A defined benefit pension (or any other retiree benefit such as healthcare) is a claim on future productivity.
“Contributing” cash to it may not be enough, if the cash didn’t convert into sufficient automation to offset declines in humans due to declining birthrates.
So the question gets more interesting if it’s “Was contributing whatever amount calculated (using tenuous assumptions) many decades ago enough, especially if you chose not to have well raised kids who in turn could provide society with the retiree benefits?”
And then that opens up a can of worms about who was and was not expected to have well raised kids, and it gets messy very quickly, yet at the same time, we see a clear macro problem of taking more and more from a smaller young population and giving it to a bigger and bigger old population.
You are saying that very matter-of-factly, while that is not how it works here in the Netherlands, and probably also in other places in Europe. The reasoning being, the pension isn't an unemployment benefit, pension is a fund you spent your career investing into.
