A retirement system designed to curry favor with voters at the expense of common sense allowed millions of public employees to retire on full pensions while still in their forties or early fifties. Expansively drafted pension plans designed to protect widowed people from destitution in old age gave rise to what Brazilians smirkingly call the “Viagra effect”—male pensioners in their seventies marrying women many decades younger, who become entitled to continue receiving their husbands’ full benefits even after they died.
