In a September 2003 article forewarning of a looming debacle in European pension systems, The Economist emphasized the need to shift old age provision from the first pillar of pay-as-you-go public pensions to the second and third pillars of funded occupational pensions and individual savings accounts. The weekly also listed recommendations to “cut back on the promises of the state pension system” and to “encourage” – I would say prod – people “to save for their own retirement”: extending the number of contributing years needed to qualify for benefits, limiting indexing methods to price inflation, and raising the retirement age, or even scrapping it altogether to give pensioners the “free choice” to decide the timing of their retirement. Lamenting that the “transition from the first to the third pillar cannot happen overnight”, The Economist insinuated that if individuals did not channel their savings toward individual schemes, governments should step in to introduce “an element or two of compulsion”. A cartoon representing would-be pensioners escaping the “crumbling pillars” of state and corporate pensions for the alleged safe haven of individual old age provision underscored the argumentation.

These proposals summarize the current welfare reform orthodoxy, which aims to redraw the boundaries between state-based pay-as-you-go pension systems and financialized forms of old age provision.