[foobazgt]

If you had to pick an age for societal burden, it'd be the average "young" person who isn't making a net-positive contribution until around the age of 25. Most people don't receive a corresponding 25 years of retirement, and the retirement they do receive is a product of contributing to it for 40 years.

But it turns out young people become middle-age people, become old people, and we're all in this together. The real problem is not about how the pie is split across generations, but about the realities of lifespans, economic production, and expenses. If you're responsible for funding the entirety of your retirement, all of this is abundantly clear. When you nationalize retirement, all sorts of budgeting tricks start happening, like "borrowing" to fund other programs, papering shortfalls via population growth, etc. Then you start getting age warfare when the govt has to eventually cut back.

You could dissolve the national retirement plan, but that seems like a bad idea for similar reasons as entirely dissolving national welfare and insurance programs. It will always be the case that some people, need some help, some of the time. I guess in my ideal world, it's reduced to a much smaller safety net, because the government is managing the economy well enough that the populace has the wherewithal to save appropriately, and they are educated enough to do so.

[zeroCalories]

Young people are an investment. Old people are purley a liability. This is true regardless of how they're cared for, when looking at it from a macro perspective. How the pie is split matters when talking about the sustainability of the system. Could you survive if 90% of your value is in investments? Maybe. 90% in liabilities? Probably not.

Having people fund their own retirement would be ideal from a economic standpoint, but given the histories and complexities of existing systems, it is probably not acceptable politically, or morally, in any country. Honestly it's a distraction.

At the end of the day, a country cannot tolerate too many freeloaders. It doesn't matter if they're pensioners or retired at 50, living to 100 hedge fund managers. Productivity is really the only thing that matters for a countrie's economic destiny.