I re-read the article and it only mentions labour vs capital once, in passing. Mostly it talks in terms of owners vs managers, and the principal-agent problem. You refer to "greedy pigs" and exploitation making it sound as though the author is anti-capitalist, but that does not seem to be the case).

(I was curious enough to look him up. He's a finance professor at HBS. That probably explains the different slant compared to other Atlantic articles).

Objectively speaking, it does not seem like that is the case for even half of workers. https://www.ebri.org/publications/benfaq/index.cfm?fa=retfaq...

EDIT: Wait... The chart title says 1979-2013, which is what the chart says... but the source citation says it came from 1979-1998... which is why I thought it was 20 years old... not sure where they got the rest of the data from.

To wit, If I own (say) $5k of Amazon stock as the result of being invested in a mutual fund, that is not sufficient cause for me to take time out of my day to call my representatives and actively lobby for Amazon.

Have you seen the movie Casino? That actually happened, the Teamsters pension fund came under control of the mob.

What about Illinois, which is facing a $120 billion pension shortfall due to decades of accounting gimmicks?

What about the UAW guys, who were counting on pensions from the big 3?

All I'm saying is, look at how it _actually_ works, in practice, vs. how it _could_ work, in theory. The reality is, DB plans are getting phased out because they're too expensive to service, and too risky for employees.

You can make the argument that people aren't getting compensated enough, and maybe that's true, but that's not an argument about DB vs. DC.

The point is, there are no certainties in this world, and if someone tells you there are, they're lying.

Further, money enough to cover the basics is vastly more important than 'extra'.

Which is why I get really mad when the current Australian government tries to spin it that retirees are 'bludgers' and are a drain on the system when they draw their (paltry) pensions. No, these people paid 40 years' worth of taxes to the government, and being supported by the government after they retired was part of that deal.

You can't offer to pay me tomorrow for a hamburger today, and then when I ask for my money tomorrow, call me a beggar.

Any retirement plan dependent on government means that you will get less value out than you put in. Think about “management fees” on an index fund – a fraction of a percent generally. Think about the de facto management fee taken by government – orders of magnitude more. Not to mention your return on “investment” is rather low and you can’t pass on a government pension to your children. So if you die at 50, the government keeps all that excess you “paid in.” That isn’t fair. People ought to have the freedom to opt-out.

A compromise might be to require paying in to a system, but you get to direct where that money is invested. Somewhat like a mandatory IRA. In the US, you are forced to pay into social security – why not “force” people to have an IRA instead? However I think the real reason that doesn’t work is that it would make people less dependent on particular political parties – because the government no longer has as much power over your survival. “Vote for us or else <the other party> will cut your benefits and make you starve.

Unfortunately, with all the talk of freedom, it’s mostly just talk. Actual freedom means being able to make your own decisions as well as living with the good or bad consequences of those decisions.

We now have mandatory superannuation contributions which work pretty much how you're suggesting, and the government is pushing towards getting rid of pensions in future.

1) there's spartan explicit connection between the taxes paid then and the pensions paid now: most governments did not put that money in an explicit infrastructure or investment fund, the revenue from which explicitly pays for pensions. Additionally, we generally do not (in Australia) connect how much you paid in with how much your taking out, so we have no way to even ethically or materially judge whether someone really is our isn't "taking out more than they put in"

2) in the real economy, pensions are not paid for by your past taxes, but from future income derived from the level of capital investment and infrastructure and the labor force at the time of your retirement. The Australian pension system contracts a population of post boomer children to pay a debt they were never party to agreeing to pay: and chicken the general demographic numbers, aren't liable to be able to pay it given the relative size of the two populations.

3) from a normative point if view, the Australian system is quite generous (not as generous as some of the European ones). It is, dare I say it, unsustainable. Not only do you have to adjust for the pensioner discounts and additional payments offered to get it's true value, but it is much greater in volume compared to all other dole payments. With no means testing for your primary property, it's both a subsidy to the rich, encourages over investment in property, and has basically set us up to escalate inter generational war fare.

My advice to everyone is to assume it won't be there for anyone not already collecting it.

Don't get me wrong, I have some sympathy for the boomers who thought it would be available. But, they got to effectively overconsume by not putting sufficient away to invest for it, and in a competition between economic reality vs "what I'm supposed to get on my defined benefit pension", reality will win every time. Government isn't god.

I'm not sure I follow your third point. The pension system is far from generous - it's ~72% of after-tax minimum wage. Pensioners generally live in the same house they've lived in for decades, if they haven't downsized, and it's only the primary property that's not means tested so it's not like they're hoarding investment properties.

And they didn't get to 'overconsume by not putting sufficient away' - they did put that amount away, as part of their tax payments. What the government did with the enforced payments is a different matter.

To get an accurate view of the value of the pension though, you have to take the dollar face value and apply both pensioner discounts (practically everywhere in Aus, you will get discounts on your rates and utilities at the very least, in practice substantially more such as transport and consumables). In addition most also get to consume their imputed rent.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all pensioners are "living it large". It is miserable to be a pensioner that doesn't own their home. But their true consumption possibilities are several multiples in practice of all our other social security payments, say for the unemployed or people on minimum wage for example, who don't own their own homes.

Given the demographic boom of the boomers, we are effectively paying living wages to the group that statistically hold the most wealth of any age group, and that we don't means test against the primary store of that wealth, I predict this system cannot last.

The government can enter into a defined pension scheme that proclaims it will be summer forever, and people can complain that they were promised that it would be summer forever, but a wise man knows that winter is coming...

  > Pensions aren't portable - in the modern labor market   
  > where people are expected to have multiple emplyers and 
  > possibly even career arcs, that's a pretty limiting.

It also represents a huge tax on people who want to be able to change jobs. I would prefer a world where people feel more free to leave jobs that suck or aren’t good fits for them. Locking them down with pensions, options plans, or 401k matching programs that vest over time are all mechanisms for employers to recapture what would have been paid out as wages from employees who leave early (who often tend to be younger).

A UBI that puts you somewhere above the poverty line supplemented with a forced savings program seems like the best move. It gives you portability, simplifies the system and administrative burden, and offers a hedge against the vagaries of the market.

Such as?

Even ones that still offer pensions, if the support isn't there then it's in conflict with how a pension matures it's benefits. Many companies treat workers as interchangable cogs and don't provide/encourage for any exceptional wage or career growth or training. So to move upward one has to change companies - dropping (or at best pausing) the pension.

Not all companies are like this, but many (most) are. I thought this all was pretty widely understood?

I guess that's a reason other than pensions, technically.

Employer and pension are not tied together in a great deal of countries - for example: state-controlled. So even if you switch jobs, the plan remains the same. (Also relevant is that most countries have a single state, so state-controlled means you can actually move anywhere inside the country and keep the same plan).

A) guaranteed life

B) guaranteed life of you or your spouse

C) guaranteed life with a return of the unused amount

D) guaranteed life with a guaranteed x year certain

Of course the different options you choose affect your monthly payout.

Reference please. The Revenue Act of 1978 created a provision, section 401(k), for employees to defer income as future compensation.

Put the words "Apple" "vs." and "Google" in the headline to generate some pretty good clicks.

The rest of the words are just to fill the rectangle the headline sits over. They just need to be formed in a way that doesn't distract from the main purpose.

If you're talking about Marxism, you're misunderstanding the division between bourgeoisie and proletarians; stocks, pensions, 401k, whatever, does not count as means of production; the division is between the proletarians, who almost always have nothing to sell but their labour-power and the bourgeoisie, i.e a class of people who own the means of production.

Further, you're using "exploit" as a prejorative, which it isn't necessarily; Marx's idea of exploitation is removed from what we think of as exploitation (in a negative sense); it's exploitation just as you'd exploit a car or something like that - you make use of it, use it up. Machines are also exploited in the same way. Nevertheless, the goal of the Marxists and indeed Communists in general is to abolish this exploitation.

Your simplification does not make the anti-capitalist plight any weaker, and in fact it just goes to show how much the ideas of the Communists are miscommunicated and misinterpreted. It could be said, with the shrinking of the number of people who are self-employed (actually, things like freelance programming forming an exception) that the model of proletarians and bourgeoisie is just as relevant if not moreso today than it was in the 19th century.

I advise you to read modern Marxist works, such as Spectres of Marx, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and particularly almost all of Zizek's work (in particular The Sublime Object of Ideology), which I must recommend. Of particular note is The Culture Industry by Adorno, commonly associated with the Frankfurt School.

I have actually read and thought about the Communist Manifesto quite a lot, but not the later works you cited. I'll add them to my reading list.

The biggest problem I have with classical Marxism is that it presupposes a sort of material capital that can be accumulated. While there are certain sectors in which "assets" in the traditional sense, whether physical ones like timber, rental real estate, etc. or the softer "intellectual property" play a dominant role, this doesn't seem to be what's driving the world forward today.

I think "reputationism", or maybe "Hollywood capitalism", is a better descriptor for how Hollywood or SV work today. Witness the sky-high compensation of CEOs, athletes, actors, real estate developers, financiers, and others whose reputations give them access to opportunities most traditional "labor" can only dream of. In fact, if you read Piketty, he makes the point that capital's share of income relative to labor has actually decreased in the past decades, even as very highly compensated labor's share has skyrocketed.

The real enemy, IMO, is "empty suits" with no skin in the game (borrowing from Taleb) - people like analysts, non-founding CEOs, private equity/VC managers who commit only 5% of the capital of their funds, and others in positions of "heads I win, tails you lose". I really admire people who stick to their beliefs and bet with their own money/credibility (like this http://longbets.org/362/) - I have much less respect for the guys blabbing on CNBC every day who just talk, talk, talk.

Can you explain what you mean by this? If you own stocks, pensions, 401k, whatever, you pretty definitionally have more to sell than just your labour-power right? I guess I don't understand how it's not gradated ownership over the means of production.

Citation needed. I believe "almost every" is pure hyperbole.

A quick search found a poll indicating 52% of Americans own stock.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/190883/half-americans-own-stocks-...

If you have better information, I'd like to see it, please.

Keep in mind that "owning stock" isn't well-defined though, that could mean (a) own individual shares (narrowest), (b) owns shares or ETFs (broader), (c) owns mutual funds.

But that still doesn't address my point. It's a lot bigger when both private sector, and public, pensions are included.

This issue is near and dear to my heart because I grew up in Illinois (now living in California) and am watching the budget battle unfold there. They have a huge pension funding gap, and the returns of the stock market are going to have a very direct, real effect on how much tax the state has to collect to fund the pensions.

What percent of asset markets are owned by the 1%?

Every time a bubble pops, they're the one's left holding the tab.

How many of those 401ks and IRAs were wiped out and the "owner" left with nothing after Madoff, housing bubble, etc.

IMO, it's a fools errand as a figurative little person on the totem pole to babysit the wealth of the rich who leave them dangling in front of the fan that just had shit splatter all over it.

I assume almost none of them.

People with most of their wealth in a 401k probably didn't have a lot of money in Madoff's hedge fund and the housing bubble also likely didn't wipe out retirement funds for the people that just left their retirement alone.