A Younger Generation Paying for a Longer Life
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Longer life is one of civilisation's great successes. It becomes an economic dilemma only because institutions built for shorter retirements must now support more years of pensions, healthcare and care. The language of burden can obscure the achievement; the arithmetic can be obscured by avoiding that language altogether.
Pay-as-you-go systems depend on current workers supporting current retirees. When the ratio changes, governments can raise contributions, reduce benefits, borrow, increase migration or ask people to work longer. Each solution has limits. A later retirement age may be reasonable for an office worker and punishing for someone whose body has already paid for decades of manual labour.
The conflict is often presented as young against old. That is too simple. Wealth varies enormously within generations. A retired homeowner with substantial assets and a renter relying solely on a state pension do not occupy the same position. Nor do two young workers when one will inherit property and the other already supports relatives.
Care adds work that accounts struggle to see. Families, especially women, supply hours of unpaid labour when formal systems are inadequate. A budget can appear balanced because the missing service has been transferred into a daughter's evening.
My reflection
intergenerational fairness should not mean breaking promises to older people or sending every new cost to younger ones. It should mean looking more honestly at wealth as well as age, protecting those who cannot absorb loss, and refusing to finance longevity by making stable adulthood unreachable for those who follow.