Conflict, crisis, and the future of old age security.

the rapid growth in old age security entitlements in all capitalist democracies was widely hailed as a necessary, indeed inevitable, consequence of industrialization and economic growth. Industrialization, it was thought, had simultaneously rendered the labor of older workers redundant (Graebner 1980) and provided the wealth to make it unnecessary (Wilensky 1975). A retirement wage sufficient to permit or induce withdrawal from the labor force in advance of physiological decline could, and should, be made available to all. In the mid-1970s, however, a contrary view began to take form. Rather than being natural or inevitable, it was argued that the combination of rising entitlements and an increasing number of retirees was part of a long-term process bound to self-destruct. In the long term, the old age security systems that were the pride of the postwar welfare state were doomed to collapse under the weight of changing demographic and fiscal realities. The "crisis" of old age security had been discovered. In the usual formulation, the roots of the crisis are attributed to demography; the system of old age security entitlements currently in place in the capitalist democracies simply cannot withstand the rise