Mentioning Social Security and government implies there is some other form of retirement that doesn't inherently depend on younger people still working, doesn't it? I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
a) make younger female family members do all the work
b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night.
Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-...
More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity.