To quote John Mueller:

Yeah, it's the default, so there's no need to specify it. It's like putting "allow: /" as the only directive in your robots.txt. Or like building a highway and adding a sign "cars allowed". It's not going to cause problems, but you're not surprising anyone either.

Now it makes no sense to put the tag on the pagination pages: <meta name = "robots" content = "noindex, follow" />