"The anthropologist Keith Hart once told me a story about his brother, who in the '50s was a British soldier stationed in Hong Kong. Soldiers used to pay their bar tabs by writing checks on accounts back in England. Local merchants would often simply endorse them over to each other and pass them around as currency: once, he saw one of his own checks, written six months before, on the counter of a local vendor covered with about forty different tiny inscriptions in Chinese."
He apparently liked to shop for stuff in the various bazaars. He would pay for his purchase by check. The seller, instead of cashing the check, would frame it, and sell it to tourists as an authentic check with Moshe Dayan's signature for much higher than the value of the check.
This resulted in a win-win situation. Moshe Dayan never had to actually pay for his purchases, the seller made far more money than the actual check, and the tourist got to have an authentic check with Moshe Dayan's signature to hang up in their home as a conversation piece.
What a simple time to live in when you can go to a bazaar and buy something with just the sellers word that it is genuine
Everyone knows scams only started in the late 2000
>A tanda is formed between ten friends and family. Each member gives $100 USD every two weeks to the group's organizer. At the end of the month, one participant gets the "pot", $2000. This continues until each member has received the pot.[4]
>Tandas are formed for many reasons, but often because at least one member is in need of money to pay a debt right away, or an emergency arises. But they can also be formed with no pressing financial obligations.
>Among Mexicans, these forms of informal savings associations play an important role sustaining the livelihood of many people living in both Mexico and the United States.
A chit fund is a type of rotating savings and credit association system practiced in India. Chit fund schemes may be organized by financial institutions, or informally among friends, relatives, or neighbours.
The chit fund is said to be an institution that's been handed down since ancient times. In 1887, William Logan, erstwhile Collector of the Malabar district of the Madras Presidency, described the custom of chit funds among friend groups in that region.
Nevertheless it is a useful shorthand for people going through the same life experiences at the same time.
I say this as someone who's technically a millennial, but old enough to remember when we were generation Y, doesn't eat Avocado toast, didn't have particular problems affording a house and don't particularly like facebook/snapchat/grindr or whatever the kids are on now. So I'm not really a representative Millennial.
SS is INSURANCE policy. Quite literally, "insurance" in the name of the law. Oh, sure, there are lots of extra quirks, but fundamentally it's insurance, you can tell because you don't get a "refund" when the insured-against event (alive + disabled + broke) fails to occur. Instead, your payments will go to the other people who got hit by disaster, the same way others' premiums could have gone to your disaster. That's normal in insurance.
In contrast, using a retirement account is an investment, its total value is part of your estate when you die and goes to your heirs, but if the stock market tanks you shit out of luck and will still starve on the street. (The thing SS is supposed to prevent.)
When you keep this "insurance, not investment" distinction in mind, a whole ton of "weird" things about SS suddenly make a lot more sense.
I think the most unique thing about SS (that almost nobody understands) is that current payouts are funded by current contributions -- there's no "pot" or "account" you pay into per se, not like a 401k for instance. Instead you earn points by paying in over time, and the points map to an amount you're guaranteed which is in turn paid for by future taxpayers.
So it’s not forced?
See: https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/disability/ and https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/survivors/
PS: This also makes the ROI for retirement seem much worse than it is as retirees only get ~72% of what is being paid into the program,
It just so happens that it's very hard and expensive to verify all citizens' age-related disabilities in different job-fields, so the "retirement age" is like a "we might as well trust them when they say they can't work and they're this old" cutoff.
I don't where you're from, but it wildly varies from one country to another.