caa a22 4500 378898876 CHVBK 20180305123513.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20040503xx s 000 0 eng 10.2202/1538-0637.1289 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.2202/1538-0637.1289 Political and Economic Forces Sustaining Social Security [Elektronische Daten] [Casey B Mulligan, Xavier Sala-i-Martin] What economic forces create and sustain old-age Social Security as a public program? We relate political, efficiency, and narrative theories of Social Security to empirical results reported in our companion paper in this volume. Political theories, including rational majority voting and pressure group theories, feature a redistributive struggle among groups. "Efficiency theories," which model SS as a full or partial solution to market failure, include optimal redistribution, retirement insurance, and alleviating labor market congestion. Finally we analyze three "narrative" theories. Overall, retirement, and not alleviating poverty, seems important at the margin, which means that plans to reduce intergenerational redistribution may not be politically sustainable merely because they provide "adequate" incomes for the elderly. Politics seem important, because cross-cohort redistribution is so prevalent, even when the old are consuming as much or more than do the young. SS reform would therefore be assisted by political reforms equalizing political power across generations. ©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston Social Security nationallicence Pensions nationallicence Elderly nationallicence Retirement nationallicence Political Economics nationallicence Mulligan Casey B. University of Chicago, c-mulligan@uchicago.edu aut Sala-i-Martin Xavier Columbia University, xs23@columbia.edu aut Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy De Gruyter 4/1(2004-05-03) 4:1 2004 4 bejeap https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1289 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1289 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Mulligan Casey B. University of Chicago, c-mulligan@uchicago.edu aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Sala-i-Martin Xavier Columbia University, xs23@columbia.edu aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy De Gruyter 4/1(2004-05-03) 4:1 2004 4 bejeap CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter