I never meant to end up in pensions. In fact, I spent the first 15 years or so of my life dreaming about overthrowing capitalism. My father was a Marxist and fed this passion, telling me I would grow up to be a leader of men, and I actually felt that being a revolutionary wasn’t just desirable, it was expected!
I probably didn’t have the typical childhood in many ways – my family spans the world. My mother was Swedish, my father was Israeli, but his family came from Turkey, Poland and Georgia – a small place in Georgia called Gori -which was the hometown of Josef Stalin. I actually believed growing up that Stalin was a relative of mine, until I discovered that everyone from Gori has a rumour in their family of being related to Stalin. So sadly I can no longer use that as an excuse for bad behaviour…
My father was an eminent physicist, which took us all over the world. I was born in Australia and then we moved to Santa Barbara, California when I was ten. I hated it – I think living there slowly turned my Marxism into nihilism and I became an angry goth, stomping around the sun drenched streets in tall black boots and always feeling far too hot.
Moving around a lot makes you a relativist at a young age. You see that people in different places operate according to very different assumptions about what is normal and appropriate. Things that are accepted as natural in one place can seem strange in another. You learn early on that ways of thinking and behaving are shaped by geography.
This was deeply alienating when I was young – I wanted desperately to fit in and no matter what I did I was always told I was strange. But in the long run this was a gift. As I grew, and my nihilism morphed into a comfortable anarcho-syndicalism I found that I naturally approached the world from a skeptical viewpoint. All assumptions were questioned, and I was able to flexibly assimilate and reject ideas. It wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but it was the start of something.
Now I must warn you, this is a disappointing story. I did not actually grow up to be revolutionary. In fact, I started my career as a social worker. I worked with many groups, from disabled children in California, to older alcoholics and drug addicts in the east end. While I was no longer attempting to smash the state, I still wanted a better life for people.
And being a social worker is a great way to understand more about the impact of inequality. I was still asking why? Why are people suffering? Who does poverty benefit? Does our system have to work like this? In whose interest is the status quo and what messages are we being fed to maintain our cooperation? What’s our modern “opiate of the masses?”
So how did I end up in pensions?
Well, social work is hard. I have so much respect for those who do it, but after a stint with children in care in Tower Hamlets I had to move on. I learned that I can’t detach, which is not a bad trait on its own, but social workers are supposed to be less emotionally fragile than their clients.
So I chucked it in and went and got a masters in social policy at the LSE. I knew exactly what I would do afterwards – I would get a job working in civil rights policy and fight for the rights and better treatment of refugees. As it transpired, no one is waiting outside your graduation ceremony to give you your dream job!
So, as I was unable to find what I wanted right away, I took a few research and policy jobs here and there. A recruitment agent called me one day and said, how about this place that does pensions policy? To be brutally honest I thought that sounded dreadfully boring but decided that it would give me an opportunity to get more experience for my dream career.
It took a little while before I realised I wanted to stay in pensions, but I had actually found all the things I had been searching for. Pensions are wonderful – they are the culmination of people’s lives. Lives that encompass the differences, the inequalities and stratifications I was obsessed with. I saw pensions as part of an economic system that generates and reproduces inequality.
To break it down – our system rests on the divide between asset owners and workers. This structure concentrates wealth over time; capital owners generate returns which generally grow faster than the wider economy. As a result, wealth builds up disproportionately among asset owners. And inequalities fall heavily on the more vulnerable – women, ethnic minorities, the disabled, carers, etc.
Viewed this way, private pensions are not a neutral invention but a product of a system built around the markets. And once you see that, the inefficiencies become easier to understand.
Private pensions are not the only way to support retirement, they are just the natural extension of our economic system. But in a more organic, human way, they are inefficient because unequal and so disconnected from how many people live their lives.
Our current system reflects what we value: paid work. This is tied to market systems, which place less value on social functions without an immediate economic return. That helps sustain the system by shifting the cost of care and social support outside the market, keeping workers available while reducing costs for employers and the state.
Looking at pensions through this lense really helps with understanding the outcomes people face – not just a reflection of their working lives, not even tied to choices they make, but an expression of the structure we all live in.
That helps with policy analysis because it shifts attention away from individual behaviour and towards the way rules, incentives and institutions produce unequal outcomes. It also helps us to see the boundaries and tensions within the system more clearly.
The tensions between adequacy and affordability, between individual responsibility and collective provision, and between what pension policy can address and what depends on wider labour market and social policy.
Policy analysis is then less about looking for technical fixes in isolation and more about understanding both the possibilities and the limits of reform.
What’s interesting and perhaps troubling about our current system is the shifts over time from a more collective approach to a more individualistic one. Of course, that’s easy to say when you start at a certain point in time. We can go back to poor laws and workhouses, serfs and landowners and say well that wasn’t very socialist! But the Second World War helped forge a different settlement. The scale of disruption and shared sacrifice strengthened the idea that insecurity was not just an individual problem, but something society had to address collectively.
William Beveridge set out a vision of welfare from cradle to grave, with the state playing a bigger role in protecting people against poverty, sickness, unemployment, and insecurity in old age. It was an acknowledgment that markets alone could not provide stability, and that some risks had to be shared across society. It didn’t change the underlying economic system, but it placed some limits around its harsher effects.
Since then, that settlement has gradually weakened, as policy has moved towards a more individual view of risk and responsibility. Collectivism has not disappeared, but more responsibility for security in later life has shifted onto individuals, through private saving, market mechanisms, and assumptions about personal planning. What we have now is a patchwork, part social protection, part market system, without a clear consensus about the balance between them or who should carry which risks.
Is security in old age primarily a collective responsibility, a role for employers, or something individuals are expected to manage for themselves?
That uncertainty runs through modern pensions policy.
All this makes the job of the Pensions Commission very hard. How do we address adequacy without a consensus on who is responsible for providing it? In fact, the scope it has been given largely sidesteps that question, excluding the role of government and, by focusing on private pensions, placing the emphasis back on the individual.
That matters, because the way a problem is framed shapes the solutions that can be considered. If adequacy is treated mainly as a question of private saving, then wider questions about collective provision, risk sharing and the role of the state can fall out of view. And yet those are precisely the questions raised by the inequalities the Commission is trying to address.
Pensions policy does not sit in a vacuum. It operates within a wider set of economic assumptions and political constraints. In practice, major spending decisions pass through the Treasury, where questions of cost, tax and growth inevitably shape what is seen as realistic or affordable.
That matters, because it affects not just what policies are chosen, but sometimes what options are considered at all. And that tells us something about what the system prioritises. The DWP may focus on adequacy and security, but those aims are often mediated through a framework focused on fiscal cost.
And this creates another tension. We ask pensions to do a lot of different things at once. We ask them to provide income in later life, but also to support economic growth. We are considering whether they can help people manage shocks, buy housing, and meet care costs. Those aims may all be worthwhile, but they don’t always fit neatly together.
They can pull in different directions, and we do not have a clear shared view about how to balance those trade offs. Is the system mainly there to provide income in retirement, or is it also meant to serve wider economic goals? If we are not clear what the system is for, it is much harder to decide what good reform looks like.
None of this means the system can’t achieve progressive things – there are some great policies out there. The first pensions commission helped us to build automatic enrolment and led to state pension credits for those unable to work. The triple lock and the new state pension have increased the minimum amount pensioners get and are keeping many out of relative poverty. It could be better though. We still need that consensus! What are we all aiming for and who should pay what?
So, here’s my point. This is not a polemic. I am not saying let’s smash the state and dismantle capitalism. My ideologies haven’t changed much but I am a realist who aims to work within the system for good. Also, I’m a bit too old now to lead a revolution – I like to be in bed by 11.
But we need be honest about the functions of the system. Is pensions policy, at least in part, a way of managing inequalities generated elsewhere in the system? If so, fine! That’s okay to recognise. If we are honest about the system and what we’re doing in it, we can make policy which works within realistic bounds and reflects the real lives of the people it aims to benefit.
I will say one other thing, while governments avoid making a solid commitment about who they see as responsible for providing what proportion of retirement income, we will continue to debate about what the system should look like rather than having a goal and working towards it.
So, I hope that has been an interesting and somewhat amusing journey. It certainly has been for me. Looking back, I feel very lucky to have found a policy field where ideas matter and where people really can make a difference.
Pensions goth
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