Fixing the future

What Hacker News says

1. throw0101cOct 2025
   > Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.

   Canada saw the demographic writing on the wall, and solved its public/government pension problem in the 1990s:

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor...

   Good book on the history of the CPP, and how the reforms were determined and enacted (Fixing the Future by Bruce Little):

   * https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831

   There's no reason other countries could not have done something similar earlier (or even now).

   In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers:

   * https://archive.is/https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/m...

   This is completely ludicrous. For retirement planning purposes, it is often recommended to assume you'll need 70% of your working age income for the same lifestyle (you have fewer expenses—live not having a chunk of your income go to retirement savings), but in many situations it could even be ≤50%:

   * https://archive.is/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-inv...

   To have the same (or more) in retirement generally means you "over saved" while working, and you could have had more resources for enjoyment of life earlier (after all, we don't know when our time will come).

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2. throw0101aMar 2025
   Related: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was also a PAYGO system and was reformed in the late 1990s:

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor...

   A good book on how it happened is Fixing the Future by Bruce Little:

   > While the deficit battles have been recounted many times, the story of the reform that rescued the CPP has gone almost entirely untold. In Fixing the Future, Bruce Little explains the CPP overhaul and shows why it stands as one of Canada's most significant public policy success stories, in part because it demanded an almost unparalleled degree of federal-provincial co-operation. Providing an overview of the CPP's entire history from its beginning in 1965, Little pulls together published, and new unpublished, material relating to the CPP reform, and interviews over fifty politicians, government officials, and others who were deeply involved in the reforms for their recollections, insights, and observations.

   * https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831

   It is now a hybrid systems: some component of benefits are PAYGO, but a portion are invested in capital markets (and private equity, by owning things like ports and highways). The investment component is run by an arms-length entity with board members being appointed by the feds and provinces:

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPP_Investments

   There were further reforms in 2017.

   Fun fact: it's actually harder to amend the CPP Act than the Canadian Constiution.

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