My goal in this book is to contribute to shifting the discussion on social security from an individual to a collective level. I aim to highlight the developmental and macroeconomic impacts of social security. These have remained on the periphery of analyses, even though they are incredibly critical factors for the country's trajectory – and for social security itself.

The emphasis placed on specific regulations concerning pensions and the disregard for developmental dimensions, which also –but through different processes– determine the income, employment, and standard of living of the insured, is akin to looking at the tree instead of the forest. Both, of course, are important. However, after so many interventions and non-interventions during the years of crisis and after so many collapses of expectations, the analysis of the developmental impacts of social security, particularly the forms of interdependence with many known but also new problems, is moving into a dangerous void.

Therefore, the great challenge in the coming years is not merely a function of whether and how we will address the social security problem. It is about how to overcome perceptions and strategies that, until now, with reference to social security, block the country's overall path toward a stronger developmental trajectory.

A solution, if it comes, will not emerge from some more changes, like those implemented in the last twenty years. A solution is a function of a chain of policies and a different understanding of the sequence of problems that lie outside the social security system itself.

In the course of writing this, I happened to reflect on a phrase by Albert Camus: "Perhaps it does not matter whether what one does makes sense or not. What matters is to see whether it responds to the hopes of people." Speaking of people's hopes, what ensures that no one will betray them is sincerity.

Thus, paraphrasing Keynes' saying that "such a society is a slave to the ideas of some dead economist," I believe that our society must overcome the syndrome of remaining a slave to the dead ideas of living economists, politicians, and many others who influence its path to the future.