pension reform

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

Diagram10.4 suggests that the greater generosity of an economy’s pension system generates lower rates of participation, and Germany’s experience with pension reform explored in a mini case study below is highly suggestive of such a relationship too. Diagram 10.4Participation rates tend to be lower when pension benefits are higher (Source OECD) A mini case study: Why did Germany’s pre-retirement participation rise so rapidly from 2003? Germany’s experience with pension reform and the response of the participation rate serves to illustrate this relationship in a robust manner. While the participation rate has generally risen for the 55–64-year-olds across most G10 economies, Germany’s participation rate had a distinct turning point in response to the pension reform proposed in mid-2003 and passed into law in 2004.

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FT Lex report FT report Full employment Fung, B. G Gbohoui, W. GDP GDP per head and population density, correlated Geithner, Timothy General Gaidar Model (GGM) General Government Debt, ratios to GDP General Theory Generosity George, A. George, Henry Geriatricians German pension reform German retirees react to pension reforms Germany Germany’s dependency ratio Gig economy ‘Gilets jaunes’ Gini coefficient Gini coefficient, measure of income dispersion Global ageing Global demographic headwinds Global disinflation Global dominance Global economy, ageing of Global environment, changing Global Financial Crisis (GFC) Global forces, dominant Global growth, driven by now ageing economies Global growth, India beat China Global inequality Global inequality, falling Globalisation Globalisation, effect underestimated Globalisation, its Great Reversal Globalisation, result of, a triumph for macro-economics Globalisation, slowing Globalisation effects, not significant in short run Global resources Global savings glut Gold discoveries Gold standard Goodhart, C.A.E.

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While the participation rate has generally risen for the 55–64-year-olds across most G10 economies, Germany’s participation rate had a distinct turning point in response to the pension reform proposed in mid-2003 and passed into law in 2004. Borsche-Supan and Wilke (2004) show how earlier changes in regulations in 1958 and 1972 then made the German pension system unsustainable as it entered the era of ageing. The change in 1958 converted a fully funded system into a pay-as-you-go structure. The revision in 1972 not only guaranteed a high post-retirement allowance, but also allowed workers to retire at any time between ages 63 and 65 with no penalties for early retirement.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

However you do it, the important thing is you track the performance of your stash and net worth for the rest of your days. Chapter 26 #4: 2015 UK Pension Reforms FOR MOST OF MY adult life, pensions were things I couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. The fact that I would need to pay money into something I couldn’t access until I was 65, and even then need to buy something called an annuity, meant pensions never had me in their thrall. The pension reforms of 2015 changed all that. I can access my pension when I’m 55 – that’s only ten years away. I can take a 25% lump sum tax-free when I’m 55 (if you were born after 1972, it’s 57[263]).

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Halftime Downer Interval Part IV: Getting F.U. Money – a Plan 18. Structure 19. You’re Not alone – Money is the Commonest Problem 20. What Do Rich People Look Like? 21. Financial Independence and F.U. Money 22. Four FI Fundamentals 23. #1: Stash Maths 24. #2: Net Worth 25. #3: One Pot 26. #4: 2015 UK Pension Reforms 27. The FIRE Triumvirate 28. Section 1: Budgeting 29. Section 2: Efficiency/Frugality 30. Section 3: Investing (Options, Interest and the SWR) 31. Section 3: Investing (Wise Words & the Case for Indexing) 32. Section 3: Investing (RESET's 10-Point Investing Plan) 33. Section 3: Investing (Final Salary and State Pensions) 34.

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However, if you’ve left the employer, or your current employer’s final salary scheme has been wound up (eg, it’s still there, but you and the employer are no longer contributing), that’s different. Let’s take a closer look. A closer look While it’s fair to say former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne has his detractors, we middle-class midlifers should be grateful to the man for his 2015 pension reforms Bye-bye being forced to buy an annuity in retirement, hello freedom and choice. In fact, I’d say George Osborne has done more to further financial independence for UK professionals of our generation than anyone. But what he may not have envisaged is the little-known rush to cash in final salary schemes, which saw an estimated 120,000 final salary scheme members “transfer out” in 2017/18, up from 80,000 in 2016/17[407].

22 Days in May: The birth of the Lib Dem - Conservative coalition
by Laws, David
Published 22 Nov 2010

I said that there were some clear ways in which we could demonstrate credibility, for example, we could establish a commission to review the affordability and fairness of public sector pensions. Danny said that this could be established on similar lines to Adair Turner’s very successful commission on the state pension reforms. Peter Mandelson and Lord Adonis looked sympathetic, enthusiastic even. But Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman recoiled in horror, and competed to look shocked, horrified, and as if a rather unpleasant odour had assaulted their senses. Not only was the Labour team clearly divided in its attitude to talks, but some interesting old/new Labour divisions were emerging during the policy discussions too.

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Harriet Harman said: ‘What if we fail to convince the markets, while panicking our people on public services?’ ‘Look, these are only the first tough decisions we are going to have to take to reduce the deficit – even on your spending plans,’ I said. ‘We are going to have to take action in areas such as public sector pensions reform, too.’ Ed Miliband looked horrified: ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We cannot go further than our existing agreements with the unions.’ ‘That sounds like a line from your Labour leadership campaign!’ joked Danny. Ed Miliband tried to look mystified. There was a long pause. Ed Balls looked determinedly grumpy.

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To me, for whom these issues were of central importance, it seemed rather like telling a chef that his food was shockingly bad but that the tablecloth was beautifully ironed. The truth was that we had no agreement on delivering a £10,000 personal tax allowance. We had no agreement on funding the pupil premium. We had no agreement on a banking levy, or on public sector pensions reform, or on restoring the pension earnings link. We had no agreement on a strategy for deficit reduction, and no agreement on spending. All of that meant that we were nowhere near being able to conclude a coalition agreement. Meanwhile, we could not know if a Lib–Lab minority coalition could command the support to survive in the House of Commons, or even deliver the Labour votes necessary to push through a referendum on AV.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Published 1 Jun 2016

However to date these increases are at a modest pace: 2.5 years for men and 4 years for women between 2010 and 2050. That is slower than the projected increase in life expectancy and so we expect this trend of pension reform to continue or accelerate. If you are a high earner, it is also important to realize that the state will play a smaller role in your pension provision going forward. For example, in 2000 a wealthy UK pensioner could expect a state pension worth more than 35 per cent of their final salary; by 2060 that will be only 20 per cent. If state pension reform is slow, changes in corporations’ occupational schemes have, in contrast, been rapid. Pensions are expensive to run and not something most firms are good at, and increasing longevity has made company pension schemes a major financial liability.

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But the falling birth rates in developed economies mean this is no longer the case, and so the schemes are revealed as unsustainable. Governments have, of course, known this for a long time and have taken a series of steps to try to improve the situation. Reform tends to be slow and as the voting population ages, it becomes increasingly resistance to pension reform. The details of reform vary considerably from country to country, but the general principles are the same: increase the retirement age so as to increase the number of years of tax paying; reduce the number of years of claiming a pension; and target pensions more to those with low incomes and assets.

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Jimmy: The three-stage life is stretched We now turn our attention to Jimmy, who was born in 1971 and has a life expectancy of 85.9 We are investigating the finances behind a three-stage life, so we assume that Jimmy graduated from college aged 21 in 1992 and intends to work until he reaches the age of 65 in 2036. Like Jack, he wants to achieve a pension worth 50 per cent of his final salary. However, we will make one key change for Jimmy: our calculations are based on the assumption that he does not have access to a company pension scheme. Despite the state pension reforms we mentioned above, we will continue to assume that he receives a state pension worth 10 per cent of his final salary. Figure 2.3 shows the financing requirements for Jimmy. Whereas Jack had to save 4.3 per cent of his income every year to retire at 65, Jimmy has to save 17.2 per cent each year.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago / London, 1998), p. 399. 57 Ibid., p. 400. 58 Ibid., p. 593. 59 Patricio Silva, ‘Technocrats and Politics in Chile: From the Chicago Boys to the CEIPLAN Monks’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 23, 2 (May 1991), pp. 385-410. 60 Bill Jamieson, ‘25 Years On, Chile Has a Pensions Message for Britain’, Sunday Business, 14 December 2006. 61 Rossana Castiglioni, ‘The Politics of Retrenchment: The Quandaries of Social Protection under Military Rule in Chile, 1973-1990’, Latin American Politics and Society, 43, 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 39ff. 62 Ibid., p. 55. 63 José Piñera, ‘Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile’, Cato Journal, 15, 2-3 (Fall / Winter 1995/96), pp. 155-166. 64 Ibid., p. 40. 65 Teresita Ramos, ‘Chile: The Latin American Tiger?’, Harvard Business School Case 9-798-092 (21 March 1999), p. 6. 66 Laurence J. Kotlikoff, ‘Pension Reform as the Triumph of Form over Substance’, Economists’ Voice (January 2008), pp. 1-5. 67 Armando Barrientos, ‘Pension Reform and Pension Coverage in Chile: Lessons for Other Countries’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 15, 3 (1996), p. 312. 68 ‘Destitute No More’, Economist, 16 August 2007. 69 Barrientos, ‘Pension Reform’, pp. 309f. See also Raul Madrid, ‘The Politics and Economics of Pension Privatization in Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, 37, 2 (2002), pp. 159-82. 70 All figures are for 2004, the latest comparative data available from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. 71 I am indebted here to Laurence J.

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In 1980, just seven years after the coup, Pinochet conceded a new constitution that prescribed a ten-year transition back to democracy. In 1990, having lost a referendum on his leadership, he stepped down as president (though he remained in charge of the army for a further eight years). Democracy was restored, and by that time the economic miracle was under way that helped to ensure its survival. For the pension reform not only created a new class of property-owners, each with his own retirement nest egg. It also gave the Chilean economy a massive shot in the arm, since the effect was significantly to increase the savings rate (to 30 per cent of GDP by 1989, the highest in Latin America). Initially, a cap was imposed that prevented the AFPs from investing more than 6 per cent (later 12 per cent) of the new pension funds outside Chile.65 The effect of this was to ensure that Chile’s new source of savings was channelled into the country’s own economic development.

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In the fifteen years that followed, it was 3.28 per cent, nearly twenty times higher. The poverty rate has declined dramatically to just 15 per cent, compared with 40 per cent in the rest of Latin America.68 Santiago today is the shining city of the Andes, easily the continent’s most prosperous and attractive city. It is a sign of Chile’s success that the country’s pension reforms have been imitated all across the continent, and indeed around the world. Bolivia, El Salvador and Mexico copied the Chilean scheme to the letter. Peru and Colombia introduced private pensions as an alternative to the state system.69 Kazakhstan, too, has followed the Chilean example. Even British MPs have beaten a path from Westminster to Piñera’s door.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

Nigel Lawson turned out to be implacably opposed to making private pensions compulsory. Nobody ever accused Lawson of being a social reformer, but he was gripped at the time by his own radical agenda — to cut taxes and make enough savings in government spending to make that possible. And to do so as quickly as possible. The Fowler pension reforms had the whiff of something that would cost money. He began to search for objections. The first meeting of the cabinet committee was due on 6 February. The papers had already gone out and were sitting in the red dispatch boxes of ministers ready for their long journeys home by ministerial car.

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Thomas, 48 Chamberlain, Joseph, 304 Chamberlain, Neville, 91 Champy, James, 174, 255 Channel Tunnel, 202 Charter Consolidated, 146 Chase Manhattan, 149 Chatfield, Admiral Lord, 233 Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society, 109–10, 118 Chevalier, Albert, 172 childcare, 13, 15, 18–19, 76, 81 see also nurseries Cisco, 114 Citibank, 96, 100 Citigroup (Citicorp), 146 secret reports, 24–6, 152, 159 Citizens’ Charter, 222–3, 258 City of London, 129–31 deregulation, 134–40, 147–51, 285 hostility to industry, 152 and occupational pensions, 190 pay and bonuses, 142–4, 149–50, 160–1 Clarke, Kenneth, 177 Cobbett, William, 282–3, 290–2 Cobden, Richard, 106 Coles, Adrian, 109–13, 117–19 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 154, 156 Columbus, Christopher, 277–8 Community Development Finance Institutions, 96 comparative advantage, 298 Comprehensive Performance Assessments, 265 Conrad, Joseph, 286 Conservative Party, 58–9, 63, 137, 188, 222, 227 and pension reforms, 176–85, 194 conveyancing, 101 Cooke, Sue, 252 Co-operative Bank, 118 co-operatives, 299 corporate re-engineering, 174, 255–6, 261 ‘Corset’, the, 57, 60–1, 65–8, 70, 72, 97, 99, 285 Cotton, Kathleen, 328 council houses, sale of, 63, 67, 100 County NatWest, 145, 148 courts, closure of, 252 Crabtree, Tim, 292–6 credit cards, 18, 80–1, 168, 300 credit default swaps, 156 Credit Suisse First Boston, 114, 151 credit unions, 96 Cresswell-Turner, Sebastian, 65 Crunchies, 44, 49, 83 Crystal Palace station, 52–4 D Dad’s Army, 93–4 Daily Express, 183, 185 Daily Mail, 9–10, 38, 189, 271 Daily Mirror, 190–1 Daily News, 38 Daily Telegraph, 15, 83, 130, 139, 181, 288 Darling, Alistair, 118 Dartford Grammar School, 216–17 Davies, Brian, 113 Davis, Brooklyn, 16 Dearing, Ron, 227 debt advice, 17 ‘deliverology’, 262, 266–7 democracy, 26 ‘property-owning’, 63 shareholder, 107 Demos, 257 Denmark, 77, 286 Department of Education, 218, 224, 227 Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), 177, 184 Department of Trade and Industry, 188 Department of Work and Pensions, 17 derivatives, 141–2, 155–6, 158–9 Direct Edge, 155 Disney, 142–3 divorce, 79–80 Dluglash, Alan, 20 Dorset, 18, 292–6 dot.com boom, 114–15, 132–3, 140–1, 154, 169 downshifting, 12, 44, 52, 73, 83, 292 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 148 Dulwich, 287 Dulwich Preparatory School, 204–6 Dunkley Marshall, 138 Dunn, Robert, 225 dyslexia, 230 E Edinburgh, 18 education, 19–20, 207–41 and character, 233–4 and choice, 207–11, 213, 216, 221–3, 238 comprehensive, 220, 234, 237 and globalization, 212, 239 national curriculum, 220, 227 ‘open admission’ policy, 220–1 private, 5, 10–13, 19–20, 36, 143, 169, 211–12, 236, 238–9, 242 SATs, 226–7 ‘Three Wise Men’ report, 226 see also Black Papers on Education; schools Efficient Market Hypothesis, 128–9, 131, 133, 140, 157 Eisner, Michael, 142 Eleven-Plus, 217–18 Eliot, T.

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Edgar, 122 Hopkinson, David, 139, 146, 150 Horta-Osorio, Antonio, 155 Hoskyn, John, 59 hospital consultants, 89, 249 house-price inflation, 3, 15, 18, 20–1, 24, 55–85, 160, 280, 284, 286 ‘Barber Boom’, 56 and building societies’ cartel, 65–6, 71–3 and divorce, 79–80 and housing density, 78–9 and Lloyd’s scandal, 28, 32 and mortgage interest tax relief, 108–9 and rents, 68–9 and school catchments, 20, 210–11, 221 and size of houses, 77–9 and working couples, 74–6 house prices, 56, 61, 68–9, 74, 87 household loans, increase in, 69 housing market, parallel, 301–2 housing shortages, 56 Howard, Michael, 177 Howe, Elspeth, 58 Howe, Sir Geoffrey, 58–60, 62–7, 97, 99, 128, 130 Human Scale Education, 235 Hutber, Patrick, 5, 36–7, 45, 47, 55, 60, 174–5, 283 I IKB, 156 IMF, 59, 128 immigrants, 39 Imperial College, London, 140 income tax, 36 Independent, 118 Independent on Sunday, 175 index-linked funds, 197–8 Industrial Revolution, 152 inflation, 36, 58, 161, 199, 279–80, 284, 286, 289 Initial Rentokil, 295 Institute of New Economic Thinking, 157 insurance, 171 interest rates, artificially low, 195, 203 ISAs, 171 It’s a Wonderful Life, 122–3 Italy, 97, 299 J Japan, 75, 152, 176, 299 Jenkins, Simon, 72, 226, 266 Jersey, 147 Jews, 39 job seeker’s allowance, 271 jobbers, 136–7, 145–7 Johnson, Rob, 157 Johnson, Simon, 151 Jones, Owen, 68, 287–8 Joseph, Sir Keith, 58, 99, 177, 220 JP Morgan, 143, 152 Judd School, 216–17 Julius II, Pope, 278 Jung, Carl, 95 junk bonds, 148, 154 K Katz, Cindi, 46 Kay, John, 104 Kensington and Chelsea, 211 Kent, 216–19 Keynes, John Maynard, 157, 290 Killik, Paul, 147 King, Mervyn, 129–31, 141 King’s School, Tyneside, 238–9 Kingsland Foundation School, 204–6 Kinnock, Neil, 31 Kinsman, Francis, 174 Kozlowski, Dennis, 117 Kramer, Sebastian, 80 Kynaston, David, 130, 311 L Labour Party, 24, 66–7, 179, 182, 194, 287 Lambton, Lucinda, 224 Lane, Deborah, 11–14, 17 Latin American debt crisis, 71 Lawson, Nigel, 58–60, 62–6, 71–2, 128, 130 and building societies, 97, 99–100, 104 and City deregulation, 138, 149 and end of MIRAS, 108–9 and pension reforms, 177, 180–5, 188, 190, 194 Leeds, 225 Leeson, Nick, 158 Leigh-Pemberton, Robin, 151 leisure time, 17 Leith, William, 15, 83 Lewis, Michael, 153–4 Lewis, Roy, 37–9 Liberal Democrats, 211 libraries, 17 Little Venice, 1–2 Lloyd George, David, 38, 172, 255 Lloyd’s of London, 27–35, 50–1, 69, 286 Lloyds Bank, 71, 109, 118, 122, 155, 171 Local Enterprise Partnership, 293 localism, 299 Lockheed Martin, 132 London education, 210–11, 219, 221, 232, 240 housing, 68–9, 85 middle classes, 41–2 wealth disparities, 284 London Olympics, 221 London Oratory School, 228 London Rebuilding Society, 296 London School of Economics, 140–1 London Stock Exchange, deregulation of, 135–40, 147–51 M M&G, 139 McDonald’s, 47 Maclnnes, Colin, 305 McKinsey, 261, 266 ‘Macmillan Gap’, 152 McRae, Hamish, 118 Major, John, 30–1, 101, 176, 213, 258, 263–4 and education reforms, 221–5 Major, Stephen, 113 Manchester, 95, 189, 224, 255 Manchester High School for Girls, 225 Mandelson, Peter, 24, 263 Mangan, Lucy, 76 Marks & Spencer, 243, 248 Martin’s Bank, 96, 122 Marx, Karl, 272–3 Mass Observation, 40 Maude, Angus, 37–9 Maxwell, Robert, 190–1, 201 Meacher, Michael, 182 medical schools, 212 Meeker, Mary, 133 Merrill Lynch, 139, 155 Merton, 211, 213 Metroland, 82 Mexico, 200 Michelangelo, 278 Middle Class Association, 37 Middle Class Defence Organisation, 38 Middle Class International, 38 Middle Class Union, 38 middle-class values, 13–14, 46–9 aspiration, 88, 234 authenticity, 242 confidence, 87 corrosion by financial sector, 154–6, 158–62 education, 14, 45–6, 49–50, 204 independence, 52, 69, 84, 86, 174, 283 internationalism, 163 moderation, 125, 160 thrift, 36, 39, 45, 49, 108, 120, 160, 169, 174, 195, 283, 301, 305 tolerance, 47, 274 middle classes and assimilation, 39 average incomes, 274 ‘casualisation’ of, 175 and children’s intelligence, 229–30 Cobbett’s description of, 282–3 definitions of, 39–45, 52 demography, 35–6 differences of taste within, 305 disapproval and embarrassment, 46–9 disparities of wealth within, 116 impoverishment, 267–72 in London, 41–2 and racism, 230 solidarity with working classes, 289–90 and status, 20, 267 vilification of working classes, 230, 287–8 Middle England, 39 middle managers, 255 Middleton, Peter, 182 Miliband, Ed, 22 miners’ strike, 148, 288 Mischel, Walter, 45 Moody-Stuart, Elizabeth, 211 Morgan, John Pierpont, 143 Morgan Grenfell, 135 Morgan Stanley, 133 Morris, Peter, 175 Morris, William, 255 Morrison, Steve, 205 mortgage interest tax relief, 61, 108–9, 182 mortgages, 14–15, 18, 20, 203, 270, 287, 290 and building societies, 71–2, 97–8, 101 ‘Grandparent Mortgages’, 75 and house-price inflation, 56–7, 60–1, 65–6 interest-only, 75, 171 and lack of choice, 82–4 and multiples of salaries, 75 and rents, 68–9 see also remortgaging Mount, Ferdinand, 26 Mrs Miniver, 275 Muesli Belt, 44, 83 Multis, 43 musicals, 44, 53 N nannies, 169 napkin rings, 39–40 Nasdaq index, 155 National Association of Pension Funds, 180, 184, 191 National Childbirth Trust, 73, 164–5 National Health Service (NHS), 85, 177, 180, 249, 253–4, 260, 267, 291 National Insurance, 181–2, 184 National Lottery, 221, 253 National Theatre, 125–6 National Trust cafés, 87–9, 163 Nationwide Building Society, 112–14, 119 NatWest, 30, 71, 96 Neill Report, 33 Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 198 Nether Wallop, 245–7 Netscape, 114 New Economics Foundation, 116 New Labour, 230 New Public Management, 263–4 New York, 78, 122, 186, 218 New York Stock Exchange, 155 newspapers, 253 Nikko, 149 noise complaints, 78 Nonconformists, 39 Norman, Montagu, 95 North Sea oil, 64, 279 Northern Ireland, 221 Northern Rock, 72, 101, 110, 112, 118 Northwood, 73 Nottingham, 225, 238, 295 nurseries, 19, 76–7, 299 O Oakwood High School, 224 Obama administration, 152 Observer, 110 Occupy movement, 289–90 Office of Fair Trading (OFT), 135–6 Ofsted, 205–6, 231, 269 oil prices, 59, 299 old age pensions, introduction of, 38, 172 Oliver, Jamie, 295 One Per Cent, the, 23–6, 45, 69, 121, 159, 161, 163, 165, 193 O’Neal, Stanley, 155 Orpington, 162 Osborne, David, 261 Outhwaite, Dick, 30–1 outsourcing, 23, 26, 41, 160, 248, 285 Owen, Wilfred, 234 Oxford University, 80, 88, 234 P Pahl, Ray, 49 Palmer, Alasdair, 175 Parents’ Charter, 222–3 Parkinson, Cecil, 137–8, 149 parks, 17 Patten, John, 224, 226–8, 238 Pawson, Andrew, 233 Pearce, Edward, 62 Penhaligon, David, 102–3 Penman, Andrew, 213–14 pensions, 167–203, 270, 281, 284–5, 290, 302 annuities, 172, 196–7 automatic enrolment, 202 average pot, 204 Brown’s tax on, 19, 194 Conservative reforms, 176–85 defined benefit vs. defined contribution, 175–6, 195–6 and home ownership, 14, 19, 21, 85, 200–1, 203 mis-selling of, 188 occupational, 172–3, 175, 178, 185, 188, 190–3, 196–7, 201–2 public sector pensions, 43, 192, 202, 253 SERPs, 179–84 state pensions, 81, 178, 200–1 surpluses, 193–4 Pepper, Gordon, 66 Perry, Grayson, 289, 297, 305 pets, 10 Pinchin Denny, 138 Pinsent Masons, 189 plutonomy, 25, 143, 152, 159–60 political economy, 48, 51 Popcorn, Faith, 83 post offices, closure of, 252 Post-Autistic Economics campaign, 157 Potosí, 279–80 Power, Michael, 257 ‘Precariat’, 17 Pride and Prejudice, 281–2 Priestley, J.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

Indeed, Europe and America surged ahead precisely because they kept changing: Government was engaged in a continual process of improvement. Looking back, others might identify dozens of small revolutions, such as Thomas Cromwell’s “revolution in government” in Tudor England or Otto von Bismarck’s pension reforms in nineteenth-century Germany. In this book we simplify and argue that the Western state has been through three and a half great revolutions in modern times. The first took place in the seventeenth century, when Europe’s princes constructed centralized states that began to pull ahead of the rest of the world.

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But if even dysfunctional California can stir itself, surely there is hope for others? It is indeed possible to find a few flickers of hope: The region’s ability to recover from misfortune and repair its mistakes is still its most admirable feature. The euro crisis is forcing some badly managed countries to change: Italy passed a pretty impressive piece of pensions reform, and Spain has begun to tidy up its skewed labor market. In America more is going on at the state level than in Washington. Kansas has created a post called “the Repealer” to get rid of red tape and pays a “bounty” to high schools for every vocational qualification their students earn in certain fields.

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AARP, 124 absolutism, 32, 43 academies, 212, 214 Adams, John, 249, 250, 251, 254, 261, 269–70 Adonis, Andrew, 131 affirmative action, 79, 88 Africa, Chinese businesses in, 152 African National Congress, 254 agriculture: in emerging world, 238 subsidies for, 185, 237–38 Agriculture Department, U.S., 108, 237–39 airports, privatization of, 235 Ai Weiwei, 34 Alton Locke (Kingsley), 58 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, 114 American Medical Association, 204 American Revolution, 6–7, 44, 45, 46, 264 Amtrak, 235 Anderson, Chris, 191 Antholis, Bill, 218 Arab League, 253 Arab Spring, 144 Aravind Eye Care System, 203, 204 Archer Daniels Midland, 238 Argentina, economy of, 120 Army, U.S., 182 Arnold, Matthew, 58 Asia: aging population of, 165 economic crisis of 1997 in, 142–43 pensions in, 141–42 in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 34–36 Asquith, Herbert, 61 Australia: civil service in, 215 overlapping areas of government responsibility in, 108 “Austrian school,” 83 automobile industry, 189, 190, 191 Bagehot, Walter, 128 Balázs, Étienne, 40 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 96 ballot initiatives, 127 Bangalore, India, 201, 218 Bank of England, 43 Barboza, David, 162 Bartlett, Bruce, 121 Baruch, Bernard, 233 “basic minimum,” 87 Baumol, William, 19, 110, 178–79, 187, 222 Baumol’s disease, 19, 109–11, 174, 178–79, 183, 222 Becker, George, 84 Beijing, 34–35 Belgium, 228 Bell, Daniel, 157 Bentham, Jeremy, 49, 57, 85 Berggruen, Nicolas, 124, 129, 131, 159 Berlin, Isaiah, 48, 226, 228 Berlin Wall, 253 Berlusconi, Silvio, 12, 128, 196, 227 Bertelsmann Foundation, 143 Best Party, 261 Bevan, Aneurin, 75 Beveridge, William, 74, 75, 78, 90, 97, 245 Beveridge Report, 74 bike sharing, 216–17, 219 Bildt, Carl, 175 Bill of Rights, English (1689), 43 Bill of Rights, U.S., 226, 250 Bismarck, Otto von, 6, 7, 60, 174–75 Blair, Tony, 96, 194, 262 on small government, 95, 211–14 Bleak House (Dickens), 50 Bloom, Nick, 191 Bloomberg, Michael, 196–97, 217 Bloomberg Businessweek, 129–30 Boao Forum for Asia, 153 Bodin, Jean, 29 Boer War (1899–1902), 61 Böhlmark, Anders, 176 Bolsa Família, 206 Booth, Charles, 66 Boston, Mass., 210 Boston Consulting Group, 172 Boston Tea Party, 240 Bourbon Restoration (1814), 46 Bo Xilai, 154, 218 Brandeis, Louis, 263 Brazil, 13, 18, 96, 153 entitlement reform in, 17, 206 breakaway nations, 260 Bright, John, 56 British Airways, 94 British Gas, 94 British Medical Association, 114 British Rail, 213 British Telecom, 94, 234 Brown, George, 134 Brown, Gordon, 99, 130, 215 Brown, Jerry, 10, 91, 106, 119, 125, 219 fiscal reforms of, 118, 129–30 Brown, Pat, 105–6, 124–25 Buchanan, James, 84, 262 Bureau of Corporations, 72 Bureau of Land Management, 236 Bush, George H.W., 95 Bush, George W., 10, 98, 164, 177, 198, 255, 262 business sector: globalization and, 191, 193 innovation in, 194 productivity in, 18–19 reinvention of, 189–92 technology and, 191 Butler, R.A., 75 California, 105–32 ballot initiatives in, 127 Baumol’s disease and, 109–11 constitution of, 107 deficit in, 118–19 education in, 111 as exemplar of Western state failures, 106–7 fiscal reform in, 129–30 old and well-off as primary beneficiaries of public spending in, 122–23 outdated governmental system of, 107–8 pensions in, 113, 115, 119–20, 130 political polarization in, 124–25 population of, 108 prison system in, 112–13 proliferation of regulation in, 116 Proposition 13 in, 91, 92, 107 public contempt for government in, 106, 112 public-sector unions in, 112–15, 120 special interest groups in, 112–15 taxes in, 116, 129 unfunded liabilities in, 119, 129, 130 California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, 116 California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), 112–13 California Environmental Quality Act (1970), 117 California Public Policy Center, 119 California Teachers Association, 113 Cameron, David, 130–31, 158, 199, 215 Canada, 199 Capio, 171–72 capitalism, 50–54 democracy’s presumed link to, 261–62 inequality and, 262–63 state, see state capitalism as supposedly self-correcting, 70 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), 86 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 96 Carlino, Gerald, 218 Carlyle, Thomas, 44, 57 Carney, Mark, 215 Carswell, Douglas, 260 Carter, Jimmy, 198 Carville, James, 97 Castiglione, Baldassare, 33 Catholics, 38 Cato Institute, 238 Cavendish, William, 31, 40 Cavendish family, 31, 47 Cawley, James, 204 CCTV cameras, 182, 226 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 124 Central Party School, 150, 156 Central Provident Fund, 140 Centre for Policy Studies, 92 centrism, 95, 98 Chamberlain, Joseph, 66 Charles I, King of England, 31 Charles II, King of England, 32, 38, 42 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl), 228 charter schools, 212, 214, 215 Chartists, 51, 58 checks and balances system, 226, 250, 255–56, 265 Chidambaram, Palaniappan, 96 Child, Josiah, 39 Childs, Marquis, 169 China, Imperial, 37 bureaucracy of, 37, 40–41 innovation disdained by, 41 in seventeenth century, 34–36 trade with West rejected by, 41 China, People’s Republic of: aging population of, 164, 183 Asian-state model in, 136–37, 145, 149, 152, 156 Communist ideology in, 63, 145 corruption in, 4, 18, 148, 149, 186 Cultural Revolution in, 156 economy of, 3, 146, 163 education in, 147, 148–49, 164 efficiency of government in, 146, 153, 159 elitism in, 161–62 governmental changeover in, 159 health care in, 164 health insurance in, 141, 156 India contrasted with, 146, 153 lack of public confidence in, 13 leadership training in, 105 local government in, 160–61, 217–18 long-term outlook of, 159 mandarin tradition of, 138, 156, 157 meritocracy in, 156–63, 164, 254 pensions in, 156, 183 Singapore as model for, 145 slowing of economic growth in, 164 social-service NGOs in, 158 state capitalism in, 64, 149–56, 234 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in, 150–52, 154–55 urban population increase in, 149 U.S. contrasted with, 147, 153 Western democracy seen as inefficient by, 145 China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong (CELAP), 1–5, 18, 145, 153, 156 China Mobile, 151 China Youth Daily, 148 Chongqing, China, 218 Christensen, Clayton, 203 chronic diseases, 183, 200, 204 Internet and, 209 Chua, Amy, 143 Churchill, Winston, 68, 75, 247 cities: population growth in, 149, 218 working relationships between, 218–19 Citizens United decision, 240 Civil War, English, 6, 31, 38, 43 Clark, Joseph, 77 class struggle, 62–63 Clinton, Bill, 10, 95, 96–97, 98, 142, 217 Clinton, Hillary, 162 Coase, Ronald, 84, 229 Cobbett, William, 49 Cobden, Richard, 56 Code for America, 216 Coggan, Philip, 263 Cohen, Jared, 210–11 Cohen, Leonard, 185 cold war, 76, 252 Colloquies on Society (Southey), 224–25 commerce, nation-state and, 33 Committee on Social Thought, 83 Common Sense (Paine), 44 Communist Party, Chinese, 63, 145, 153 elitism in, 161–62 as meritocracy, 156–57 Organization Department of, 151 Communists, communism, 7, 8, 63–64, 71, 77, 134, 137, 145, 225 successes of, 90–91, 252 compassion, 61 “compassionate conservatism,” 98 competitive advantage, 189 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 222 Confederation of Medical Associations in Asia and Oceania, 204 Congo, 22 Congress, U.S., 16, 100, 228 approval ratings of, 11 dysfunction in, 256 lobbies and, 238–40, 257 Congressional Budget Office, 15, 242 Congress Party, India, 162 Conservative Party, British (Tories), 11, 69, 75 conservatives, conservatism, 10 “compassionate,” 98 see also Right Constitution, U.S., 108, 109, 256 Fourteenth Amendment of, 120 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 92 consumer choice, 191 consumption taxes, 123–24 Corn Laws, 50, 238, 240 corruption, 185–86 crime, Western state and, 181–82 Crimean War, 65 Croly, Herbert, 71 Cromwell, Oliver, 32 Cromwell, Thomas, 6, 37 crony capitalism, 72, 112, 155, 234, 237–38, 246, 269 Cultural Revolution, 156 Czech Republic, 252 Darwin, Charles, 59 Das, Gurcharan, 13 Davies, Mervyn, 215 decentralization, 216–19 defense, spending on, 16 Defense Department, U.S., 20 deficits, deficit spending, 14, 100, 118–22, 177, 231–32, 241 unfunded liabilities and, 119, 232 democracy: in Asian-state model, 17 big government as threat to, 251, 264–69 as central tenet of Western state, 5, 8, 16–17, 22–23, 136, 141, 221 Founding Fathers and, 226, 250, 265 Fourth Revolution and, 249–70 globalization and, 262 imperfections of, 17, 127–28, 141, 143–44, 145, 226–27, 247–48, 251, 269 income inequality and, 263 in India, 136, 146 individual freedom as threatened by, 226, 250–51 nation-states and, 259, 262 presumed link to capitalism of, 261–62 as presumed universal aspiration, 261–62 as rooted in culture, 262 scarcity and, 247–48 self-interest and, 250, 260 short-term vs. long-term benefits in, 260–61, 264 special-interest groups and, 16–17, 111–15, 247, 251 strengths of, 263 twentieth-century triumph of, 252 twenty-first-century failures of, 252–61 uneven history of, 249–50 welfare state as threat to, 22, 142 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 252 Democracy in Europe (Siedentop), 251 Democratic Party, U.S., 97, 240 spending curb approved by, 12 spending cuts opposed in, 100, 255 Democratic Review, 55 Deng Xiaoping, 142 Singapore as inspiration to, 145 Denmark, 22, 210 disability insurance in, 244 “flexicurity” system in, 173, 176 innovation in, 220 1980s financial crisis in, 176 reinvention of welfare state in, 173–74 Depression, Great, 69–70, 85 Detroit, Mich., 218–19 bankruptcy of, 14, 119 Detter, Dag, 236 Dicey, A.V., 57 Dickens, Charles, 50, 57–58 Dirksen, Everett, 192–93 disability-insurance reform, 244 Discovery Group, 211 discretionary spending, 195 diversity, 214–16 DNA databases, 182 Dodd-Frank Act (2010), 117, 239 Doncaster Prison, 214 Downey, Alan, 177 Drucker, Peter, 198 Dubai, 144, 217 Dukakis, Michael, 95 Dundase family, 49–50 East India Company, 36, 40, 47, 48, 50, 56, 150, 240 Eastman Kodak, 190–91 École Nationale d’Administration, 194 economic-freedom index, 174 Economist, 86, 97 Edison, Thomas, 179 education, 7, 9, 16, 48, 58, 197 charter schools in, 212, 214, 215 in China, 147, 148–49, 164 cost/outcome disparities in, 194–95 declining quality of, 111 diverse models for, 214–15 government domination of, 10 international rankings of, 19, 148, 206–7 preschool, 123 reform of, 58–59, 212 in Sweden, 171, 176–77 technology and, 179–80 voucher systems for, 171, 176–77, 220 in welfare state, 68, 69 Education Act (British, 1944), 75 Egypt, 155 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 Mubarak regime overthrown in, 144, 253 Eisenhower, Dwight, 77 elections, U.S., cost of, 257 electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, 205 elitism, 135, 136, 138–39 in Chinese Communist Party, 161–62 in U.S., 162 welfare state and, 77–78 Emanuel, Rahm, 216 emerging world: agriculture in, 238 as failing to grasp technological change, 18 innovation in, 17 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217 need for reform in, 14 urban population shift in, 218 “End of History, The” (Fukuyama), 262 Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR), 182 Enlightenment, 42 entitlement reform, 95, 217, 234, 241–46 beneficiaries’ responsibilities and, 245 conditionality in, 17, 206, 244 disability insurance and, 244 globalization and, 245 information revolution and, 245 in Latin America, 17, 206, 244 means testing and, 243, 245 transparency and, 244–45 entitlements, 9, 10, 15, 16, 79, 100, 127, 141, 222, 228 aging population and, 124, 183–84, 232, 241–42 middle class and, 11, 17 pensions as, 79, 184, 243 as unfunded liabilities, 245–46, 264, 265 universal benefits in, 124, 141, 243–44 equality: capitalism and, 262–63 liberal state and, 69 of opportunity vs. result, 79, 228 sexual, 169 welfare state and, 68–69, 74, 79, 222 Western state and, 221 Equality (Tawney), 69 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 13, 254 Estonia, 121, 210 Euclid, 31, 33 eugenics, 67–68, 78, 169 euro, 99, 100, 258 euro crisis, 12, 100, 126, 130, 258–59 Europe: age of conquest in, 36–37, 39 compulsory sterilization in, 78 contest for secular supremacy in, 38–39 democracy’s failures in, 258–59 dysfunctional political systems in, 126 economic crisis in, 126 Enlightenment in, 42 government bloat in, 98–99 mercantilist policies in, 40 national consolidation in, 38–39 old-age dependency ratio in, 14–15 postwar era in, 78 public spending in, 99–100 revolutions of 1848 in, 54 technocratic bent in, 76–77, 259 transnational cooperation in, 76 wars of religion in, 34, 38 welfare state in, 75 European Atomic Energy Community, 76 European Central Bank, 258–59 European Coal and Steel Community, 76 European Commission, 254 European Economic Community, 76 European parliament, 258 European Union, 13, 16, 17, 76, 99, 108, 109, 258–59, 260 Extraordinary Black Book, The (Wade), 49 Exxon, 154 Fabians, 8, 21, 67, 72, 73, 96, 134, 169, 220 Facebook, 190–91 Falklands War, 94 Farrell, Diana, 132 fascism, 8, 71, 77, 252 Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism, The (Hayek), 134 Federal Communications Commission, 73 Federalist Papers, 5, 265 Federal Register, 117 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 37 filibusters, 256 financial crisis of 2007–8, 100, 164, 263 financial-services industry, 239 Finer, Samuel, 27, 276 Finland, 210 innovation in, 220 1990s financial crisis in, 176 fiscal crisis, as incentive for change, 198 Fisher, Antony, 81–82, 90, 92, 280 “flexicurity,” 173, 176 Ford, Henry, 189, 191, 201 fossil fuels, government subsidies for, 239 Foster, William, 58 Founding Fathers, 108 democracy and, 226, 250, 265 liberal state and, 44–45, 222 Fourteenth Amendment, 120 Fourth Revolution, 5 Asian-state competition as impetus for, 17, 163–64, 247 decentralization and, 216–19 democratic reform and, 249–70 diversity and, 214–16 entitlement reform and, see entitlement reform failure of current model as impetus for, 14–17 freedom and, 247, 248, 268, 270 government efficiency in, 233 ideological foundation of, 21, 28, 221–23, 232 information revolution and, 245, 246–47 infrastructure and, 232 innovation and, 219–20 monetary and fiscal reform in, 266–67 pluralism in, 211–14 as postbureaucratic, 211 pragmatism and, 18–19, 232–33 privatization and, 234–37 security and, 232 small government as principle of, 232, 264–69 subsidy-cutting and, 237–41 technology and, 18, 19–20, 233, 266–67 France, 43, 78 deficit spending in, 14 expanded bureaucracy in, 60 government bloat in, 12 pension age in, 16 public spending in, 75, 99–100 ruling elite of, 194 state capitalism in, 235 Francis I, King of France, 37 Fraser Institute, 174 fraternity, welfare state and, 74, 79 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 38 freedom: balance between security and, 230–31 as central tenet of Western state, 8, 23, 46, 68–69, 222, 256 core elements of, 223–24 democracy as threat to, 226, 250–51 diminished concept of, 225–27, 228–29 Fourth Revolution and, 247, 248, 268, 270 Hobbes and, 33 as ideological basis of liberal state, 69, 223–26 Mill and, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 228, 250, 256, 268 necessary constraints on, 223 welfare state as threat to, 22, 74, 222, 265 see also rights Freedom House, 143, 252 free markets, 49, 59, 142 Friedman as evangelist for, 84, 86 Thatcher and, 93 free trade, 50, 54, 57 Mill’s espousal of, 55 French Revolution, 6, 44, 45–46, 249 Friedman, Milton, 81–87, 89, 93, 106, 128, 171, 280 background of, 82 big government as target of, 82, 84–85, 88 as free-market evangelist, 84, 86 Nobel Prize of, 82, 86, 91 Reagan and, 86 “Road to Hell” lecture of, 84 single currency opposed by, 99 Thatcher-Reagan revolution and, 8, 28, 97, 100 Friedman, Thomas, 163 Friedrich, Carl, 265 Fukuyama, Francis, 142, 143, 256, 262 Future of Freedom, The (Zakaria), 143 G20 countries, 15 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 85, 86 Galtieri, Leopoldo, 94 Galton, Francis, 68 Gardels, Nathan, 124 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 57 Gates, Bill, 97 Gazprom, 152, 153, 154 Geely, 150 General Electric (GE), 205, 243 General Motors (GM), 189, 190, 191, 233 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes), 70 Geometry (Euclid), 31 George III, King of England, 11, 41 Germany, Federal Republic of (West Germany), 75, 78, 232, 265 Germany, Imperial, 6, 60–61 Germany, Nazi, 71, 232 Germany, unified, 12, 22, 173, 186, 212 gerrymandering, 13, 106, 113, 125, 256–57, 264, 267 see also rotten boroughs Gillray, James, 227 Gladstone, William, 7 economizing by, 51–52, 224 small government as principle of, 51–52, 60 tax policy of, 51 globalization, 10, 191, 193 democracy and, 262 entitlement reform and, 245 government and, 10, 96, 200–207 health care and, 200–201 national determination and, 259–60, 262 Glorious Revolution (1688), 43 GOATs (Government of All the Talents), 215 Godolphin, Sidney, 31 Golden Dawn party, 259 Goldman Sachs, 120 Goldwater, Barry, 80, 86 Google, 189–90, 191, 233 Gore, Al, 95, 131, 198 government: anti-innovation bias of, 194–95, 212, 219 bloat in, 9–11, 18–19, 89–90, 98, 177, 222–23, 227, 229–30, 231, 233 centralization bias of, 192–93, 212, 216 challenges to reform in, 196–98 coercive power of, 198 efficiency of, 18–21, 37, 89, 187, 198–99, 213, 233, 247, 255 entrenched workforce of, 193–94 globalization and, 200–207 in-house bias of, 192, 212 local, 216–19, 267 public contempt for, 106, 112, 227–28, 230, 233, 251, 261 sunset clauses and, 118, 246, 266 technology and, 200, 207–11 uniformity bias of, 193–94, 212, 214 volunteerism and, 216 Government Accountability Office, 235 Grace Commission, 198 Gray, Vincent, 210 Great Britain: asylum seekers in, 54 as capitalist state, 50–54 commercial empire of, 39–40 deficit of, 177 education reform in, 58–59, 79, 212, 214–15 falling crime rate in, 181 fiscal reform in, 130–31 government bloat in, 89–90 health-care spending in, 90 landed artistocracy of, 48, 49 liberal revolution in, 46 low public confidence in, 11 national pride in, 61–62 patronage vs. meritocracy in, 50, 52–53, 222 postwar era in, 78 power of Anglican Church in, 48 public spending in, 9, 75 wars of, 6 “winter of discontent” in, 93 Great Depression, 69–70, 85 Great Exhibition of 1851, 54 Great Society, 77, 192 Great Western Railway, 65 Greece, 16 economy of, 120, 259 public-sector employees in, 115 public spending in, 99 Green, T.H., 61 Green River Formation, 236 Grenville family, 49–50 Grillo, Beppe, 12, 227 gross domestic product (GDP), unreliability of, 121 Grote, George, 54 Guangdong, China, 217 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 31 Hagel, Chuck, 256 Hall, Joseph, 35 Halsey, A.H., 88 Hamilton, Alexander, 5, 150 Hamilton, James, 120 happiness, right to, 48, 49 Hard Times (Dickens), 58 Havel, Václav, 252 Hayek, Friedrich, 10, 83, 85–86, 92, 93, 134, 170 Health and Social Security Department, British, 89 health care, 7, 9, 90, 98, 213 aging population and, 15, 183, 242 in China, 164 cost of, 110, 121, 205, 242–43 cost/outcome disparities in, 195 globalization and, 200–201 government domination of, 10 in India, 17, 18, 200–206 labor productivity in, 200 mass production in, 201–3 Obamacare and, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 role of doctors in, 203–5, 243 single-payer systems in, 205, 233, 243 special interest groups and, 200 in Sweden, 171–73 technology and, 183, 208–9 healthcare.gov, 199 health insurance, 141 health registries, 172, 183, 209 Heath, Edward, 92–93 Hegel, G.W.F., 45, 60–61 71 Helsinki, 220 Heritage Foundation, 92 Hewlett, Bill, 105 Higgins, David, 215 Hilton, Steve, 132 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 250 Hitler, Adolf, 71 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 8, 9, 21, 27–28, 29, 40, 44, 63, 135–36, 181, 219, 268 background of, 30–31 as controversial thinker, 31–32 on human nature, 29–30, 44–45 individual liberty and, 33 as materialist, 33 as royalist, 6, 18, 31–32 social contract and, 32, 34, 42, 222 Hogarth, William, 227 Hollande, François, 12, 16, 153, 184, 194 Holocaust, 78 Homestead Act (U.S., 1862), 62 House of Cards (TV show), 227 House of Commons, 127 House of Representatives, U.S., 97, 127 Howard, Philip, 118, 132, 195 Hu Jintao, 2 Huldai, Ron, 216 Hume, David, 43 Hungary, 254 Huntington, Samuel, 41–42 Hurun Report, 161 Iceland, 261 India, 8, 35, 36 China contrasted with, 146, 153 democracy in, 136, 146 economic stagnation in, 147 education in, 147 health care in, 17, 18, 200–206 infant mortality rate in, 201 lack of public confidence in, 13 local government in, 217–18 nepotism in, 162–63 Thatcherite reform in, 96 as weak state, 37 Indonesia, 142–43 health insurance in, 141 industry, landed aristocracy as opponent of, 48 Industry and Trade (Marshall), 233 information, access to, 210–11, 214 information revolution, 245, 246–47 information technology (IT), 18, 19–20 infrastructure: Fourth Revolution and, 232 spending on, 122, 232 innovation, 219–20 in business sector, 194 government bias against, 194–95, 212, 219 nation-state and, 37, 39 Institute for Energy Research, 236 Institute of Economic Affairs, 82, 92 Institute of Medicine, 204 Institute of Racial Biology, 78 interest groups, 16–17, 90, 111–15 Interior Department, U.S., 236 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 15, 76, 90 Asian financial crisis and, 142–43 Internet, 191, 260 health care and, 208–9 self-help and, 209 Iran, China and, 152 Iraq, 253 Iraq War, 143, 253 Ireland, 38 public spending in, 99–100 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 37 Islamic world: antiscientific attitudes in, 41 in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 35 Istanbul, 35 Italy, 196, 259 pension reform in, 130 politicians’ pay and benefits in, 115 public spending in, 99–100 voter apathy in, 12 It’s Even Worse Than It Looks (Mann and Ornstein), 125–26, 227 Jackson, Andrew, 55 Jacques, Martin, 163 Jagger, Mick, 90 James I, King of England, 31 James II, King of England, 43 Japan, 15, 17, 36 Jarvis, Howard, 91 Jay, Douglas, 77 Jiang Jiemin, 154 Jiang Zemin, 142 Johnson, Boris, 216–17 Johnson, Lyndon, 77, 80, 87 Joseph, Keith, 92, 93 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 128 Kamarck, Elaine, 131–32 Kangxi, Emperor of China, 40 Kansas, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 224 Kaplan, Robert, 144 Kapoor, Anish, 34 Kennedy, Joseph, 73 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 185 Kerry, John, 96 Keynes, John Maynard, 22, 69–70, 76, 97 pragmatism of, 70–71 Keynesianism, 71, 77, 83, 95 counterrevolution against, 82–84 Khan, Salman, 180 Khan Academy, 180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 79 Kingsley, Charles, 58 Kirk, Russell, 85 Kissinger, Henry, 133, 136 Kleiner, Morris, 118 Knight, Frank, 84 Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), 215 Kocher, Robert, 200 Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 120 Kristol, Irving, 87 Kroc, Ray, 185 Labour Party, British, 68, 69, 70, 77, 93, 94–95, 114 laissez-faire economics, 56, 57, 61, 65–66, 70, 71 Laski, Harold, 68, 134 Latin America: economies of, 8 entitlement reform in, 17, 206, 244 Lazzarini, Sergio, 153 Lee Hsien Loong, 135, 138 Lee Kuan Yew, 4, 17, 53, 133–34, 137, 139–41, 143, 144, 145, 147, 156, 170, 183, 244 authoritarianism of, 137, 138 small-government ideology of, 140, 165 Left, 62, 73, 88, 183 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 20, 187, 213 and growth of big government, 10, 98, 131, 175, 185, 228, 230, 231 subsidy-cutting and, 234, 237–38 Lehman Brothers, 14 Lenovo, 150 Le Pen, Marine, 259 Le Roy, Louis, 276 Leviathan, 10 Leviathan (Hobbes), 29, 32, 33, 34, 42 Leviathan, Monumenta 2011 (Kapoor), 34 Liberal Party, British, 68, 70 liberals, liberalism: and debate over size of government, 48, 49, 232 freedom as core tenet of, 69, 223–26, 232 right to happiness as tenet of, 48, 49 role of state as seen by, 21–22, 222–23, 226, 232 see also Left; liberal state liberal state, 6–7, 8, 220, 221 capitalism and, 50–54 competition and, 247 education in, 7, 48, 58–59 equality and, 69 expanded role of government in, 56–62 Founding Fathers and, 44–45, 222 freedom as ideological basis of, 69, 223–26, 232, 268 industrial revolution and, 246–47 meritocracy as principle of, 50, 52–53 protection of rights as primary role of, 45 rights of citizens expanded by, 7, 9, 48, 49, 51 rise of, 27–28, 269 small government as principle of, 48, 49, 51–52, 61, 232 libertarian Right, 82 liberty, see freedom Libya, 253 LifeSpring Hospitals, 202–3 Lincoln, Abraham, 62, 92 Lindahl, Mikael, 176 Lindgren, Astrid, 170 Lisbon, Treaty of (2007), 258 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 50 Liu Xiaobo, 166 Livingston, Ken, 217 Lloyd George, David, 62 lobbies, Congress and, 238–40, 257 Locke, John, 42, 43, 45 social contract and, 42, 222 Logic of Collective Action, The (Olson), 111 London School of Economics, 67, 74 Louis XIV, King of France, 38 Lowe, Robert, 58–59 L.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills
Published 6 Nov 2014

Is the key issue wealth inequality between generations, such as the ‘baby boomers’ and the rest, or is it inequality within each generation? It examines two kinds of policies concerned with how the state helps people accumulate resources over their lives: pensions policy, and the rationale for the recent wave of pension reforms in the UK; and the other hugely varied (and often contradictory) range of policies that affect or are affected by the way people accumulate wealth and other assets. Chapter 7 then looks at financial and other links across the generations. Given their very different family backgrounds, what do the life chances look like of young George Ackroyd compared to those of young Edward Osborne, both born in July 2013?

…

Also, as the middle panel of Figure 6.3 showed, the wealthiest quarter of pensioners have non-pension wealth of £300,000 or more, including financial wealth of more than £100,000 (2008–10 figures). One response is to argue that pensions – and other extra payments to pensioners, such as Winter Fuel Payments or free TV licences for the oldest pensioners – should become means tested. But we have just been through a series of major pension reforms designed, with widespread support, to reduce the spread of means testing in old age. This reached its logical conclusion with the flat-rate ‘single tier pension’ introduced by the Coalition for those reaching pension age from 2016, set at a level that will carry most clear of means testing. This was for good reasons, given the public interest in there being clear benefits to people from providing for part of their own income in retirement.

…

But in combination with the age-related patterns of demands on the welfare state of the kind shown in Figure 3.5 in Chapter 3, this means a large increase in what we would expect to have to spend in the future, if we carry on treating people of a given age in the same way as we do now. The independent OBR looks each year at what pressures of this kind – alongside other factors such as pension reforms already under way – would mean for future public spending. The results of its 2013 exercise are shown in Figure 8.10. Such projections are, of course, vastly uncertain – we cannot be at all precise about how the age structure of the population will actually evolve over the coming decades, and many features of the welfare state are bound to change, as they have in the last 50 years.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Occupational schemes had miscalculated the length of time they would have to pay out to pensioners surviving for longer and longer. Private pensions had been mis-sold, both literally to those induced to opt out of the state schemes and figuratively to those who had believed the patter about them paying off. In a parallel universe, pension reform might have been Labour’s forte. All pensions systems ultimately had to be social democratic; even the most ironclad free marketeer had to accept the need for state provision and tight regulation. But if reforms were to last, a measure of bipartisanship was needed. Things started badly when Labour were accused of damaging private pension funds in 1997 by adjusting a tax break on corporation tax.

…

So, too, were persistent allegations that pension entitlements being racked up by public-sector staff were over-generous. But the state was accumulating hundreds of billions in liabilities and the government obfuscated when it might have fought prejudice with facts about the relative remuneration enjoyed in public and private sectors and the small average size of public-sector pensions. Reforms were needed but Labour went AWOL. The biggest question confronting an ageing society was similar to that posed by Sir Nicholas Stern over climate change: how much would people cut consumption in the here and now for the sake of tomorrow? It was not one likely to be tackled by a government that believed its political fate depended on keeping the fires burning.

…

The age of retirement would probably need to keep rising faster, with a review every four years to make sure pensions were keeping up with life expectancy. Later on, Labour tried to inject more equity into pensions by stopping the tax deductibility of pension contributions for those on higher earnings from 2011. Labour’s principal pension reforms were meant to address inequality. They introduced a future pension entitlement aimed at carers, disabled people and the low paid who had failed to accrue regular National Insurance pension rights. As many as twenty million people could gain extra post-retirement income in future if this reform were to stick.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Britain has already made this move, announcing that public-sector pensions will increase in line with the consumer price index, rather than the retail price index. The former tends to rise by around 0.7 per cent a year less than the latter. This change may reduce the government’s pension bill by 10 per cent or so. Indeed the proposed British pension reforms for the public sector involved a combination of different measures – as well as a change in inflation-linking, the government also planned to make public-sector workers retire at the state pension age (rather than at sixty), switch them to career-average schemes and increase the level of their contributions.

…

BEQUEATHING OUR DEBTS 1 ‘Global Demographics – From Golden to Grey, Long-Term Asset Return Study’, Deutsche Bank, 10 September 2010. 2 Quoted in David Willetts, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give it Back, London, 2010. 3 Ibid. 4 Martin Neil Baily and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, ‘US Pensions Reform: Lessons from Other Countries’, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009. 5 ‘Global Demographics’. 6 ‘Global Aging 2010: An Irreversible Truth’. 7 Eileen Norcross and Andrew Biggs, ‘The Crisis in Public Sector Pension Plans: A Blueprint for Reform in New Jersey’, http:://mercatus.org/pensions. 8 Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua Rauh, ‘Public Pension Promises: How Big Are They and What Are They Worth?’

…

Bibliography Some suggestions for further reading: Acharya, Viral and Richardson, Matthew, eds, Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed Financial System, New York, 2009. Ahamed, Liaquat, Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression and the Bankers Who Broke the World, London, 2009. Baily, Martin Neil and Kirkegaard, Jacob Funk, US Pension Reform: Lessons from Other Countries, Washington, DC, 2009. Barbera, Robert J., The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing Our Economic Future, New York, 2009. Belloc, Hilaire, Usury, London, 1931. Bernholz, Peter, Monetary Regimes and Inflation: History, Economic and Political Relationships, Cheltenham, 2003.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

But once the government changed after the unexpected election rout of the NDA government in May, the progress toward the pension reform came to a standstill. While it got Chidambaram’s support, he was bent on getting legislation introducing the pension regulator through parliament, which stalled when the left parties opposed it. Chidambaram waited and finally, in exasperation at two and a half years of stalling, decided to start work on the scheme without legislation. The opponents of the bill have been furious with the finance minister ever since and have labeled it “Chidambaram’s pension reform,” implying that he is working on it without the parliament’s aye.

…

“There was a familiar tendency among company management to make long-term promises they did not have to fulfill personally,” Marty says. “They made these promises without an idea where their revenues would stand. In some ways, these disasters were inevitable.” Our great, big growth advantage As Surendra Dave notes, one of the first things the Indian economists in the committee working on pension reforms did was study the failure of these social security systems in the West. India, in shaping a universal social insurance scheme so late in the game, had a great opportunity to survey the disasters gone past and frame a better policy. At the very least, the challenges developed markets are facing around pensions and social security tell us “what not to do”—which mechanisms, for example, trigger health carelessness, low savings and high future taxes.

…

We entered 2008 with the stock market having risen more than three times that, but with the shift yet to be made. Even after its steep falls in September 2008, a fund that had invested money in 2004 would have turned in good returns. The stock market is expected to touch $5 trillion by 2020, and we are still stalling. A BIG CHALLENGE to pension reforms and a sustainable social security policy is the danger of politics creeping in. What our experiences and those of developed markets make clear is that a universal scheme, to be effective and sustainable, must be insulated from political compulsions as much as possible. Otherwise, long-term funds become easy prey for election-minded governments and end up getting tweaked and changed and overhauled, especially in times of low growth.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Apr 2008

Kessler, Daniel, and Mark McClellan. “Do Doctors Practice Defensive Medicine?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111 (1996): 353–90. Ketchum, Christopher. “Enron’s Human Toll.” Salon.com, January 23, 2002. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/23/enron_toll/index1.html. Klevmarken, N. Anders, “Swedish Pension Reforms in the 1990s.” April 2002. http://www.nek.uu.se/Pdf/wp2002_6.pdf. Kling, Jeffrey, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Lee Vermeulen, and Marian Wrobel. “Choosing Well: The Case of Medicare Drug Plans.” Working paper, Harvard University, August 2007. Koehler, Jay, and Caryn Conley. “The ‘Hot Hand’ Myth in Professional Basketball.”

…

Journal of Economic Literature 45 (2007): 686–702. Nordhaus, William D., and Joseph Boyer. Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. Sydney: Currency, 1990. Normann, Goran, and Daniel J. Mitchell. “Pension Reform in Sweden: Lessons for American Policymakers.” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder no. 1381, 2000. http://www.heritage.org/Research/SocialSecurity/bg1381.cfm. O’Donoghue, Ted, and Matthew Rabin. “Doing It Now or Later.” American Economic Review 89, no. 1 (1999): 103–24. ———. “Studying Optimal Paternalism, Illustrated by a Model of Sin Taxes.”

Economists and the Powerful
by Norbert Haring , Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas
Published 30 Sep 2012

There are plenty of examples from other countries to copy: the US individual retirement account system is based on the Chilean pension reform of 1980/81 that in turn was based heavily on proposals made in the book Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. In response to the Chilean system facing a likely collapse in a few decades time, it was substantially overhauled in 2008 to require mandatory participation of all citizens in exchange for universal pension coverage. Another example is that of Sweden, which enacted a series of very famous pension reforms in 58 ECONOMISTS AND THE POWERFUL 1998 followed by refinements in 2010 – there an individual’s personal retirement account defaults to an age-determined mix of an equity index tracking fund and a fixed income fund, but that can be switched at any time into any other investment by its owner.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

The reason for America’s prolificacy could also be that pensions in the United States are particularly stingy, making kids more useful as old-age insurance. A typical worker in the United States receives as little as 40 percent of his or her last wages from Social Security. European pensions are more generous. In Italy, fertility started rising slowly in 1996 after plummeting for ages. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year in which pension reform kicked in, reducing the payments promised to younger workers from 80 percent of their last wage to only 65 percent. Indeed, economists found that the odds of having a kid rose 10 percent for those workers who had their pensions cut, relative to those who hadn’t. But the most convincing explanation seems to be that the United States has been better at accommodating work and childbearing than other nations.

…

Data on government pension replacement rates and their impact on fertility comes from Olivia S. Mitchell and John W. R. Phillips, “Social Security Replacement Rates for Alternative Earnings Benchmarks,” University of Michigan Retirement Research Center Working Paper, May 2006; and Francesco C. Billari and Vincenzo Galasso, “What Explains Fertility? Evidence from Italian Pension Reforms,” CEPR Discussion Paper, October 2008. Arguments about work’s impact on fertility in Europe are drawn from Bruce Sacerdote and James Feyrer, “Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations,” NBER Working Paper, June 2008; and Samuel Preston and Caroline Sten Hartnett, op. cit.

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story
by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Peter Petre
Published 30 Sep 2012

Every time I arrived at an event, they’d be out there, waving signs, booing, chanting, and ringing cowbells. The unions formed coalitions with names like the Alliance for a Better California and started pouring millions of dollars into TV and radio ads. One commercial featured a firefighter who was convinced that my pension reforms would take away benefits to widows and orphans. Another showed teachers and PTA members saying how disappointed they were with me for trying to put California’s budget troubles on the backs of the kids. The heat of the protests surprised me, but the reforms were too important to give up. My spokesman told the press, “Our door will be open twenty-four hours a day to any Democrat who is serious about negotiating.

…

The Democrats, senate leader Darrell Steinberg and assembly speaker Karen Bass, made themselves wildly unpopular with the liberals by agreeing to support open primary elections as well as even more welfare reforms—removing things like automatic cost of living increases. They enraged the public-employee unions by agreeing both to pension reform and to another condition I insisted on: the creation (at last!) of a strict rainy-day fund that could be used only in a true emergency. The Republican leaders paid an even higher price. The party stripped State Senator Dave Cogdill of his leadership position the night of the vote and forced Mike Villines, the assembly Republican leader, out of his post a few weeks later—all because they had accepted a compromise that included a tax increase.

…

The polls had shown it headed for a landslide victory this time, with 84 percent planning to vote yes, according to the reform group the Think Long Committee for California. In the end, politics as usual produced a tax increase with no real safeguards to restrict further spending. And now the budget reform initiative will not be voted on until 2014. In the fall, I signed a historic pension reform that rolled back some of the worst excesses threatening to bankrupt the state. By cutting a lot of red tape, we issued permits for so many solar power plants in California—more than 5,000 megawatts in 2009 alone (one hundred times all the solar permitted in the United States a year earlier)—that California was being called the Saudi Arabia of Solar.

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile
by Alexander Davidson
Published 1 Apr 2008

I will explain how the London insurance market, including Lloyd’s, works. There is a new chapter on reinsurance, which covers the impact of catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and how insurers have started to tap capital markets for extra reinsurance capacity. In personal finance, we will take a critical look at pension reform, and controversies related to sales of payment protection insurance. We look at current thinking on mortgages. Elsewhere, we compare types of pooled investment. Since the first edition was published, regulation and corporate governance have evolved, and this book covers how they work today. We focus on the role of the Financial Services Authority and the development of its principles-based regulatory regime, which is not always helped by the onset of EU financial services legislation.

…

As an employee, you are included in the state second pension, unless you contract out, which is to give up the entitlement and build up a sum instead in your own pension fund. HM Revenue and Customs rebate part of your National Insurance contributions into your personal pension. You are free to contract back in. State pension package The Pensions Act 2007, which received Royal Assent in July 2007, is mainly about state pension reform. It has three strands. People will receive the state pension later than before. This will be on a phased basis. In 2024–26, they will start taking the pension at the age of 65–66, and in 2034–36, they will start at the age of 66–67. In 2044–46, they will take it at the age of 67–68 years. The basic state pension rises every year with the Retail Prices Index.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

However, while this should make them interested in states being, if not debt-free, then reliably able to fulfil their obligations to their creditors, it may also mean that they have to pay for their government’s liquidity in the form of deep cuts in public benefits and services on which they also in part depend. However complicated the cross-cutting cleavages in the emerging international politics of public debt, the price for financial stabilization is likely to be paid by those other than the owners of money, or at least of real money. For example, public pension reform will be accelerated by fiscal pressures; and to the extent that governments default anywhere in the world, private pensions will be hit as well. The average citizen will pay – for the consolidation of public finances, the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of interest on the public debt and, if necessary, for another rescue of national and international banks – with his or her private savings, cuts in public entitlements, reduced public services and higher taxation.

…

This process is expected to continue, assisted by deep changes in political-economic institutions which, for example, prevent the central bank from accommodating an expansionary fiscal policy: The medium-term financial forecast of the Swedish government for the years 2013–2015 projected surpluses of up to three percent of GDP … The estimated annual surplus is up to three percent of GDP. The improvement of the budget balance would be achieved solely by expenditure cuts and not by revenue increases.59 The economic downturn after 2011 did not cause a rethinking of fiscal priorities. Transition from high to low taxing and spending was accomplished, among other things, by a pension reform (1994/1998) that has made the pension system ‘completely independent financially from the budget. There is no longer any cross-subsidization from the public purse to the pension funds’ (ibid.: 17). In spite of the fiscal surplus, pensions were cut in 2010 and will be further cut in future, in line with expected shortfalls in revenue due to demographic change.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

Die ‘Erweiterung des Staatskorridors’ in der Bundesrepublik der sechziger bis achtziger Jahre,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (2006): 255–263, and Werner Ehrlicher, “Deutsche Finanzpolitik seit 1945,” VSWG: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 81 (1994): 10–19. 19. On the changes in Italy, see Daniele Franco, “A Never-Ending Pension Reform,” in Martin Feldstein and Horst Siebert, eds., Social Security Pension Reform in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 213–214. 20. Data on food stamps from US Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, at www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf, viewed June 1, 2015. 21. The average retirement age for women in the OECD countries fell from 63.4 years in 1970 to 61.4 in 1980; the average retirement age for men in OECD countries dropped from 65 years to 63.3 during the same time period.

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

By 1946, every British family with more than one child was receiving a family allowance. (2) A basic income is unaffordable. Some politicians and commentators have asserted that a basic income would be unaffordable without a big rise in direct taxes. These calculations assume that basic income from the outset would replace all existing benefits. However, like pension reform and other changes to the social protection system, basic income could be introduced gradually. There would still be savings from a reduction in meanstested benefit payments.7 And there are other ways of paying for a   Why Basic Income Beats the Alternatives 57 basic income without sharp increases in income tax, including from a Commons Fund.

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century
by Mark Leonard
Published 4 Sep 2000

Every study has shown that the simple move of raising the retiring age can immediately remove the ticking time bomb of growing dependency ratios.18 The European Commission forecasts that if member-states succeed in raising the average retirement age by five years from sixty to sixty-five, without raising benefits, the cost of Europe’s pension system would remain stable.19 This is a painful political challenge, but it is one that all European governments are already grappling with, through pension reforms – many based on a Swedish template – that will reduce the fiscal pressures from population ageing and encourage longer working lives. Another partial solution to Europe’s demographic dilemma is the move towards supporting ‘managed migration’ that has taken hold across Europe. All European countries are now ending their blanket ban on economic migration and developing criteria for admitting labour migrants based on qualifications or salary.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

The ancestor household in Japan; respect for elders On the concepts of oyakoko and ie in the ancestor household, see Yoshimitsu (2011). For the impact of Confucian concepts on economic outcomes – for example, corporation organization – see Nakane (1970) and Kumagai (1992). Intergenerational inequality A recent review of intergenerational equity is given by Motoshige (2013). An early paper on the risk pension reforms posed to Japanese notions of solidarity is Takahashi (2004). On government programmes that aim to bring generations together, see Larkin and Kaplan (2010). The two samurai Oda Nobunaga, born in 1534, played an important role in unifying Japan. A deft ruler also known as an economic strategist, he destroyed many opponents and competitors and was assassinated in 1582, aged 47.

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Takahashi, K., Tokoro, M., and Hatano, G. (2011), ‘Successful Aging through Participation in Social Activities Among Senior Citizens: Becoming Photographers’, in Matsumoto, Y. (ed.), Faces of Aging: The Lived Experiences of the Elderly in Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Takahashi, M. (2004), ‘The Social Solidarity Manifested in Japan’s Pension Reforms’, Shimane Journal of Policy Studies, 8, 125–42. Traphagan, J. W. (2004), ‘Interpretations of Elder Suicide, Stress, and Dependency Among Rural Japanese’, Ethnology, 43 (4), 315–29. Ueno, C. (2009), The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press). United Nations (2017), World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, Key Findings and Advance Tables, ESA/P/WP/248 (New York: United Nations).

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

Because of the inherent complexity and subjectivity associated with calculating the funding levels for pension funds, the true costs are often disguised in the near-term (see box on page 7). The shortfall associated with underfunded pensions can be made up by either investment performance or pension reform (i.e., changing the structure of the pension in some way). Yet pension reform amounts to fiscal tightening at a time when the global economy is weak and personal budgets are stretched. At the same time, these decisions are made by politicians, whose tenure in office does not compel them to make difficult, long-term decisions. Because voters do not opt for more tax or less benefits, the problems are often ignored, growing bigger by the day.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

These are out of reach for the majority in the private sector who are paying for the pensions in the public sector. 70 Britannia Unchained Overall, 40–45 per cent of adult lives are now spent in retirement compared to roughly 30 per cent in the 1950s. The balance between the years we spend in work and the years we spend in retirement has grown unbalanced. So, while the Unison union bemoans the ‘Great Pension Robbery’, the reality is that their campaign to frustrate pension reform would be socially unjust, by loading up more debt or higher taxes for the next generation to pay off. A further factor undermining the British work ethic is the rise of welfare dependency. The postwar welfare state was designed as a safety net to help the poorest and most vulnerable. It has ballooned beyond all recognition, corroding the UK work ethic.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

The media picked up the issue as well; an NBC Reports special that aired in 1972 called “Pensions: The Broken Promise” received abundant press and was viewed widely across the country, spotlighting the issue during a divisive congressional battle over pensions.30 Together, these events and the ensuing media coverage helped garner political support for pension reform. Given their involvement in the early pension problems, the United Auto Workers (UAW) had an interesting position on the subject of pension reform. On the one hand, the UAW did not, of course, want to see labor suffer when firms were facing dire financial straits. On the other, because it had often pushed for retroactive increases in pension benefits, it did not necessarily want to require full funding of plans at all times because that would increase the push back against the UAW’s negotiation of more pension benefits, since the firm would be required to make an immediate cash outlay to meet the liability after new benefits were set.31 The thrust of the UAW’s push for reforms was to establish pension reinsurance more than it was to create requirements for fully funded pension plans. 112 Investment: A History Congress responded with efforts from a variety of committees.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2011

“To me there were shocking moments,” he says. Having sped past a DO NOT ENTER sign, we are now flying through intersections without pausing. I can’t help but notice that, if we weren’t breaking the law by going the wrong way down a one-way street, we’d be breaking the law by running stop signs. “When you want to do pension reform for the prison guards,” he says, “and all of a sudden the Republicans are all lined up against you. It was really incredible and it happened over and over: people would say to me, ‘Yes, this is the best idea! I would love to vote for it! But if I vote for it some interest group is going to be angry with me, so I won’t do it.’

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

A good example of the constraining role of the ECB in relation to government actions came with the two letters addressed to the Italian and Spanish governments in August 2011, with the signatures of both the president of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, and the national central bank governors, Mario Draghi (who would be Trichet’s successor) and Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez. (See chapter 15 for details.) The letters included not only fiscal demands but precise conditions on pension reform, the liberalization of services, a loosening of collective bargaining, and the implementation of an unemployment insurance scheme. Italy started to implement the reforms, but most were left to Silvio Berlusconi’s successors as prime minister, Mario Monti, Enrique Letta, and Matteo Renzi. Similarly, in Spain, Prime Minister Zapatero did not act, but the letter provided a basis for the policy agenda of the government of Mariano Rajoy.

…

Klaus Regling resisted, and he submitted a court case against the European Council’s decision to weaken the excessive deficit procedure for Germany and France. Only losses in German regional elections and strong arguments by German economists made Schröder concede and opt for reforms. Labor market and pension reforms were implemented. At that time, the Economist famously called Germany “the sick man of Europe.”23 After a few years, Germany benefited from the reforms and presented itself as a model for the rest of Europe. OTHER STRUCTURAL REFORMS IN EUROPE The roots of the concerns that drove the Germans lay further back, in the perception that under the Nazi dictatorship the expansion of state expenditure had been a way of increasing state control and the possibilities for arbitrary and corrupt actions.

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News,in Politics, and inLife
by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
Published 26 Dec 2008

It is with people, and our tendency to ignore that this compromise took place, while leaping to big conclusions. Is this a mere tabloid extravagance? Not at all: it is commonplace, in policymaking circles as in the media. When, amid fears of a pension crisis, the British government- appointed Turner Commission published a preliminary report in 2005 on the dry business of pension reform, it said 40 percent of the population was heading for “inadequate” provision in retirement. With luck, your definitional muscles will now be flexing: what do they mean by “inadequate”? In reaching that 40 percent figure—a shocking one—the Commission had said each to their own resources: either you have a pension or you don’t, a hard-and-fast definition like the interpretation in the yob survey of the law on assault, in or out but nothing in between, covered or not, according to your own and only your own finances.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 30 Sep 2009

CAPITAL MARKETS TAKE OVER The same decade that saw the banking industry enter its perfect storm saw the beginning of the longest bull market in Wall Street history. The 25-year bull market that ended in 2008 coincides with a vast increase in pension fund assets under professional management. Some of this merely reflects demography as the Baby Boomers began to accumulate wealth. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) pension reforms of 1974 and the implementation of tax The Natural History of Financial Folly deferred personal pension plans, 401(k)s, in 1981 were key factors. The 1982 bipartisan commission on Social Security chaired by Alan Greenspan and Daniel Patrick Moynihan led Congress to raise payroll taxes and retirement ages in 1984, but the need for personal retirement savings became widely recognized.

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed
by John Peet , Anton La Guardia and The Economist
Published 15 Feb 2014

Indeed, in their first encounter with the European semester, several national leaders, even those normally thought of as pro-European, went out of their way to criticise the Commission for its intrusiveness. Spain’s Mariano Rajoy announced in 2012 that it was for his government, not the Commission, to decide the right level of the Spanish budget deficit. In France, Hollande early on declared that, while the Commission was within its rights to demand pension reform, his government should be left to decide what sort of changes to make and how quickly to make them. The Italian government rejected a criticism of its longer-term debt sustainability. And when Belgium, the most pro-European country of all, was rebuked over its budget deficit, one Belgian government minister asked aloud: “Who is Olli Rehn?”

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

It was a moment of reflection for all of us. The news also weighed heavily on our minds: catastrophic forest fires were ravaging New South Wales and Victoria in Australia, a few months after raging in Brazil’s Amazon and, again, in California. Social fires were burning too. France was gripped by strikes over the government’s proposed pension reform, following months of protests initially triggered by a rise in fuel prices. Mass protests had broken out in Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Unrest over the economy and, more generally, growing inequality was feeding a global wave of populism while demands for more action on climate change inspired a rising tide of protests around the world, led by younger generations rallying behind Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

They aren’t all as abstract as the ones in Minsk.13 They happen in Havana. In the final days of Burma’s military junta, they happened there, too. What is common is a rising level of innovation in protest strategy. Russia’s Pussy Riot does aggressive culture jamming. In Ukraine, the Femen network of young women bare their breasts in public but then talk about pension reform. The Russian art collective Voina painted a two hundred–foot penis on a Saint Petersburg drawbridge to protest heightened security. Ukrainian activists launched a Kickstarter campaign to buy themselves a “people’s drone” that would let them watch Russian troop movements in their country.14 The internet of things is putting tough regimes into digital dilemmas on a regular basis, because leaders have to choose between two equally distasteful actions.

Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity
by Paul Ely Beckerman and Andrés Solimano
Published 30 Apr 2002

Reduced oil revenue and the need to increase public expenditure on account of El Niño, together with the inflexibility of public expenditure, combined to increase the public deficit. The authorities simply could not reprogram expenditure sufficiently in response to their changed priorities. Three additional aspects of Ecuador’s public-sector structural-reform agenda go beyond the government budget narrowly defined. These are (a) the need for pension reform, (b) the issue of political and administrative decentralization, and (c) the lagging privatization of publicly owned assets. Like many of South America’s older national pension systems, Ecuador’s pay-as-you-go social-security system has become financially unviable, and a fundamental reform, like those of Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru, is clearly necessary.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter
Published 14 Sep 2020

These individuals are motivated to be loyal soldiers and are threatened with losing their positions or being denied promotions if they stray from ideological purity.56 Majority-party leaders have extra privileges, setting the size of committees, distributing seats and staff between the parties, and selecting the chair.57 The partisan chairs of congressional committees wield substantial control over big decisions, such as the committee’s schedule. In 2003, for example, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee tried to rush through pension reform before the Democratic members had a chance to read the bill. When the Democrats protested, committee chair Bill Thomas called the US Capitol Police to remove Democrats from the committee library.58 Partisans transformed committees from havens for negotiation and problem solving into battlegrounds.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

Since the mid-1990s, fourteen countries have increased or plan to increase pension ages for men, and eighteen have done so or plan to do so for women. Over the next forty years, almost half of OECD countries are set to increase the pension age. But, as the OECD noted, this is just “running to stand still,” because life expectancy is rising. The United Kingdom’s Turner commission on pension reform has suggested that the state pension age should be increased to seventy years.45 Faced with the lengthening retirement periods of their former employees, the private sector is increasingly moving away from defined-benefit pension plans. Starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s, advanced economies have seen a shift toward defined-contribution plans.* Between 1980 and 2008, the proportion of US private-sector payroll workers enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans fell from 32 percent to 20 percent; the proportion plummeted to 16 percent in 2013.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

People will have to live for a shorter time, survive on less, save more, or work longer. Unable to build adequate savings, and with an inadequate social safety net, retirement will become a luxury available to only a small part of the population. Many workers will have to work as long as they are physically capable or until death. Spanish pension reforms termed it “active aging.” Most will find kinship with singer Annie Lennox's song “Cold,” where she confessed that dying was easy but living scared her to death. The existing economic model also creates intergenerational issues because of its reliance on deferring economic, resource, and environmental adjustments into the future.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

John Major’s government had equalised the state pension age for men and women in the 1995 Pensions Act, to be phased in. Labour raised the retirement age. Cameron speeded things up, leaving many women in their fifties and sixties hard done by, some having to work much longer than they had planned or felt able to. A major pensions reform enacted under Labour came in during 2012, auto-enrolling all employees for the first time into pension schemes. People were free to opt out, but few did, and as a result 10 million people earning over £10,000 now had the prospect of a pension for the first time. Since earnings were still low, only a fifth of them were estimated to be saving enough to pay for a decent level of income in retirement, but take-up of the scheme, branded NEST, was impressive.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

Collectivised or not, it also manifests self-help philosophy in a way that is equally acceptable to right-wing politicians. All that remains is for political leaders to sell this idea to the voters. In individualist Britain and America it should not be difficult. In continental Europe the task looks likely to be much harder, despite the greater urgency of pension reform. Most Europeans see pensions as falling firmly within the domain of the state although they would probably not vote for the tax increases necessary to close their pensions deficit. Such is the passion about state provision of pensions that German, Italian and French citizens have demonstrated on the streets to defend it.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”8 Awkwardly for those who like to believe that political and economic freedom are indivisible, the Chilean reforms were launched after a military coup that overthrew the leftist government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Chile’s policies of slashing tariffs and taxes, inflation fighting, privatization, and pension reform were regarded as a model by free-market reformers around the world. But they took place against a background of the imprisonment, torture, and murder of dissidents. General Pinochet’s embrace of the market and assault on inflation came in 1975, after a visit by Milton Friedman, the doyen of the Chicago school of economists, who was to receive the Nobel Prize for economics the following year.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

Here was a cross-section of the modern British working class, hundreds of thousands strong, standing up to a government that was forcing them to pay for a crisis they had no role in causing. The protest marked the beginning of a new wave of trade-union resistance. After assuming office, the Conservative-led government announced so-called reforms to public sector pensions-'reforms' being a term that had long since changed in meaning from 'social progress' to 'rolling it back'. Arguing that public sector pensions were becoming unaffordable, the government unveiled plans to make workers pay more and work longer for their pensions and receive less. Yet a recently commissioned Government report written by ultraBlairite ex-Labour Minister John Hutton revealed that public sector pensions would fall as a proportion of Britain's economy: in other words, they were set to become more affordable.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

They always talk about Social Security and Medicare as a political “third rail,” that electrified track on a subway that’s deadly to touch. But it’s starting to look like generous benefits aren’t sacrosanct after all. State and local pensions are the canaries in the fiscal coal mine. Most states have implemented pension reforms since the Great Recession, and as part of that process most states have reduced benefits.45 Usually those reductions only limit future payouts that will be available for new hires when they retire several decades down the road. But increasingly, current retirees aren’t as safe from cuts as they used to be.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

An even longer-run study of age-related spending based on current laws, including residential care costs, and covering more than a hundred countries going out to the end of the century argues that richer countries will have to boost spending from 16 to about 25 per cent of GDP. US spending would have to rise to 32 per cent of GDP, and spending in the EU and Japan would have to increase to 24 and 28 per cent, respectively. These increases are predominantly related to healthcare, because pension reforms in recent years have already contained expected outlays.18 China’s pension and healthcare expenditure are predicted to rise from 7 to about 20 per cent of GDP. These predictions are, if anything, on the low side, and are highly sensitive to fertility and mortality assumptions. Consequently, if the expected stabilisation of fertility at around 1.85 children falls short, and/or if life expectancy rises further, then these estimates will be overshot.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

The fall has been pronounced in the public sector in recent years as austerity measures and recession have eroded employment, but the worst coverage continues to be in the private sector, where over 85 per cent of workplaces have never seen a union rep – and it is part of a global decline, registered first in the United States but apparent in all the core industrial economies.8 In a weakened condition, unions had put up little resistance to austerity measures, barring a brief flurry of strike action against pension reforms in 2011, after which the rate of strike action fell to the lowest levels on record.9 The labour movement, having become more top-down, more politically timid and more constrained by hostile legislation, has been poorly placed to put up much of a fight – in a way, supporting Corbyn’s candidacy, as the big unions did, was by far the most radical thing they have yet done to address their existential decline.

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
by Helaine Olen
Published 27 Dec 2012

She advocates opening up the state pension systems to private workers, a proposal recently endorsed by both New York City comptroller John Liu and California state treasurer Bill Lockyer. “What I’m thinking is that it would be a very smart political and policy move by those who want to keep defined-benefit public pensions to link the move for pension reform to a demand for a meaningful retirement-security option for California private sector workers like the one proposed by Dr. Ghilarducci,” Lockyer said in a recent speech. The interest of state government officials points to the real reason Ghilarducci is viewed as the wicked witch by more than a few in the financial services industry.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

A large body of psychological research suggests that these preoccupations are associated with increased rates of mental illness, including depression, substance abuse, anxiety and personality disorder.4 Less dramatically, and anecdotally, we can live in a prosperous economic environment, and still discover that modern life is rubbish. So how can a better understanding of economics help? Talk of improving quality of life might provoke expectations that the following chapters include detailed discussions of integrated transport policies, pension reforms and endogenous growth theory. In other words, the kind of policy wonkery which few of us care passionately about. But we do care about the principles at stake - whether it is fair to tax the rich more highly, whether environmental damage can be boiled down to a sum of money, whether surveys can really measure our quality of life or happiness.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

The objective was to avert a crisis in which social expenditures would drive up government spending; to promote individual savings; to avoid government mismanagement of pension funds; and to encourage the development of the private financial sector that would manage people’s savings. However, such pension reforms did not yield the expected results: Negative social impacts. With the introduction of individual savings accounts, privatizations broke the social contract enshrined in government-run social security in which current workers support retired workers. The privatizations led to increasing inequalities, especially when Europe entered a phase of higher unemployment; those with low incomes had very small savings and ended up with small pensions.

Discover Greece Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Nevertheless, snap elections held in September 2007 returned the conservatives to power, albeit with a diminished majority. Over recent years, a series of massive general strikes and blockades highlighted mounting electoral discontent. Hundreds of thousands of people protested against proposed radical labour and pension reforms and privatisation plans that analysts claim would help curb public debt. The backlash against the government reached boiling point in December 2008, when urban rioting broke out across the country, led by youths outraged by the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Athens following an alleged exchange between police and a group of teenagers.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

In a press briefing, the new British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, 284   e u r o t r a g e d y said, “Greece is a reminder of what happens when governments lack the willingness to act decisively and quickly, and when problems are swept under the carpet.”4 The IMF’s European Department and European leaders pronounced that much-​needed austerity was working in Greece. In August, just three months after the start of the rescue program, Poul Thomsen, head of the IMF’s operations in Greece, portrayed the rosy picture of a Greek miracle in the making. Among notable successes, Thomsen pointed to pension reforms, which he said “were a sweeping change in one step.” He gave a human face to austerity and won the hearts of many Greeks when he said that the “wealthy will have to pay their share, after pensioners and workers did their bit.”5 Even the stern German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, joined the celebration.

…

In 2012, with Monti as prime minister, the Italian economy contracted by 2.5 percent. The unemployment rate jumped to 11 percent, with the pain most acutely felt by young Italians. While Italy labored under the ECB’s tight monetary policy, Monti pushed structural reforms. His major achievement was a politically controversial pension reform, which raised the minimum age at which Italians would be eligible to start receiving pensions. In December, Berlusconi withdrew parliamentary support for the Monti-​ led government, Monti stepped down, and elections were scheduled for February 24–​25, 2013. The election campaign quickly turned into a contest between the “Europeans” and the large numbers of Italians who were angry at their worsening economic condition and the imposition of austerity by a prime minister with ties to Brussels.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
by David Halpern
Published 26 Aug 2015

The other main criticism came from the political left, who worried that the Tories would use nudging as an excuse for avoiding tougher, presumably more effective policies. Fortunately, neither of these criticisms turned out to be well-founded. A good example of the potential power of a gentle nudge is the pension reforms that in 2010 were being prepared for a roll-out in Britain under a plan devised by Lord Adair Turner. Under the plan, employers were required to automatically enrol workers into the plan, but employees were free to opt out if they wished to do so. Left-leaning sceptics thought that participation should be mandatory, and that the mere nudge provided by automatic enrolment would not suffice.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Hundreds of multinational corporations, commodity traders, banks, and investors (including a top Trump financier, the investment firm Blackstone) are currently staking a claim on Indigenous lands for forest-based exports of soy, beef, and paper products. Bolsonaro is also actively courting an updated US–Brazil free trade agreement, alongside implementing market-friendly pension reform, eliminating a swath of labor regulations, and cutting education budgets for public universities he deems dens of “cultural Marxism.” Bolsonaro wants a cleansing of the left, which he holds responsible for unemployment and crime. A former military officer, Bolsonaro is also a fervent admirer of the CIA-backed military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for two decades and has openly remarked, “The situation of the country would be better today if the dictatorship had killed more people.”60 Vincent Bevins contends that Bolsonarismo is best understood as “a violent obsession with destroying the left combined with contempt for democratic institutions.”61 Indeed, Bolsonaro espouses authoritarianism and an extirpation of socialism to ensconce a Christian, settler, racial-capitalist order disguised as majoritarianism.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear
by Dr. Frank Luntz
Published 2 Jan 2007

The media will assuredly use unwise or tactless statements by any Republican or conservative against you (just look at how they are treating James Dobson’s recent comments). A single misstep by one member will hurt all of you. Finally, I believe that Clinton’s state of the union address will focus on education (targeted at voters under age 50), pension reform (for voters aged 50 to 65) and the combined issues of Medicare and Social Security (for voters over age 60). I urge you to attempt to preempt him—at least on the pension issue. I promise you that “pension security” does matter, particularly to those who vote, and could become the sleeper issue of 2000.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

Reed couldn’t cut existing pensions without lawsuits, but he reduced pensions for all new employees to pre-2000 levels and raised the vesting period from ten to fifteen years. When union members picketed city hall, Reed invited them all into his office—in shifts—and patiently explained, with charts and spreadsheets, that without pension reform everyone’s pensions would eventually go bust. By getting the city’s budget under control, Reed then had some money to invest in more police and, what he wanted most, to reopen the sixteen recreation centers and swimming pools in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which had been shuttered for lack of funds.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

The worry is that attempts to regulate, to prevent such abuses, will now become a cross-border dispute, with the German government (and therefore the Troika) taking the side of the oligarch/German partnership against the public interest. 31 In the case of Greece, the historically tense relationship with Turkey makes cutbacks in military spending especially difficult, even though when Georges Papandreou was foreign minister, there was a serious rapprochement. 32 See John Henley, “ ‘Making Us Poorer Won’t Save Greece’: How Pension Crisis is Hurting Its People,” Guardian, June 17, 2015. 33 Matthew Dalton, “Greece’s Pension System Isn’t That Generous After All,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2015. 34 Whether part of the formal or implied contract is of secondary concern. 35 There is an exception: when pensions have been gratuitously increased after the work has been done. In that case, the worker has been given a “gift,” which was not part of the contract. Reducing, or even eliminating, the gift, in the presence of extreme budgetary stringency, may then make sense. 36 In February 2014. 37 There are other anomalous aspects of the demands for pension reform. Part of the problem that the pension system finds itself in is because it held Greek government bonds, which experienced significant write-downs as part of debt restructuring. Had the restructuring been done earlier (in 2010) and had the Troika not imposed such contractionary policies, the size of the write-downs would have been markedly less.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

In this view it wasn’t the riskiness of an individual stock or bond that mattered, but the way it fit in to a portfolio. By the mid-1970s, this approach had a name—modern portfolio theory—and was beginning to make slight inroads in the institutional investing world. Then Washington gave it a huge boost. In the wake of several corporate bankruptcies that left pensions unpaid, Congress passed pension-reform legislation in 1974. The Employee Retirement Security Act has since gone on to have many interesting consequences. The first had to do with the standard of prudence laid down by the law and in subsequent regulations from the Department of Labor. No longer a legal concept based on tradition, prudence was redefined to mean following the scientific dictates of modern portfolio theory.8 IN THIS ACCOUNTING, RISK CEASED to be a vague, unquantifiable menace that could be tamed only with judgment.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

We rode back to Paris in another train with Michel, a young driver who sported a Celtic cross in his left earlobe and a shock of blue hair over his forehead. The drivers’ union had announced a 24-hour strike, and François thought he’d participate, but Michel hadn’t made up his mind yet. (Nationwide strikes over the issue of pension reform would erupt a couple of months later, limiting service on some transit lines.) What was really bothering them, though, was what was happening on line 1. At great expense, and without interrupting service, the first-born of Paris’s métro lines was being converted to all-automatic operation. Automation is a step beyond autopilot: the new trains wouldn’t need drivers at all, and an entire line can be run by only six employees.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

See “Repealing the Individual Health Insurance Mandate: An Updated Estimate” (CBO, Nov. 8, 2017). 8.This option basically means that what were subsidies provided by the healthy to the unhealthy through the private insurance system are instead achieved through the tax system. 9.See Peter R. Orszag and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths about Social Security Systems,” in New Ideas about Old Age Security, eds. Robert Holman and Joseph E. Stiglitz (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001), 17–56. Most individuals don’t know the fees charged by alternative plans, and thus don’t realize the impact of fees on their retirement income.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

The Philosophy of Money (Boston: Beacon Press). Simmons, Jacqueline (1996). "Home Prices Soar in Unexpected Places," Wall Street Journal, February 13- Simons, Katerina, and Stephen Cross (1991). "Do Capital Markets Predict Problems in Large Commercial Banks?," New England Economic Review (May-June}, pp. 51-56. Singh, Ajit (1995). "Pension Reform, the Stock Market, Capital Formation, and Economic Growth; A Critical Commentary on the World Bank's Proposals," mimeo, Cambridge University, Economics Department (December). Sloan, Allan (1994). "KKR Deal Makes a Silk Purse Out of a Cow's Ear," New York Newsday, September 18, p. A86. Smith, Adam (1976).

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

The building of social security systems in China and other emerging economies is one of the great challenges for the world economy. Few leaders in these countries are much impressed by the European welfare system. But they will have to provide. What would a Chinese National Health Service look like? Part of the spike in Chinese savings rates can be dated back to a pension reform that severely limited retirement payouts to state workers. Financial markets will need to develop to help the Chinese masses save and smooth their incomes over time. In China, however, the experts refute the notion that high savings really are the problem. The flipside of the ‘savings glut’ in China that America complains about is the ‘investment famine’ in the rest of the world that China is only too keen to point out.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

Elizabeth Malkin, “To Halt Energy Slide,” New York Times, April 11, 2019; Jude Webster and Michael Stott, “Mexico: Lopez Obrador Makes a Big Bet,” Financial Times, October 3, 2019 (“technocrats” and “sovereignty”); Sergio Chapa, “Mexico’s New President Takes Nationalist Tone,” Houston Chronicle, March 21, 2019 (“transformation”). 3. Andres Schipani and Bryan Harris, “Can Brazil’s Pension Reform Kick-Start the Economy?,” Financial Times, October 22, 2019. Chapter 6: Pipeline Battles 1. Remarks by President Obama on American-Made Energy, Cushing, Oklahoma, March 22, 2012; Jane Mayer, “Taking It to the Streets,” New Yorker, November 20, 2011 (“game over”); Kevin Birn and Cathy Crawford, “The GHG Intensity of Canadian Oil Sands Production: A New Analysis,” IHS Markit Canadian Oil Sands Dialogue, June, 2020.

Greece Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

At the eleventh hour, Tsipras secured an €86 billion bailout loan – but the austerity measures attached were even more rigorous than those proposed before the referendum and many felt that, with Greek banks on the brink of collapse, Tsipras had been bullied into accepting the terms. Further tax hikes, pension reforms, and privatisation of €50 billion worth of public companies have left many viewing Greece as a financial ward of Europe. Dissent within Syriza and ANEL, brought on by hardliners opposed to the bailout, led Tsipras to resign in August 2015 and return to the polls in September. This was Greece’s fourth election in just over three years.

…

Nevertheless, snap elections held in September 2007 returned the conservatives, albeit with a diminished majority. In the following years, a series of massive general strikes and blockades highlighted mounting electoral discontent. Hundreds of thousands of people protested against proposed radical labour and pension reforms and privatisation plans that analysts claimed would help curb public debt. The backlash against the government reached boiling point in December 2008, when urban rioting broke out across the country, led by youths outraged by the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Athens following an alleged exchange between police and a group of teenagers.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

The Five Star Movement called for a universal basic income of $920 a month, implying a huge increase in government outlays. The Northern League has called for a flat tax rate of 15 percent and actions against refugees. It would also like to see heavy spending on infrastructure. Both parties wish to roll back pension reforms and other plans aimed at boosting competitiveness. Both are strongly Eurosceptic and show little inclination to be bound by European Union rules and regulations. Both call for scrapping sanctions against Russia. There is likely to be a new set of elections where the main topic will probably be continued membership in the Euro.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

The idea of pulling together existing public assistance programs to create a more comprehensive system came under the rubric of “winning the peace.” The system included not just the establishment of the National Health Service but the introduction of a “family allowance,” a mix of direct payments and tax benefits to cover every child until he or she completed school; the provision of national insurance and pension reforms; and other benefits and subsidies (like free school milk) to provide a safety net for children, the working poor, and the elderly. As was the case in the UK before the formalization of the welfare state and the NHS in the 1940s, the United States Congress in 2021 had already allocated billions of dollars for domestic programs that fell under the rubric of “development.”

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill
Published 15 Aug 2011

The surprising turnaround in education politics in the Democratic bastion of Illinois came after the teachers’ unions overplayed their hand and alienated Democratic legislative leaders by withdrawing all financial support to them in retaliation for the Democrats’ support of a relatively modest pension reform proposal in the cash-strapped state. Emanuel says he plans to implement these reforms quickly and also begin using Schnur’s New Leaders for New Schools and other outside groups to do all the recruiting of school principals. “What happened in Illinois was staggering,” says Duncan, who had run Chicago’s schools before becoming education secretary.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E
by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi
Published 9 Feb 2007

The suspension was related in part to the bright fiscal picture at that time, with the United States running yearly budget surpluses from 1998 to 2001. A return to deficits in 2002 almost certainly played a role in the Treasury’s decision to resume issuance of long bonds beginning in February 2006. Another major factor was the global movement toward pension reform, which boosted demand for longer maturities for use as a match against future pension liabilities. Scant global supply of long bond issue also played a role, with many “natural” investors such as insurance companies left clamoring for the paper. Treasury bonds used to be callable during the last five years of their life.

…

Estrella and Mishkin found that the yield curve spread between the 10-year Treasury note and the 3-month T-bill was one of the most successful models of recession four quarters in the future. • One of the more popular theories behind the low level of long-term interest rates of recent years has been attributed to a drop in term premiums. Low inflation expectations, increased Fed credibility, increased foreign buying, and global pension reform are other factors likely at play. • In January 1997, the Treasury began issuing inflation-protected securities (TIPS). TIPS are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The break-even rate on TIPS is used by many as a gauge of the bond market’s inflation expectations

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

“Is Â�There a Â�Future for a Universal Cash Benefit in Japan? The Case of Kodomo Teate (Child Benefit).” In Yannick Vanderborght and Toru Yamamori, eds., Basic Income in Japan: Prospects of a Radical Idea in a Transforming Welfare State, 49–67. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Abrahamson, Peter, and Cecilie Wehner. 2003. “Pension Reforms in Denmark.” November, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. http://Â�w ww╉.Â�lse╉.Â�ac╉.Â�u k╉/Â�european╉ Institute╉/Â�research ╉/Â�hellenicObservatory╉/Â�pdf╉/Â�pensions╉_Â�conference╉/Â�AbrahamsonWehner╉ -Â�Pensions╉.Â�pdf. Ackerman, Bruce. 1980. Social Justice in the Liberal State.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

(London: Demos, 2007) Wilson, Dominic, and Anna Stupnytska, ‘The N-11: More Than an Acronym’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Papers, 153 (28 March 2007) ——and Roopa Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Papers, 99 (2003) Wolf, Martin, ‘The Brave New World of State Capitalism’, Financial Times, 16 October 2007 ——‘Life in a Tough World of High Commodity Prices’, Financial Times, 4 March 2008 ——‘Why Agreeing a New Bretton Woods is Vital’, Financial Times, 4 November 2008 ——‘Why America and China Cannot Afford to Fall Out’, Financial Times, 8 October 2003 ——Why Globalization Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) Wolferen, Karel van, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York: Vintage, 1990) Wong, Herman, ‘On Global Catwalks, a New Face That’s Hot - Asian’, China Daily, 24 May 2006 Wood, Frances, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese (London: John Murray, 1998) Woodall, Pam, ‘The New Titans’, survey, The Economist, 16 September 2006 Wooldridge, Adrian, ‘After Bush: A Special Report on America and the World’, The Economist, 29 March 2008, p. 10 World Bank, At China’s Table: Food Security Options (Washington, DC: 1997) ——China Engaged: Integration with the Global Economy (Washington, DC: 1997) ——Clear Water, Blue Skies: China’s Environment in the New Century (Washington, DC: 1997) ——The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Oxford University Press, 1993) ——Financing Health Care: Issues and Options for China (Washington, DC:1997) ——Old Age Security: Pension Reform in China (Washington, DC:1997) ——Sharing Rising Incomes: Disparities in China (Washington, DC:1997) ——‘Will Resilience Overcome Risk? East Asia Regional Outlook’, November 2007, posted on www.worldbank.org Wu, David Y. H., and Sidney C. H. Cheung, eds, The Globalization of Chinese Food (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002) Xie, Andy, Asia/Pacific Economics, report for Morgan Stanley, November 2002 Xinran, What the Chinese Don’t Eat (London: Vintage Books, 2006) Xu, Gary Gang, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Yahuda, Michael, ‘The Evolving Asian Order: The Accommodation of Rising Chinese Power’, in David Shambaugh, ed., Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) ——Hong Kong: China’s Challenge (London: Routledge, 1996) Yan Xuetong, ‘The Rise of China in Chinese Eyes’, Journal of Contemporary China, 10:26 (2001) Yardley, Jim, ‘After the Fury in Tibet, Firm Hand Trembles’, International Herald Tribune, 18 March 2008 ——‘China Offers Defense of Its Darfur Stance’, International Herald Tribune, 8-9 March 2008 ——and Somini Sengupta, ‘Beijing Blames the Dalai Lama’, International Herald Tribune, 19 March 2008 Yoshino, Kosaku, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 1992) Yu Bin, ‘China and Russia: Normalizing Their Strategic Partnership’, in David Shambaugh, ed., Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Yu Yongding, ‘China’s Macroeconomic Development, Exchange Rate Policy and Global Imbalances’, unpublished paper, Asahi Shimbun Symposium, October 2005 ——‘China’s Rise, Twin Surplus and the Change of China’s Development Strategy’, unpublished paper, Namura Tokyo Club Conference, Kyoto, 21 November 2005 ——‘China’s Structural Adjustment’, unpublished paper, Seoul Conference, 2005 ——‘The Interactions Between China and the World Economy’, unpublished paper, Nikkei Simbon Symposium, 5 April 2005 ——‘Opinions on Structure Reform and Exchange Rate Regimes Against the Backdrop of the Asian Financial Crisis’, unpublished paper, Japanese Ministry of Finance, 2000 Zakaria, Fareed, The Post-American World (London: Allen Lane, 2008) Zha Daojiong, ‘China’s Energy Security and Its International Relations’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, 3:3 (2005) Zhang, Peter G., IMF and the Asian Financial Crisis (Singapore: World Scientific, 1998) Zhang Wei-Wei, ‘The Allure of the Chinese Model’, International Herald Tribune, 1 November 2006 Zhang Yunling, ed., Designing East Asian FTA: Rationale and Feasibility (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2006) ——East Asian Regionalism and China (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2005) ——and Tang Shiping, ‘China’s Regional Strategy’, in David Shambaugh, ed., Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Zhao Suisheng, ed., Chinese Foreign Policy: Pragmatism and Strategic Behavior (New York: M.

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
by Michael Gross
Published 1 Nov 2011

Simultaneously, the Nevada Gaming Commission was investigating the man who actually ran the Stardust for the mob, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal (aka “Ace” Rothstein, played by Robert De Niro in the Scorsese movie). Next, the Labor Department piled on, asking whether the Teamster loans to Glick violated a brand-new pension reform law implemented to curb abuses like those that had already plagued Beverly Ridge. Then, Nevada charged Glick with failing to report loans to his casinos. Finally, Glick’s name surfaced in the investigation of the gangland-style execution of Tamara Rand, a fifty-four-year-old San Diego businesswoman whose safe deposit box was stuffed with $400,000 in crisp new currency.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Though still low, the share of German women and men aged 60–64 working in 2009 was nearly double their share a decade earlier.16 And France, like the United States and Germany, has increased the threshold age for full retirement benefits for most to age 67 from age 65, and the early retirement threshold to age 62 from 60. The Hollande government last year allowed a few quite limited exceptions to those tougher standards (for those who began working careers as teenagers and the like). These reforms have worked. In combination with earlier pension reforms (1993, 2003), the net impact is projected by the French statistical agency Insee to increase the workforce there by two million employees by 2030.17 CHAPTER 26 INCENTIVIZING AND REWARDING WORK “France’s labour force … has never had an international reputation as being work-shy.”1 CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Weekly Standard, November 2008 Critics of stakeholder capitalism might argue the superior work incentives of Reaganomics.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

‘Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among Hunter-Gatherers’, Current Anthropology, 51(1) (February 2010), pp. 19–34. Smith, Mark B. ‘Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev’, Humanity, 3(3) (Winter 2012), pp. 385–406. Smith, Mark B. ‘The Withering Away of the Danger Society: The Pensions Reform 1956 and 1964 in the Soviet Union’, Social Science History, 39(1) (March 2015a), pp. 129–48. Smith, Mark B. ‘Faded Red Paradise: Welfare and the Soviet City after 1953’, Contemporary European History, 24(4) (October 2015b), pp. 597–615. Smith, Michael E. (ed.). The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies (Cambridge: CUP, 2012a).

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

Unfortunately, recent reforms in many developed countries fail to distinguish adequately between these different types of individual, and in some cases more is demanded of the latter than of the former, which is why these reforms sometimes provoke strong opposition. One of the main difficulties of pension reform is that the systems one is trying to reform are extremely complex, with different rules for civil servants, private sector workers, and nonworkers. For a person who has worked in different types of jobs over the course of a lifetime, which is increasingly common in the younger generations, it is sometimes difficult to know which rules apply.

Lonely Planet Greek Islands
by Lonely Planet , Alexis Averbuck , Michael S Clark , Des Hannigan , Victoria Kyriakopoulos and Korina Miller
Published 31 Mar 2012

Greece’s dispute with its Balkan neighbour, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), stems from their claim to the name Macedonia and on Greece’s favourite son, Alexander the Great – despite Alexander’s home of Pella still standing in the province of Macedonia in northern Greece. Crunch Time Over recent years a series of massive general strikes have highlighted mounting electoral discontent. Hundreds of thousands of people have protested against proposed radical labour and pension reforms and privatisation plans that analysts claim will help curb public debt. The backlash against the ND government, also mired in a series of political scandals, reached boiling point in December 2008, when urban rioting broke out across the country, led by youths in Athens outraged by the fatal shooting by police of a 15-year-old boy.

Greece
by Korina Miller
Published 1 Mar 2010

Nevertheless, snap elections held in September 2007 returned the conservatives, albeit with a diminished majority. Over recent years, a series of massive general strikes and blockades have highlighted mounting electoral discontent. Hundreds of thousands of people have protested against proposed radical labour and pension reforms and privatisation plans that analysts claim will help curb public debt. The backlash against the government reached boiling point in December 2008, when urban rioting broke out across the country, led by youths outraged by the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Athens following an alleged exchange between police and a group of teenagers.

Italy
by Damien Simonis
Published 31 Jul 2010

His death unleashes a wave of sorrow and crowds outside St Peter’s chant santo subito (sainthood now). He is succeeded by Benedict XVI, the German Cardinal Ratzinger. 2006 In April, Berlusconi narrowly loses general elections to a broad centre-left coalition led by the technocrat Romano Prodi, who immediately runs into trouble with the Telecom bugging scandal and the pension reform quagmire. 2006 Juventus, AC Milan and three other top Serie A football teams lose points and receive hefty fines in a match-rigging scandal that also sees Juventus stripped of its 2005 and 2006 championship titles. 2007 Former heir to the Italian throne, Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, is cleared of corruption and fraud charges in connection with alleged illicit dealings, among others, involving the casino in Campione d’Italia, an Italian enclave in Swiss territory. 2008 Italy’s national airline, Alitalia, files for bankruptcy and is later resurrected, in reduced form with fewer routes, aircraft and staff, as a private airline. 2009 Italy’s Constitutional Court overturns a law giving Berlusconi immunity from prosecution while in office, opening the possibility that he could stand trial in several court cases.

France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition)
by Nicola Williams
Published 14 Oct 2010

The constitutional reform also gave the green light to local referenda – to better hear what the people on the street were saying (though the first referendum subsequently held – in Corsica – threw up a ‘No’ vote, putting Paris back at square one; for details Click here). Spring 2003 ushered in yet more national strikes, this time over the government’s proposed pension reform, which was pushed through parliament in July. ‘We are not going to be intimidated by protestors’ was the tough response of centre-right Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in office since May 2002. An extreme heatwave that summer, sending temperatures in the capital soaring above 40° and claiming 11,000 predominantly elderly lives, did little to cool rising temperatures