Studying the politics of pension reforms and their social consequences

The Fate of Social Modernity

“…Hence, when pensions are conceived of as 'deferred wages', retirement schemes tend to exclude unwaged people -whereas in countries in which the lion's share of pension payments is derived from capital assets, the poorer sections of a given population incur the risk of receiving low incomes in later life because their access to profitable saving plans is limited. Accordingly, the very devices used to respond to the collective concern for social security have implications in terms of structures of social inequality (Ebbinghaus and Möhring 2022).…”

“…For many years now, European societies have been engaged in a fervent public debate about both demographic change and the (alleged) requirement to set limits to the expansion of collective retirement provision and adjacent welfare programmes. Internationally, the idea of 'cost containment of old age expenditure' (Arcanjo 2019: 512) strain on the lives of twenty-first century elderly people, beyond the biological restrictions also related to old age (Jang 2019;Peris-Ortiz et al 2020;Ebbinghaus and Möhring 2022). For many of those looking ahead to life after work, the result is looming 'pension insecurity' (Olivera and Ponomarenko 2017) and 'disorientation' when it comes to retirement planning (Bode and Lüth 2021).…”