Pensions and social justice

Abstract

Recent debates about the pension reform in France emphasized the key role played by concerns for social justice. This paper argues that, from the perspective of social justice, both the existing pension system and the universal pension point system are missing the main target in terms of social injustice: the unfair situation faced by individuals who die prematurely, before reaching the retirement age. Those persons are victims of a double penalty. On the one hand, they suffer from a premature death, which prevents them from realizing their life-goals; on the other hand, those persons contribute to the pension system during their career, but are dead before enjoying the retirement period. We argue that this double penalty is not due to fatality: the structure of existing pension systems tends to exacerbate the undesirable consequences of a premature death. We show that social justice requires nothing less than to reverse pension systems, that is, to allow individuals to be retiree before starting their career. Such a reverse pension system, which amounts to provide a universal pension to all young adults ? while leading to postpone the age of exit from the labor market ? would contribute (at least partly) to free the unlucky short-lived from the double penalty faced under the standard or the reformed pension system.