Most, if not all, the generations that have retired in the last 50 years or so in Welfare states have done so at a profit: they paid less in social contributions than they got in retirement benefits/ pensions.
Previous generations compensated this by an indirect payment: they had a fertility rate above the generational substitution rate (2,1).
The pyramid scheme that are our Welfare states has been slowly been undermined by pensions that are too high. This was possible through productivity gains and through the accumulation of massive amounts of public debt.

Both these avenues seem now a lot more difficult: Europe is already buried under unsustainable amounts of both public and private debt, and its economic performance has been consistently poor.

Among the answers that we might need to find for these problems are:
- Reducing all barriers to wealth creation. Without private companies to pay taxes, there is no Welfare system.
- Incentivizing innovation that leads to the reduction of job demands: for example, robotization for all sectors that are less attractive for workers.
- Families with children and working parents pay double into the system: they pay taxes and social contributions, and they provide the next generation of workers. We should thus redesign all social policies to guarantee that working families with children are always (ceteris paribus) better off than workers without children or families were no parent works.