The Retirement Trap
France is not yet on the brink of collapse of its pension system. But it is approaching a moment of truth: population aging, public debt, deficits in public schemes, a weakened CNRACL, low employment among seniors, dependency, fragmented careers, distrust of elected officials and fear of funded pensions now form one and the same political knot.
This book proposes to move beyond slogans. Neither reassuring denial, nor accounting brutality, nor naïve privatization. Through a quantified, sourced and comparative study, it dismantles the real mechanics of French pensions: pay-as-you-go, funded systems, special schemes, the civil service, Agirc-Arrco, reserves, legal retirement age, arduous work, small pensions, administrative errors and justice between generations.
The French case becomes here a Western laboratory. It shows how a social promise created to protect the elderly can become unreadable, contested and difficult to finance when it is no longer adapted to demography, the economy and the democratic distrust of the twenty-first century.
The issue is not only to “save the accounts.” It is to save a pact of civilization: protect those who have worked, not sacrifice the young, recognize worn-out bodies, demand exemplary behavior from leaders, make schemes transparent, prepare for dependency and build a collective second pillar for the future.
This book defends a reform in twenty measures: progressive, controlled, socially differentiated and politically readable. A reform that does not begin by asking the people for efforts, but by restoring trust, telling the figures, dealing with deficit hotbeds, protecting the most vulnerable and finally preparing future generations.