I've a suggestion to add: we should also aim to produce a briefing note of no more than two pages summarising useful arguments against the CW on pensions, and distribute it to Political and union leaders and advisors. The standoff in France would be harder on the government, imo, if parties on the left, and unions, had some good reframing points to counter the endless "it's inevitable, it's common sense" line.

This note could be produced once the main points of a Consultation submission were worked out.

An old comment of mine:

Going back to JakeS' logic

The intuitively obvious corollary to this is that we need to get out of the private pension funds mindset - by their very nature, private pension funds make Joe Schmoe an investor in the securities markets. And Joe Schmoe knows nothing about investing in the securities market, so he shouldn't be doing it.

the way I put it is this:

We understand that "widows and orphans" shouldn't be investing in risky assets and so we create "pension funds" subjected to strict regulations on the kinds of assets they may hold (e.g., no "speculative" or worse-rated bonds) and the kinds of strategies they may pursue (e.g., no "short-selling") so that they may be "safe" for widows and orphans to invest in. But that means that we regulate pension funds to behave like widows and orphans, so they get scalped by sharks like widows and orphans would.

In addition, the whole "private pension fund mindset" is predicated on the argument that public pensions are insolvent because they will eventually be unable to pay the promised premiums. We are told that instead we should invest in private pension funds. But the question arises: if the government is not going to be able to raise the necessary cash to meet its pension liabilities, where is the stock market supposed to get all that cash from? After all, the government and the stock market share in the same GDP pool. In addition, the government's "cost of capital" is lowest (in absolute terms considering "cost of debt" and relatively speaking when "risk-adjusted").

(with added emphasis)

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

Oh, dear

In particular, [the consultation] aims to address the following issues:

• Ensuring adequate incomes in retirement and making sure pension systems are sustainable in the long term

A public pension system based on sovereign outlays is the easiest way to solve this problem.

• Achieving the right balance between work and retirement and facilitating a longer active life

Neither here nor there, though there's the fact that under many European pension systems, receiving a pension is incompatible with doing any productive work. I think the social function of pensions should be given a good round of thinking. Maybe pensions should not be tied to age but basically for incapacity for work of greater or lesser degree? The current stigmatization of people on disability benefit needs to end, by the way. And it's not totally unrelated to this policy drive to "facilitate a longer active life".

• Removing obstacles to people who work in different EU countries and to the internal market for retirement products

Please don't mix the issue of people working across borders having trouble collecting pensions (supranational fiscal unification, anyone?) with the "market for retirement products". A dignified income for everyone, retired or not, is not a (finalcial!?) product looking for a freer market.

• Making pensions safer in the wake of the recent economic crisis, both now and in the longer term

Easy, don't make people's pension dependent on the vagaries of the market. Don't force people to take on a private pension because the public provision is deliberately inadequate. This is a political issue, obviously.

• Making sure pensions are more transparent so that people can take informed decisions about their own retirement income

This is contradictory. A system where, say, people are guaranteed a particular percentage of median income as their state pension would by definition be "not transparent" or hard to forecast. But precise forecasts are necessary for financial planning of private pensions. But private pensions leave people at the mercy of the vagaries of the capital markets. And state pensions are, we're tendentiously told, unsustainable.

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

Previous discussions of health care, which raise some of the same issues.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Here's an attempt at summarising the discussion on the hot France thread. It may be seen as too cursory, in which case go ahead and add to it!

On the France Is Heating Up thread, Jake S stated as a general principle that retirement pensions were a distributional question, not a generational one.

As a general point applying to sovereigns: there was "no causal relationship between the outlays of a sovereign state and its tax revenue". Taxes are not raised to pay for public spending, which is carried out by creating legal tender ex nihilo. (Taxes serve to destroy legal tender, thus preventing inflation). A sovereign that deficit spends today will not be unable to do so tomorrow.

In this context, it doesn't matter to future taxpayers what this generation decides about the retirement age. If taxes appear too heavy to taxpayers in the future, that will be an issue for them to deal with at that time.

Beyond the general point, France, in particular, has no demographic imbalance to correct for - if it is able to distribute income to the retired now, it will not encounter any major problems in doing so over the next forty years. According to demographic projections, the ratio of the active age group (20-60) to the whole population will remain fairly stable at approximately one half.

marco posted two data items from INSEE (French statistics institute):

These bear out the overall point that the projections show no major shift in the roughly 50% proportion of the "active-age" group within the whole population. The "dependence ratio" remains the same.

gk suggested there might be a political difficulty in persuading people they had to consecrate more resources to the older part of the population (60+) than to the younger (20-). In particular, if the transfer towards the elders is done by government while transfers towards the young are private and "preferred".

afew posted a quick search for figures (2005) that showed that public transfers towards the under-20s were in fact higher than towards the over-60s, in a ratio of approximately 5:4.

According to the projections, Jake S also said, the rise in the older segment of the population would be offset by a reduction in the younger, allowing the total expense to remain roughly stable. There is no need for pre-emptive planning at this stage.

An exchange between talos and Jake s was too fruitful to summarise, so here it is in extenso (questions by talos, answers by Jake S):

JakeS:

How does state borrowing enter into this argument of money created and destroyed?

Reasonable people can disagree on that.

One view is that sovereign bonds are a way to take money out of circulation. In this view, issuing sovereign bonds is similar to instating a tax, and repaying sovereign bonds is similar to abolishing a tax.

Another view (and the one I subscribe to) is that sovereign bonds are a form of money - just a less liquid one. So when the sovereign deficit spends, it is printing money whether it "funds" its spending with sovereign bonds or by simply crediting the accounts of the recipients with legal tender. The difference is only in the liquidity (or lack thereof) of the new money, with legal tender being the most liquid and bonds being progressively less liquid the greater their time to maturity.

Which of those two you adopt is a matter of intellectual convenience - they are indistinguishable for the purpose of macroeconomic planning.

How is the argument affected if the sovereign can't print money (i.e. in eurozone countries)?

Well, the argument hangs on the sovereign's ability to enforce legal tender laws. So as long as the French sovereign can enforce French law in defiance of the Bundesbank, it doesn't change... in principle. Restrictions such as the Maastricht rules are voluntary restrictions on the behaviour of the sovereign, not fundamental facts of economic life.

In practise, this pressure towards deficit errorism is a major problem with the € as currently constructed. But the € as currently constructed is not sustainable on the time scales involved in these population projections - for precisely that reason. So the € will either change to accommodate a pan-European economic policy (in which case macroeconomic stabilisation will become a federal task), or the € will break down and we will return to floating sovereign currencies.

How is it affected if the sovereign has pretty much all of its debt in its own currency (i.e. the US)?

It isn't. There are many possible complications to having debt in other people's currency, but those really aren't in the realm of pensions and labour market regulation - which are almost always exclusively accomplished with domestic legal tender.

This means that various announced projected "costs of pensions by the year 20XX" measured as percentage of projected GDP, are questionable?

Yes and no. It depends on what they mean by that.

It is, obviously, possible to input some assumptions about GDP growth, pension systems and demographics, and get a scenario for the share of pensions in GDP in 20XX. What is dishonest is to discount sovereign outlays and taxes in order to obtain a present value - sovereign budgets just don't work that way.

Now, if the taxpayers of 20XX believe that they are paying too generous pensions, then that is a wholly legitimate political position... in 20XX. But demographic trends are slow-moving, so there will be plenty of time for the people who are actually alive and paying taxes in 20XX to reduce pension benefits if they find their taxes onerous. Arguing that we need to make this decision for them is to presume to speak for the as yet unborn and uncontemplated.

How is this argument affected by demographic decline?

It isn't. See bullet immediately above.

A note: I looked up the numbers a few years ago on Greece (below population replacement rate since 1980) and found that in the mid 2000s the percentage of working age population employed was at an all time high and dependence ratios at an all time low. This was due to a steady increase in female participation in the workforce, of course, but also due to the fact that the under 18s shrank almost as fast as the over 65s. This, I would wager, is pretty much par for "infertile" countries.

That is my experience from looking at the data as well.

Thus the dependence ratio doesn't seem to be too much affected in projections even of the most demographically declining countries - and thus dependents' costs unless old people are much more costly to society than children,

Yes and no. Most projections do show an increase in dependence ratios, albeit a modest one.

[That old people are more expensive than children] is indeed probable.

I wouldn't know about that. I'd have to pull out some consolidated public sector budgets to be sure, but for Denmark I'm pretty sure that they cost the same, or close enough as makes no matter.

One could offer a counterargument to

it makes no difference to future taxpayers what this generation does with retirement age

that any changes in retirement age necessarily unfold over a long period (you can't make someone planning to retire next year, retire in 5 years time and any cuts in pensions should be rolled out over many years so as to not influence life plans and expectations too much).

One could make that argument, but one would have to make the case that the funding problems are going to show up faster than the possible rate of adjustment. Which just isn't the case for any of the major [1] EU member states except Germany. And Germany starts out with large current account and trade surpluses against the rest of the Union, and mercantilist inflation rates; they could print the money to fund their retirement obligations without corresponding tax increases and still be a net exporter and on the low end of Eurozone inflation rates.

Generally as per the "slash pensions argument": aren't, pretty much linear, projections of current trends to 50 years' time some sort of quackery?

Yes, that would be rank quackery. Fortunately, population projections aren't simply linear projections. All reasonably literate societies have very good fertility statistics, and societies with (near-)universal health care have uniformly excellent fertility statistics. We know how many children people have, we know when they have them, we know what the age and gender distribution is today and we know how many people immigrate and emigrate.

Of course you have to make assumptions about how those figures are or are not going to change over the course of your projection. But the assumptions that underpin the population projections of European states are usually not wholly unreasonable.

Especially in a time of unfolding multiple global crises and geopolitical shifts? How is it even rational to project that far into the future any current trend and to implement policy now

The usual justification is that if we have a shock that's big enough to force us to discard our projections, things will be so fucked up that we can't plan for it anyway. So we make plans based on things not going catastrophically wrong - no serious wars, no exceedingly deadly pandemics, no agricultural collapse, etc., because it's silly to get caught with your pants down just because the sky didn't fall.

Your mileage may vary on whether that's sufficient reason or not. That's a political decision that reasonable people can disagree about.

- Jake

[1] Minor EU member states are not worth doing 20-year macroeconomic projections for - their economic well-being is more dependent on what the major EU members do than on any policy of their own. (This should not be construed as an excuse to be negligent in policy planning - just as a statement on the inherent uncertainty of long-term planning for states that are not even halfway sovereign.)

The national pensions scheme (in France, at least, and no doubt elsewhere) runs on contributions raised on salaries. These are nominative and confer rights to a future pension (subject to rules on number of contributions).

The contributions received by the scheme are paid out to present pensioners. The state is only called on to make good the deficit, when there is one (there usually is, but a small percentage).

The pension fund's income can thus be said to consist (for the most part) in deferred salaries, earned by work. The outgoings, (pension rights acquired by previous work), go almost immediately to consumption.

Legal tender is used to denominate these flows, but in what sense is it created ex nihilo?

If it can be argued that it is, how can this be the most clearly and persuasively explained to Dummies?