Been paying attention to protests in France on changes to pensions?

In recent days there've been some large-scale and disruptive strikes across France protesting changes to the pension system.

Here's something to consider:

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was the first statesman in the world to start a state sponsored pension system. His landmark 1889 bill ('Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill') created a hitherto new system of providing pension for people who reached the age of 70, by taxing the younger people who are still in the work force. (In 1916 the retirement eligibility age was lowered to 65.)

Bismarck's original idea behind the pension scheme was a good one. But left mostly untouched and unreformed for over a century, the 'good idea' has not kept up with the changing times. In today's world, this archaic idea may no longer be entirely practical. For starters, the average life expectancy in the 1880s when Bismarck started the world's first ever pension scheme, was about 45 years. So, the state hardly had to pay anybody for prolonged periods of time.

So, in short, under Bismarck the vast majority of people would have been dead prior to being able to claim a pension. That compares to the legislation (now passed by the French senate) raising the retirement age to 62 with an average life expectancy of over 80 years. Was the old system sustainable? I'd vote no. Is the new system all that much better? I somehow doubt it.

Here's a bit of what Foreign Policy Magazine had to say:

Americans have no reason to feel smug on this issue. Experts in the United States have long agreed, as they have in France, that the social security system is unsustainable and will ultimately bankrupt the country. And yet both parties fall all over themselves to pander to voters on the protection of those benefits. I have recently been pelted with emails from a liberal, union-supported group called the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, which boasts that "over 135 members of Congress" have signed a letter to President Barack Obama opposing any cuts in benefits or any further increase in retirement age. Of course, all attempts to include serious cost-control measures in the health-care reform bill failed. Rewriting the social contract turns out to be very hard, no matter how obvious the need to do so.

This, to me, seems as though it's really the biggest challenge to democracies worldwide in the coming years.