HOW did we get here? How did it come to this? Not just to the Donald Trump phenomenon, but to the whole choice facing us on Tuesday, in which a managerial liberalism and an authoritarian nationalism — two visions of the president as essentially a Great Protector
.. For a while, conservatives have worried that this revolution is a boon to liberalism, to centralization and bureaucratic control — because as families thin people are more likely to look to politics for community and government for protection.
.. This idea is borne out in voting patterns, where marriage and kids tend to predict Republican affiliation, and the single and divorced are often reliable Democratic partisans.
.. For this reason mass immigration, the technocratic solution to the economic problems created by post-familialism — fewer workers supporting more retirees — is a double-edged sword: It replaces the missing workers but exacerbates intergenerational alienation, because it heightens anxieties about inheritance and loss.
.. In this landscape, the white-identity politics of Trumpism or European nationalism may be a more intuitively attractive form of right-wing politics than a libertarian conservatism. Right-authoritarianism offers some of the same welfare-state protections that liberalism offers to its Julias, it offers tribal solidarity to people whose family bonds have frayed — and then it links the two, public programs and tribal consciousness, in the promise of a welfare state that’s only designed for you and yours.
.. They can hope that with time the racial and ethnic differences between the generations will diminish, and that eventually state programs can more smoothly substitute for thinning families without ethno-cultural anxieties getting in the way.
.. In either case, the demagogues of the future will have ample opportunity to exploit the deep loneliness that a post-familial society threatens to create.
.. A fear of a world in which no one is bound by kinship to take care of you, and where you can go down into death leaving little or nothing of yourself behind.
Muhlenkamp: How Retirement Has Changed—Why Saving More and Working Longer will be Necessary
If you are trying to fund a retirement
lifestyle that roughly equals what you
were spending during your working
years, personal savings play a crucial
role. Prior to Social Security and
Corporate Plans, personal savings
and assets were the sole source of
“retirement” income. For most people,
these assets were insufficient to allow
them to live on their own—they lived
with their kids.During the 1950s and ‘60s, the
personal savings rate averaged 10-12%
of disposable income. As people came
to trust Social Security and pension
plans, the rate dropped to 2-3%.
Emphasis on personal savings was
renewed in 1974 with the introduction
of Individual Retirement Accounts
(IRAs).Today, personal savings (as a
percentage of disposable income) is on
the order of 4-5%.
2. Social Security was signed into.. This succeeded until the 1970s, when double-digit inflation crippled the majority of defined benefit pension plans. Over time, retirees’ purchasing power was cut in half, spurring negotiations to double their pension amounts. As a repercussion, pension plans were suddenly 50% underfunded. Additionally, productivity gains took effect (e.g. we produce the same tons of steel as we did in 1960 with one-tenth of the manpower), squeezing workerto-retiree ratios
Why Don’t Americans Save More Money?
Maybe the only way to make people richer in the long run is to take their money away from them.
In 2008, several researchers studied the stereotype that minorities spend more than whites on “visible goods”—like clothes, shoes, jewelry, watches, salons, health clubs, and car parts. They discovered that, even after controlling for income, minorities save less than whites and spend more on such conspicuous consumption goods. But the story wasn’t just about race. White people in poor U.S. states spent more of their income on visible goods than whites in higher income states.
.. One possible explanation is that people spend more to signal that they’re not poor, Megan McArdle suggested. “If you’re a member of an identifiable demographic with low average incomes (southern, racial minority, rural) you are likely to be treated as if you are poor,” which makes it harder to get both social respect and work, she wrote. In a perfectly homogenous country with all white people, there would be less reason for the poor to signal their wealth with expensive visual cues, since they already look just like the rich. But in a diverse country where some demographic groups are stereotyped as poor, lower-income people might be more likely to pay for clothes and cars that say “I’m not who you think I am.”
.. They even discovered a positive relationship between the income of the state’s richest households and the number of personal bankruptcies in that state.
.. The American middle class made up for decades of flat wages with debt. But the last two studies offer a cultural explanation. Minorities and poor whites have spent more to signal that they are not poor, while Americans in general have spent more to signal that they are just like the rich.
.. A college graduate at 29 is 30 percent more likely to be married than a peer who never finished high school. That helps to explain why nearly 60 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women.
.. The lottery is a $70 billion government-financing initiative disproportionately funded by the poor.
.. But it’s not clear that higher earnings will necessarily lead to wealth creation for the poor. In the 1990s, after all, rising incomes were plowed into homes that eventually destroyed the savings of many poor and middle class families.
.. In a world obsessed with the wizardry of behavioral nudges, perhaps policymakers should consider putting away the magic wand and just do the paternalistic thing: Force people to save more, by expanding Social Security or by creating new forced savings policies.
100 CEOs Have More Saved Up for Retirement Than 41 Percent of U.S. Families Combined
Together, 100 American CEOs have more saved up for retirement than 41 percent of American families combined.
The CEO with the largest nest egg on the report’s list was David C. Novak, the former chief of Yum Brands (which owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell), and now its executive chairman. At last count, Novak had nearly $250 million in his retirement account
.. For the purposes of comparison, the average Yum employee had about $70,000 in his or her 401(k). That means the Novak’s retirement savings are more than 3,330 times the size of the typical Yum employee’s, which makes the ratio of average CEO pay to average worker pay—300:1—look relatively small.
.. for all American households nearing retirement age, the median retirement-account balance is about $12,000. So, it’s not so much that these CEOs have a lot (they do) but that everyone else has next to nothing.