In the pension reform debate, the idea that mass migration should be encouraged comes up regularly. The new arrivals will work and thus support the system of continuous financing of pensions. The idea has a catch, experience shows that migrants from the global south do not flock to work and are more interested in the fruits of the social system than work, but let’s not be detail-oriented, let’s assume that they will actually work, somehow join us, as they once said nicely.
Then the system began to work very well, as the motorless mine elevator once worked. It was invented by Jára Cimrman and introduced in his mine Marcela near the town of Grünbach. The lift had two cages on a common rope, one carrying the wrecker down and the other up. Care was taken to ensure that the cage going down had about one more crash than the cage going up. The elevator could do without a motor, the problem arose when the Cimrmans began to accumulate wreckage in the mine.
Back to the topic: assuming that the masses of migrants suddenly revived to work reach retirement age and become entitled to a pension, who will finance it? Even greater masses of new migrants? What will happen in the final stage when Africa is empty of productive migrants working for retired migrants fearing the future because there will be nowhere else to take from?
If you think I’m joking, you’re right. But the Cimrman effect also applies in other directions. Pension reformers rely on a higher retirement age. We will reach the desired state where the old will finance the pensions of even older old people. It is the squaring of the circle, there can be no painless systemic solution. It will always be a compromise between the impossible and the absolutely impossible with the result of general pissing off.
Which, of course, has been the standard condition of humanity since the beginning of time, except for the rare moments when there was a change perceived as right or out of stupidity as a change for the better. Time, however, will quickly return justified and fictitious satisfaction to normal.
