At least the kind that attributes seniority based on age or experience.
If people can generally earn a better wage by being senior, and being senior simply implies having more experience doing the same thing.... then basically it means as people grow older they can expect to earn more money by doing pretty much the same thing (or sometimes even less).
And how does society pay for this? It seems to me they simply exploit the younger workforce with the promise (often fulfilled) that they, in time, will have the same benefits just for consistently showing up.
It used to be that the scheme also run under the assumption that the population is increasing, so there are always more junior positions for a senior position to "feed" upon, but that part of the equation is being disrupted.
But it's still sufficiently close to a Ponzi scheme.
There are other Ponzi schemes like social welfare (esp. for the elderly) that is paid for by a rising population. There mere idea that the economy is going to take a hit due to falling population is a hint that there's something Ponzi in the existing assumptions. No regulated fund dares tell investors that they're taking a loss because the number of investors have dropped. Yet economists keep saying that shit with a straight face.
Disgusting.
And all of that is obvious. Everyone with a sane mind knows there are Ponzi schemes running everywhere (as long as there's money involved and it's government sanctioned, it's sus. Try this heuristic and be amazed.)
My point though, is that Ponzi schemes make people "lazy" and lose ambition. It incentivizes people to fight to maintain the status quo.
And that's bad for economies actually.
We're seeing this play out in many developed economies. They get to a stage of advanced development, then settle into some kind of Ponzi scheme (most notably -- retirement pensions, social welfare, or some kind of social contract where employers don't ever fire employees even if they're underperforming.) People who know they aren't pulling their weight are afraid to lose their senior status in the Ponzi schemes they participated in, so they fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
And maintaining the status quo means stifling development and improvement.
This isn't like a social justice critique of how unfair things are and how boomers have it easy. (Although you can take it as such.) This is a reflection after thinking deeply about why some economies are doomed to decline in the coming decades, and why some economies are growing.
In particular, this thesis can in a sense explain the continued growth of USA after it had attained developed country status -- because its social net is shit, employees have little protection and are generally hired and fired at will, and labor unions don't affect the industries that are growing (tech). People are still motivated by poverty, and they don't have a lot of proud traditions to defend relatively speaking.
Economies that are more equitable seem to take the hit more badly. See even Japan, which didn't even experience the boom that long (about a decade or two between 1980-1990?)... and they just fizzled out. For some reason in the 21st century they just stopped the large scale innovation that they were known for in the 20th century. Where they used to be known as the high tech nation, these days (gaijin) friends working in Japan complain that they're still fixated on *fax machines*. There's a limit to "if it ain't broke don't fix it", and I guess this is it.
So if you're investing long term -- this is the kind of forward perspective you should be adopting. Too many people simply look at the past and project -- it might work for short term bets, but it never works long term.
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