Hello everybody in this GAP Social Security

Hello,

my name is Andreas Siemoneit, I would like to introduce myself as facilitator of the GAP group on Social Security. I’ve got degrees in physics as well as business engineering and I am working since 17 years as consultant and software developer for enterprise software (enterprise resource planning systems). Since more than three years I am deeply involved in the degrowth debate in Germany, studying privately for the third time in my life, this time the subject of „Sustainability“. I am active mainly in the German Society for Ecological Economics (VÖÖ), in the board of Förderverein Wachstumswende (who is running the social network wachstumswende.de) and in the German Green Party.

I am interested in the subject of Social Security since many years, because I regard the Social System in Germany as unjust and inefficient already today. As Kerstin Hötte wrote correctly in her stirring paper and as Angelika Zahrnt and Irmi Seidl have shown in the book „Postwachstumsgesellschaft“ they have edited, the debate about social security is crucial for degrowth (by the way: Attached you find a summary of this book, in German only).

As a facilitator of the GAP group, my job is primarily to enable the participants to discuss productively and less to take part in the discussion myself. But I would like to make some remarks on the discussions made so far.

Two more general remarks:

• Social security systems are IMO not so much dependent on growth but rather on full employment. The main problem of most countries is the relatively high unemployment rate, leading to more people needing financial support from the system and less people financing it. Only capital-based pension systems are dependent on growth, but that’s more psychological, because people are simply used to get high interest rates. They could be quite low in a degrowth society, and saving money would then be no more than keeping it instead of making it grow. The expectation of high interest rates is IMO not a systemic growth force.
• Saving money is quite problematic beyond the expectation of interest, because a current claim for goods and services is put aside and brought back into the economic circulation later – sometimes decades later. Only when the amounts saved in total are about the same all the time (constant savings) the effect is neutralized. Spoken in terms of economic achievement, every pension system is a pay-as-you-go system, because the old age pensioners receive their benefits always from the currently productive people, no matter which way the system is funded.

Toward the discussion expecting us:

• I regard it as problematic to discuss the social security systems of a degrowth society too detailed, with concrete instruments or already concrete figures, because wether these policies will be viable in the future is dependent on too many factors beyond today’s fantasy. I would regard it to be more fruitful to discuss the principles of a just social security system instead. In fact, talking about social security is talking about justice, and for me this discussion is quite independent from growth/degrowth questions, because as long as people are working productively there will be enough money to finance some kind of social security system.
• For the old age pension system this could be for example: How much sense does a fixed age limit make? In which way should the contributions made by people during their productive work life reflect their claim to the height of their pension? How shall times of reproductive work count for pension claims?
• For unemployment insurance this could be for example: Will this branch of social security still play a role as important as today, when in a degrowth society there might be less unemployment because of less (highly consumptive) technical rationalization of work? Are thoughts about a general reduction of working time realistic?
• For the health insurance system this could be for example: Is it acceptable that sick people pay the same premiums like healthy people (as it is in Germany today), or do we have to make them pay more to give incentives for a healthier lifestyle (take for example a well payed employee who suffers from a sports injury)? How do we handle the frequently increasing costs of medical (technical) progress? Is some kind of rationing necessary, and if: How?

See you soon at the discussion!