Fellow's workshop

Niko and Pietro Intropi

Go Funded?
A plan for fertility-based pension funding in the public pension system
By Niko Väänänen

Public pension systems have been successful in preventing old-age poverty. Yet, the financial sustainability of these systems is threatened by low fertility rates observed in Europe. The lack of trust in the long-term sustainability erodes public confidence of the systems.

To make public pension systems more future-proof while respecting intergenerational fairness, I propose adding a funded element to the pension system. Firstly, I propose of complementing the paygo pension scheme with a fund. This way the public pension would be provided by a mixed system. The funding ratio would depend on the changes in the ratio (active age population/children). Secondly, I will address the issue of governance of this fund as the institutional sustainability should be designed carefully. I will draw relevant conclusions of past experiences with public pension reserve funds and sovereign wealth funds."

Freedom’s Values: The Good and The Right
By Pietro Intropi

There are two very general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g. to freedom’s contribution to wellbeing), the other appeals to how persons have reason to treat one another in response to their status as purposive beings (i.e. to the right). In this talk I offer an analysis of two ways of valuing freedom and I show that this distinction has many relevant implications for contemporary freedom debates, especially for understanding the relationships between freedom and justice. In particular, I discuss two attitudes towards freedom (promoting and respecting freedom) and two versions of the claim that freedom has non-specific value, analysing under which conditions interference with people’s freedom can be considered disvaluable as such (independently of the content of the freedom in question, and even when interference is aimed at depriving someone of the freedom to perform a morally impermissible action)