OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems. Now if we think about

OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems. Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are currently working pay those who are not (gross oversimplification). The question is whether the workers pay enough money to sustain the idle. Now health care and unemployment ought to be fairly constant (barring some major crisis), and you can have rules so people don’t abuse the system too much. So no pyramid there: we adjust how much workers pay for health and unemployment and that’s the end of it. Retirement however is subject to longer term variation because of that age pyramid. And at a time where we have boomers retiring, we have less working people to sustain them all. And it’s made quite worse when the salaries of the working people don’t even keep up with inflation. We could have solved this by having an exponentially growing population, but that is bound to crash at one point. So okay, I understand the pyramid analogy there. There’s a problem though: the boomers will die. Population will eventually get over that hump, and we’ll have a more reasonable proportion of working & retired people again. So the temporary deficit is just that: temporary. And if that’s not enough, there’s something simple we can do to solve the problem. It’s so obvious that (at least in France) people don’t even dare utter it on national television: just raise contributions a little bit. But no, doing this is so unthinkable that our rulers would rather have people retire later. Which won’t work, because of structural unemployment. So what we’ll have instead is lower pensions, and an increased reliance on pension funds. There’s a snag however: pension funds are actually a form of redistributive system. Because redistributive systems are the only system there can ever be. See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people. And when you retire, and the time comes to get your money back, you won’t get your money from a frozen value store. You’ll get it from the current economy, be it interest rates from your investments or currently paying people. However you cut it, your pension has to be taken from the current economy, and the only way you get paid is if your pension fund (and by extension the whole economy), can support it. I’d rather have an explicitly redistributive system, it’s more honest that way.