[jdasdf]

Most pensions are Pay as You Go systems where no investment actually occurs (or if it does it is vestigial).

Effectively no different from a regular ponzi scheme being used to purchase votes.

Self-investment has the actual investment there.

If pensions were fully-funded you'd be right, but they aren't in almost every country. Unfunded pension liabilities are well over 300% of GDP in most european countries, but since they don't show up on debt to gdp metrics, people aren't aware of it.

>The investment dollars in scope are similar, with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.

Also that is untrue.

[TheCoelacanth]

Retirement is going to be effectively pay-as-you-go no matter what you do (at least until we invent much more sophisticated robots).

You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.

If you save money or invest in financial instruments, you're still relying on labor from subsequent generations and if there aren't enough of them, higher labor costs will eat up everything you saved.

The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.

[toomuchtodo]

> The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.

Indeed, and we didn’t do that. We invested in issuing debt and other non production capacity efforts.

[jdasdf]

>You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.

But you can?

It's called paying nurses more to encourage greater supply...

[toomuchtodo]

Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.

Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics. People are too bought into an abstraction while the underlying crumbles, for obvious reasons.

TLDR Humanity is Pay As You Go no matter what.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

[jdasdf]

>Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.

You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what the current situation is.

There is no "gains in an investment account" because social security is unfunded, and has only vestigial investments (many of which are primarily fig leaf to finance the government at lower costs/lower returns).

There won't be any "gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because there fundamentally aren't any gains.

Now, assuming that your misconception was correct, and that there was a pot of unrealized gains to be consumed when you retire... That still wouldn't cause any "competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because the thing about having resources is that you can spend them to get more of the things you need. Sure a large influx of capital requiring some specific goods or services would increase the price of those things... which would in turn increase the incentive to provide more of those things.

Frankly that isn't an issue if it's fully funded.

> large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits.

And this is the problem.

Theft and its normalization through political power is what causes the self-funded and fully funded model to fail, not anything inherent to it.

>Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics.

There is nothing to capital markets that requires growth. Indeed historically it is the opposite, and investors tend to overpay for growth resulting in lower returns.