Pensions actually provide a massive benifit in that they don't provide dead people money. You can say I will be fine if I run out of money at age X, but when you start talking about 100 million people you get a large number that make it past that.

Also, fully funded is only fully funded when it can survive the company going bankrupt tomorrow. People like to redefine it as liability less than X, but that just means underfunded.

Granted, if you have kids you might want the leftovers from your retirement to go to them, but that's not a social problem. Further becase pensions take less money so a subset can always just buy life insurance.

PS: The biggest issue is benifits not including inflation, but again that's a policy issue.