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Pensions avoided each person needing to individually make all those choices by centralizing the same thing into an efficiently managed centralized process with rrliable results. The only thing splitting it up by individuals did was increase the overhead on retirements to funnel the money to the wealthy while allowing the elderly to be blamed for not taking care of their own retirement.
I agree, 401ks are stupid and were invented as more of a tax loophole for the wealthy than as an every-man's retirement fund. But they're cheaper for business so that's what we're stuck with.
That's not what I was talking about at all, though. I was just pointing out that if you have enough money to save for retirement, there are ways to relatively easily invest and grow your money while still mitigating risk and staying mostly hands-off.
Fun fact about pensions. At their height, only about 45% of private-sector workers actually had a pension. Having one was undoubtedly better, on average, than having a 401k today. But they weren't the utopian retirement solution that we (including myself) like to pretend they were. A majority of the population didn't benefit from them at all, and the less-fortunate were essentially in the same or worse spot as they're in today.
Yeah, but while the number of employees who have acess to retirement options (68%) is higher, the number who chose to participate (51%) isn't significantly higher as of 2021. This probably includes some crappy options not nearly on par with pensions.
Another problem is the shift from pensions to personal options is also used by conservstives to say we don't really need social security. Honestly I would rather change social security to have a higher payout rate and collect more for it by removing the cap and collecting it from businesses based on sales/business income (not just profits). That would balance out the jobs being lost to automation while tying retirement to the economy as a whole. With a solid guaranteed level of retirement income the option to save up would not be a necessity to actually retire.