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Every economic system and model depends on future expansion of both capital and human resources.
Sustained economic growth is a product of the Industrial Revolution so this is only true if you ignore almost all of human history.
> There are no theories of at scale planning for a future has less stuff and fewer people and no growth or even shrinkage.
On at least one interpretation this is how total war usually works in industrial societies. The Roman Empire abandoned long settled territory full of Roman citizens on more than one occasion, Britain, Dacia, so dealing with economic contraction is also far from unknown historically, even for well developed states with a literate culture and bureaucracy.
> The "can't afford" BS is the mantra of private capital, which does a great job of funding the .1% and an awful job of funding the 99.9%, which is what pensions do.
You radically underestimate the proportion of the population who would be basically ok in a world without defined benefit pensions or one where they don’t exist at all. The professional classes would be just fine if they had to arrange their own retirements instead of having financial intermediaries do it.
> The fact that expected benefits may not be fully achieved due to, I don't know, inability to predict the future has been used as a straw man to dismantle what have been in historical terms far and away the most successful at scale future funding schemes.
Nothing has been dismantled yet. I’m not aware of a single developed country without a non-contributory old age pension. More generally people I respect, like Noel Maurer, have said that the US’ Social Security system can be made sound with quite feasible increases in taxation. This does not apply, to the best of my knowledge to the large public sector pensions though. They were based on assumptions of economic and population growth that just don’t hold and without politically impossible levels of taxation they’re doomed.
> The repeated failures of unplanned models get lost down the memory hole.
Well no one planned those unplanned models. Extremely generous public sector pensions have been known to be actuarially unsound for decades. The planners know very well a reckoning is coming. They just hope it doesn’t happen while they’re in office.
> We need a new term to complement "Ponzi scheme" to capture the mass reality distortion that index funds make everyone their own best investment manager.
At least investment funds don’t saddle the taxpayer with obligations run up by long gone politicians. There are well run government pension systems, or there’s one, Singapore’s.