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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I think I want pension funds to be stodgy, conservative, no-fun, reliable old plodding donkeys, not flashy exciting high-risk high-yield racehorses. 'Way cheaper now' has to be paid for eventually, and it can go sideways just like this did.

That doesn’t exists in the real world of being “stodgy conservative”. Transferring money from today to the future is always going to have a lot of risks.

There’s no risks free way of transferring consumption today into consumption tomorrow. It involves some part of society investing surplus today into capital investments that are fruitful tomorrow.

You could say just buy government bonds. But if everyone does that then government bond yields go down (potentially even negative) and someone needs to a credible borrower today that will pay you your capital tomorrow when your pensioners want to consume.

The US government of course does this with social security but that even runs into issues of population pyramids and whether social security will give much real spending power when their are more retirees than young caregivers/workers.

How much should society be willing to pay for that preference? I don't think your opinion is able to graduate from irritable mental gesture to serious policy preference unless you have some inkling of the relative costs involved.