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0 pointsdiscardedrefuse3y ago0 comments

"By yearend 1960, pension plans covered 23 million persons, about one-half of all private sector workers."

"By yearend 1977, total employer contributions to defined benefit pension plans had risen [...] covering nearly 35 million active employees." [More than half.]

https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1991/12/art3full.pdf

https://www.thebalance.com/the-history-of-the-pension-plan-2...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USPRIV

Add to that, the public sector workers that were (mostly) all pension and you have more than a majority of workers on pension plan during that time period. No one is wearing rose tinted glasses.

Yes, obviously today, pensions have been removed from (almost) all private sector work places and are rapidly disappearing from the public sector too. Everything has been converted to some kind of investment plan; to pump money into to Wall Street. And we saw how great these investment plans worked out for the poor folks that had planned to retire around 2008.

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ChrisLomont3y ago

I like that you inject "[More than half]" when referring to the nearly 35 million workers in 1977.

Except there were over 90 million workers by then [1]. The FRED series you picked is not all employed people.

> And we saw how great these investment plans worked out for the poor folks that had planned to retire around 2008.

Ah, cherry picking, the best of all logical fallacies.

It's already known that those pensions didn't turn out too well either, since most of the people in that time now get most of their retirement income from Social Security.....

>to pump money into to Wall Street

And now the bias shows. Why not own some productive assets? What do you think pension plans do with money? Sit on it in a safe? Invest them all in the employing company, increasing risk, so that when/if the parent company fails the people get screwed? (Which happens and still happens a lot).

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41840558

discardedrefuseOP3y ago

> Ah, cherry picking, the best of all logical fallacies.

I don't appreciate your tone here. Everything I posted was the result of a quick web search. It just so happened that the FRED data I found corroborated the numbers in the study I found. Maybe you missed it, but both the study and FRED data are specifically about private sector workers.

Here is some more data (not hidden behind a paywall like your study):

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

It looks like at the end of 1977 there was 85M people employed (total) in the US. Which is certainly not "moving above the 90-million mark" as your page suggests. So maybe your data is cherry picked? Is your data even US data? The page you provided doesn't say.

> It's already known that those pensions didn't turn out too well either

You didn't back this up with anything. Private pensions are protected by ERISA that was passed in 1974. It requires employers to have separate assets to cover their pensions and created the PBGC which insures them. The only pensions that I've seen go belly up are state (Kentucky) pensions where the state governments (not beholden to ERISA) raided the pension funds for other things.

> Why not own some productive assets?

If by "productive assets" you mean real estate, the price to play is way too high. And on a moral note, allowing family homes to be commoditizated into investment vehicles for the rich is part of the problem. If, instead, "productive assets" is just your fancy way of saying stocks and their derivatives then yeah; I'm invested in the market. I'm not happy about it, but there isn't another choice.

> And now the bias shows.

Yes I'm biased. Fuck Wall Street. It has nothing to do with "investing in companies". It's all about wealth extraction (from companies and now from dumb money). It produces nothing of value.

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