them in school. We work together to make more than we need and those growing up and those in old age reap either the benefits of learning and practising, or having earned it through their lifes work resting.

It baffles my mind that you ignore the work retired people did before they retired.

Which is why I keep telling people: If you don't want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them

You should stop telling them that.