The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security wants to find everyone who hasn’t paid social insurance and mobilize them to start paying.
I’ve said before that the biggest problem with social insurance in China isn’t whether it has value, but the huge gap between what the system promises and the reality of working life.
Society can’t even make an eight-hour workday or a two-day weekend the norm, yet it expects workers to pay social insurance every month.
Workers have no guarantee of reasonable working hours, no guarantee of their right to rest, and no guarantee of stable income. Even making ends meet after losing a job can become a problem. Yet they’re expected to take on a long-term, rigid obligation to pay into a pension decades in advance.
Shouldn’t this logic be explained clearly first?
Social insurance is essentially a system for sharing social risks. It can be an important safeguard in a modern society, but only if the system is fair, contribution levels are in line with people’s ability to pay and the benefits they receive, and ordinary workers can genuinely enjoy the rights the system promises.
If a system constantly emphasizes what individuals should contribute but rarely discusses what workers actually receive; if it keeps expanding the number of contributors without also addressing low incomes, excessive working hours, and insecure employment, then social insurance can easily turn from social protection into a long-term financial burden for ordinary people.
In a country that can’t even make the eight-hour workday or two-day weekend the norm, social insurance is a scam within a scam—a travel allowance for retired senior officials who worked eight-hour days and had weekends off. I once built a statistical model to estimate how many young people in the public sector would need to support the generous pensions of retired officials. Even a rough calculation showed that the social insurance system was on the verge of buckling… No country’s public finances can support a group of deadweights. The gap is simply too large; there’s no country anywhere in the world with such a huge gap.
There’s an even more serious problem facing us over the next 20 years: AI and robots may replace some human labor. Businesses may continue to increase their output, but total wages may not grow at the same rate, and gig work may expand further.
Does the next generation’s social security system really need a ‘headcount’ to support it?
AI is a social system that needs to be continually adjusted in response to technological development, income distribution, and fiscal data. Sadly, no one in China is paying attention to this～
$BTC $ETH #btc #eth
I’ve said before that the biggest problem with social insurance in China isn’t whether it has value, but the huge gap between what the system promises and the reality of working life.
Society can’t even make an eight-hour workday or a two-day weekend the norm, yet it expects workers to pay social insurance every month.
Workers have no guarantee of reasonable working hours, no guarantee of their right to rest, and no guarantee of stable income. Even making ends meet after losing a job can become a problem. Yet they’re expected to take on a long-term, rigid obligation to pay into a pension decades in advance.
Shouldn’t this logic be explained clearly first?
Social insurance is essentially a system for sharing social risks. It can be an important safeguard in a modern society, but only if the system is fair, contribution levels are in line with people’s ability to pay and the benefits they receive, and ordinary workers can genuinely enjoy the rights the system promises.
If a system constantly emphasizes what individuals should contribute but rarely discusses what workers actually receive; if it keeps expanding the number of contributors without also addressing low incomes, excessive working hours, and insecure employment, then social insurance can easily turn from social protection into a long-term financial burden for ordinary people.
In a country that can’t even make the eight-hour workday or two-day weekend the norm, social insurance is a scam within a scam—a travel allowance for retired senior officials who worked eight-hour days and had weekends off. I once built a statistical model to estimate how many young people in the public sector would need to support the generous pensions of retired officials. Even a rough calculation showed that the social insurance system was on the verge of buckling… No country’s public finances can support a group of deadweights. The gap is simply too large; there’s no country anywhere in the world with such a huge gap.
There’s an even more serious problem facing us over the next 20 years: AI and robots may replace some human labor. Businesses may continue to increase their output, but total wages may not grow at the same rate, and gig work may expand further.
Does the next generation’s social security system really need a ‘headcount’ to support it?
AI is a social system that needs to be continually adjusted in response to technological development, income distribution, and fiscal data. Sadly, no one in China is paying attention to this～
$BTC $ETH #btc #eth