{"id":2085,"date":"2004-06-14T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2004-06-14T13:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/06\/14\/2085.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:07","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:07","slug":"high-risk-low-return-or-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/06\/14\/high-risk-low-return-or-what\/","title":{"rendered":"High Risk? Low Return? or what?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger’s left-labor blog hero Nathan Newman points<\/a> to a NYT<\/a> article that discusses the effect of switching from old-fashioned defined-benefit pensions to new-fangled defined-contribution retirement accounts.\n

In the article, Mary Williams Walsh says that “virtually all” the studies showing current retirees to be wealthier than the last generation simply ignore the major asset of the last generation’s retirees: their pensions. That is, the studies compared the currently common system, with the major assets being houses, cash reserves, and stocks (mostly through 401k plans and the like), with the previous one, with the major assets being houses, cash reserves, and pensions, but they left out the pensions. Is it possible that those were honest studies?\n

Anyway, the main problem is that somehow we went from a low-risk low-return system to a high-risk high-return one. That’s fine for the affluent, who can simply add a HRHR plan onto some basic assets, but not great for those of us who have little savings other than our through our employer-assisted plans. I would rather have a LRLR plan, because I don’t want to be old and poor. I wouldn’t mind being old and rich, someday, but being old and comfortable, or even old and solvent, would be fine. I would gladly trade away my shot at old and rich for a guarantee of old and solvent (or at least, a guarantee of solvent if I grow old).\n

The problem, as I see it, is that I can only really get a LRLR plan (with my employer or my family’s employers contributing) if lots of other people want one. And they don’t. Perhaps they’ve been duped by the phony numbers, or the whole bizarre Dow-Jones-in-the-daily-news thing, or perhaps I’m just on the wrong end of the culture stick this time. I suspect it’s the latter, and I suspect that it’ll be a while before the cultural emphasis changes from rich to not-poor, from HRHR to LRLR. I don’t want the whole country to suddenly become risk-averse, you understand, but ... um ... yes, I do.\n

This is what happens when parents fail to teach their children to shoot craps.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger\u2019s left-labor blog hero Nathan Newman points to a NYT article that discusses the effect of switching from old-fashioned defined-benefit pensions to new-fangled defined-contribution retirement accounts. In the article, Mary Williams Walsh says that \u201cvirtually all\u201d the studies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17044,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions\/17044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}