> We're essentially paying out of pocket for the current retirees and by the time we retire there will be nobody to pay our pension. Or at least there will not

> We're essentially paying out of pocket for the current retirees and by the time we retire there will be nobody to pay our pension. Or at least there will not be enough somebodies. This comes up again and again (not just in Slovenia, but in any country that has an inter-generational pension system). There are two points to make here: One is that as long as a country produces enough goods and services, money is "just" a tool for allocating these goods and services. How money is being saved and spent has already changed massively; countries have a different tax structure, require people to spend vastly more on health insurance than a century ago, families are smaller compared to a century ago and parents are less dependent on their children in old age (and thus the way our retirement works now is already vastly different from back then). There's little reason to think that the system cannot adapt. This is not to say that it "will" (because, well, predictions are hard, especially about the future), but it would also be unrealistic to assume that what we are going to have 30-50 years from now will be like what we have now. Heck, we don't even know if the "lump of labor fallacy" will still be a fallacy in a future of rising automation or whether part-time work will become the norm. At which point all bets are off, anyway. As a simple example, we could just implement a basic level of pensions through taxes (in lieu of existing pension schemes) that people could increase through private pension schemes. This is essentially basic income minus the moral hazard (because you don't have to worry about creating a disincentive to work for people outside the labor force). The second point is that investing privately in your retirement does not fundamentally change anything. When a society ages and has a disproportionate amount of young people, these young people still need to generate enough economic output, regardless of whether the income for those too old to contribute comes out of interest payments, an inter-generational scheme, taxes, or something else.