Manticore seems to have given people prolong but insisted that they were on their own for retirement beyond a minimal safety net.
The RoH might have had a government funded retirement system with perhaps an already too young retirement age that was then compounded by the introduction of prolong which would might have resulted in a sudden decrease in the number of people entering the workforce 25 years down the road. The effect would be comparable to what is occurring in Europe and Japan now. It isno accident that Greece, Italy and Spain are the countries hardest hit by the recession because they have had the lowest birth rates and the lowest retirement age.
The interesting aspect of demographics is that at a certain point, it does not matter if a society has privately funded verses publicly funded retirement. If the number of retirees istosmall large relative to the younger workers, there will be no market for the assets that they wish to sell to fund their retirement and no workers to produce goods and services for them to buy.
Another issue is immigration. With the exception of Japan, industrialized countries with below replacement level birthrates have tried to keep their demographics in balance by accepting immigrants. This works great if the immigrants are educated or at least productive but not so well if they are ignorant and indolent. It is disastrous if the immigrants are from a profoundly different society that is. Intolerant of it's host society. The civil war in Lebanon should be required reading.
Given the MWJ and the nature of Manticoran societ, I expect that the SKM had no shortage of immigrants while the stratified PRH had none. This would exacberated the demographic issues.
SCC wrote:OK, first of all I'd like to correct a mistake the OP made: These days First World nations are moving away from tax based retirement plans and towards giant savings account system. One view actually suggests that the US never actually had a tax based system (Look at the names used), rather having a single giant savings pool.
These saving accounts have existed in the past under some form of pension plan (Not to be confused with an actual government pension system, this is why they may now be known as superannuation plans). The real change is that contributions based on a percent of your salary are now mandatory and possibly tax exempt.
There's also a couple of things I'd like to correct about prolong.
I doubt that Prolong was ever part of the PRH BLS system, rather it seems to be part of every nation's that can afford it public health care plan, the idea is simple, if people live longer but the amount of time they spend needing government support (At the start and end of their lives) doesn't change the government actually wins, especially in the medium-long term, once the first people to receive it start reaching the old retirement age and don't retire. It was no effect on the social welfare side, apart from the INCREASE in time that the productive part of the economy can be taxed.
The other is age, there was a cap on how old you could be to receive Prolong, but I think there was a minimum age as well, later versions can be given younger (I think) but also definitely have a lower maximum age
