According to the FT , we are about to enter our fourth period when  earnings don’t keep up with inflation since 2008.

For many people with school economics, we grew up with average earnings being against of real price indexation by a couple of percent. We thought that as time we were getting richer.

But I’m not sure with four cuts in real earnings that as a nation we are feeling better than we did in the years leading up to 2008. There will be people in the Institute of Fiscal Studies will right me on the numbers but I get the feeling from the media I follow. We are not as confident about our earnings nor are we as confident about our house prices going up (if we own property) and those coming up to an age we want to wind down, aren’t so happy with our pensions.

We are told that we ought to get used to inflation beating our wage life in retirement, it is written into the statutory money purchase illustrations which show us no growth at all. Our private DB plans are capped at 5% or 2.5% and pay out CPI not RPI. We had resistance to the move to CPI nearly 20 years ago but now there’s no conversation about the pensions we get paid by consultants or trustees or it seems Government.

Pensions fall into the future austerity of “old age”. We haven’t yet devised a way to pay inflation linked deferred pay rises – some call pensions. It’s very dishonest isn’t it?

If you wanted me to single out one outstanding feature of CPI pension it is that it targeted inflation to hit each year and when it missed , it vowed to get back to it and beat it. That is the aim of a CDC scheme and it doesn’t pretend that this can be done without taking short term risk to get long term gain. To suppose that you will get to an aim of beating inflation by investing in gilts is ludicrous. You must embrace the growth that is in the economy and put to one side areas which will struggle to deliver returns that match and then beat inflation.

We should not be saying at a time of immense technological advance that we can deny ourselves economic advantage as a country both in the amount we pay each other and the amount we pay ourselves through our retirement saving. I see the paucity of imagination about pensions and I wonder where the vision for the next generation is.

For if we are battening down the hatches on our pensions , what are we doing for the generations behind us, whether they be born in 1970 ,1980 – especially readers born since the turn of the century?

We cannot grow our nation into something that can pay proper pensions over the next fifty years if we don’t think of our investments stretching out way past 2050 and to the end of the century. This is why I cannot see as CDC as something that winds up at some time in the future. I see it as progressing, albeit with amendment, perhaps rewriting but essentially as a pension, way beyond the confined of our imagination.

And today we find ourselves in a slough of sluggish growth, on four occasions our earnings have grown slower than inflation. It is as if we’ve accepted we’re in some twilight of our nation, that we will have a diminishing place in the world and a diminishing standard of living going forward.

Investing for the future is what I want CDC pension funds to do; so that wages in retirement grow at least as fast as inflation- till we die – then pass to living spouses.