Oddbean

"And so Baby Boomers had like a 3.5 worker-to-retiree ratio to support in their peak earnings years, while Millennials will have more like a 2.5 worker-to-retiree ratio or less to deal with. " // I certainly vividly remember how, in our later high school years, during the "Social Studies" class, we were presented with very similar formulas for the German social security system. The math simply did not seem to check out. It just didn't make sense "what the adults were trying to tell us". It did not square. When a few of us inquired about it, the teacher didn’t have any satisfying answers. (Well, duh—he’d been on the Ponzi train long enough to know that it would work out for *him* as long as a sufficient number of people kept paying into the system for the next 20-30 years.) We were presented with all these rosy words and theories about how great Germany is because "everybody is taken care of." But when you looked at the cold, hard numbers, it seemed evident that a cold, hard stop would follow - and that our generation would bear the brunt. That specific day never got out of my head. A severe seed of doubt had been planted.

Its ~ 2:1 currently in Germany w/o consideration that 100 billion euro are subsidized from taxes (or should we say abused) on top, otherwise it would look even more worse…. https://www.demografie-portal.de/DE/Fakten/altersrentner-beitragszahler.html#:~:text=Aktuell%20stehen%20einem%20Altersrentner%20rund,noch%20sechs%20aktiv%20versicherte%20Erwerbspersonen.

That's pretty much the numbers they were projecting us ~20-25 years ago. The math was off, but everyone pretended that it will all work out somehow. "Magic", "adults in control" or some other fairy tale to make people feel good and not having to think to much about the ultimate outcome. In hindsight, quite grateful for this early severe crack in confidence in the system I took away from that school day.