They’re paid out according to their contributions. But they’re paid with money current workers are paying in. It is technically a ponzi, but was designed to be sustainable instead of promising reckless profits.

The money they paid was so that their parents and grandparents had a little something going into retirement.

There’s no such thing as ethnic cleansing. It’s just a weasel word for genocide. It’s all it ever has been. When “ethnic cleansing” was going on in the Balkans in the 90s, it was just a genocide that nobody was intervening to stop. Same for Myanmar in the mid 2010s And for Karabakh in 2020.