My latest book Social Security: A Fresh Look at Reform Alternatives (available here) argues that it’s not just labor quantity — the number of employees who are accruing future Social Security benefits — that will determine the size of Social Security’s future imbalances (and, incidentally, those of Medicare, and the size of deficits for all of government), but also the quality of that labor — the value of the work those employees are doing. 

Declining labor quality (as experienced baby boomers retire) will reduce taxable payrolls faster than is being projected by the Social Security Administration and the Congressional Budget Office. The result is even more beneficiaries receiving Social Security checks, and lower-wage workers who will be funding those checks.

In the book, I construct a detailed simulation of U.S. demographic and economic forces over the coming decades to estimate how much of a drag declining labor quality will exert on labor productivity, countering the effects of capital accumulation and technological advance.

Now James Heckman has coauthored a study suggesting that the same thing is happening in Europe, traceable in part to public policies promoting less use and low maintenance of worker skills through the early retirement incentives of their public pension, welfare, and health systems. 

So it is quite clear how the developed world (Anglo-Saxon and mainland Europe) will spiral downward. We’ll all vote to “strengthen” social insurance systems (the U.S. health care “reform” this year being the latest example), only to further weaken incentives for the young to acquire skills, further erode the tax base, which in turn will promote the further “strengthening” of social insurance protections … and so on. 

My old idea of a “covert generational war” is playing out before our very (but fully blind) eyes.

Two months ago, EU officials were even flirting with the idea of a cross-country crisis insurance institution — a European Monetary Fund. 

One ironic element in the ongoing European crisis: Remember how the EU’s erstwhile Stability and Growth Pact included penalties on nations who exceeded the 3 percent fiscal deficit rule? Turns out, penalties must now be paid by the “successful” countries — mainly Germany and France — by coughing up the aid packages!