Nevin's Data "Points"

  I recently picked up a book that states “why (almost) everything you know about the US retirement system is wrong” — and it’s definitely worth a read. The book — titled  The Real Retirement Crisis: Why (Almost) Everything You Know About the US Retirement System Is Wrong   — is the work of American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Andrew Biggs — and it’s a comprehensive assessment of any number of the misstatements, mischaracterizations, flawed assumptions and downright obfuscations that plague any realistic assessment of the nation’s retirement system. Indeed, he argues that “factoids, however compelling, are no substitute for facts.”   The Goal Biggs outlines the goal of a retirement system as one that “allows individuals to maintain their preretirement standard of living in retirement.” In that regard, he (and academics generally) would say that lower-income individuals' preretirement are well-served by Social Security’s benefit structure. Indeed, the argu...

  “Sure, it will probably be more work, and generate fewer clicks,” commented one industry source, “but it’s the right thing to do.” Yes, after years of relying on uninformed “guesses” from individuals ignorant of their financial needs and situation, the retirement industry, major media outlets, and a large number of academics have made a commitment to focus on actual data, rather than hypothetical extrapolations from incomplete datasets. Another explained, “we always thought that exaggerating the depth of the retirement crisis would encourage people to save more — but that turns out not to be the case.” Those projections affixed labels like “ magic ” to those extrapolated numbers based on surveys of uninformed workers, which not only ignored real differences in incomes, location and age, but were typically also averaged to further obscure accurate results. Likely fueled by previous reports of needed retirement savings,  surveys of individuals routinely exaggerated  the r...

   “ Larry Fink Knows Less About Retirement Than You’d Think an Investment Billionaire Would .” That’s the provocative title of a recent Substack column by Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. [i]  Not that Biggs offered a truly harsh criticism. Rather, he equated the comments of Larry Finks with that of “someone who reads the newspaper, the same as you or me.”  Of course, and as yours truly has commented on any number of occasions — and what Biggs calls out — is that “much of what you read about retirement in the newspaper or online or even in  so-called studies  just isn’t correct.” To put it mildly. In this recent column, Biggs offers a detailed account of what the actual data shows versus what Mr. Finks (and SO many others [ii] ) have held out as reality. Those with no retirement accounts don’t have retirement savings. Fink is quoted as saying that 57 million Americans “don’t have any savings or retirement plan.” Howe...

   A recent headline asks: “ Why Aren’t We Talking About America’s Retirement Crisis?”   Really? It seems to me that that’s ALL we’re talking about! Even more ironically, that headline appeared in an op-ed crafted by none other than Teresa Ghilarducci (and her new co-author, Christopher Cook) who, so far as I can discern, talks (and writes books) about little other than the so-called “crisis.” And this specific op-ed, as hers often do, got picked up in syndication (see  this link for details ).   But then, this week I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Andrew Biggs, which matter-of-factly stated, “After a period of trying-in-good-faith, I've concluded I have to be more, um, forthright in calling out, shall we say, misinformation regarding Americans' retirement income security.” Said another way, it appears that Mr. Biggs has come to the conclusion –  as I have  – that polite commentary and even-handed discussions are insufficient to put to bed w...

“What if the entire retirement-crisis narrative playing out in opinion polls, the government, and the media was a massive case of confirmation bias?” That’s the provocative position of an intriguing new white paper titled “ America’s ‘Retirement Crisis’: The Emperor Has No Clothes ” by  Andrew Biggs . [i]   Readers of my work will note that with frightening regularity there are any number of assertions, “studies” and surveys all painting a dismal picture of the state of the nation’s retirement—each and every one embraced and promoted with attention-grabbing headlines without so much as a question as to the veracity of the underlying data, the logic of the conclusions drawn, or the motivations of the proponents that have drawn them. Consequently, I was delighted to come across this paper that provides a detailed, thoughtful, and data-driven analysis that focuses on a number of points that have been made (and uncritically trumpeted by the media) by none other than Teresa Ghilard...