When it comes to money, we manage to miss the application problem. The classic "people don't want a drill, they want a hole."
I don't want $n,000,000 net worth at age 60. I want to be assured I will have food, housing, and health care. Maybe what we need is a system where, instead of paying out Social Security in dollars, you get a ticket to a subsidized retirement community.
Then you eliminate the moral hazard where if you let the stock or real estate markets fail, allowing defective assets to fail, Grandpa starves.
If done right, it might produce more services than just giving people bags of dollars and expecting them to fight over available retirement home space.
That... doesn't really help anything.
> Then you eliminate the moral hazard where if you let the stock or real estate markets fail, allowing defective assets to fail, Grandpa starves.
Except it doesn't. If Grandpa qualifies for social security (not everyone does) and if the benefits are sufficient to pay for necessities, ticket vs. dollars doesn't matter: stock or real estate collapse doesn’t causs starvation, because sociak security covers it. (In reality, its already a mix of dollars and tickets, since social security is dollars but medicare is more like a ticket.)
OTOH, if as is generally the case now, the benefits are too low, distributing them via a subsidy for inadequate minimal support doesn’t relieve that problem any more than the dollars did.