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Are you mad at the pensioners, who worked for decades on the agreement they’d get a pension, or are you mad at the oligarchs and businesses who lobbied to make pensions a thing of the past so that you’re not protected as well?

You should be mad at the Capitalists not the workers.

>>ok_dad+(OP)
It's worth noting that a lot of shares in publicly traded companies are held by retirement and pension funds.

Money paid to a shareholder is money not paid to the person doing the labor and vice-versa.

That's not to say that pension funds are the sole reason that wages haven't kept up with costs over the last 50-ish years, but it doesn't help, particularly when management/the oligarchs are compensated mainly using the same shares that those retirement and pension funds use to generate revenues for the people they cover.

>>ok_dad+(OP)
Patrick Boyle did a segment recently on pensions that I cannot locate. He pointed out that the private industry in the US that granted generous pensions in the mid-20th century all went bankrupt, and that is why there are not private-sector US pensions anymore. It coincided with globalization, but is more a symptom of the countercyclical nature of pension expenses. They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.

This is one of many ways that folks aged 70+ had it much better than folks in the workforce now, and represents generational inequality that you should not minimize or attribute to "capitalists."

You may, if you like, attribute it to "generosity" by individuals indifferent to "math."

>>ok_dad+(OP)
I think they're mad at a society that promised generous pensions in exchange for lower wages, and then (for various reasons) didn't deliver them.

>>unytti+r2
> They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.

Shouldn't a reasonable business have been investing forward to avoid this problem? IE, you don't use todays dollars, you use yesterdays dollars.

Its seems the flaw is that they lacked sufficient savvy to invest the pensions in a way where it would be able to build upon itself.

>>no_wiz+u5
It's more-- you build a tidy SaaS business. It's stable for a while. You want to be generous and skilled workers are in demand, so you offer a pension. This is good for a while, maybe a long while, and you "invest forward" as appropriate.

Then, a competitor disrupts your segment. The competitor is new, and for whatever reason does not have the same legacy pension expense. In order to compete, you must invest. But your pension expense in particular does not allow this.

What does the legacy enterprise do in this situation? In many cases in the 20th century, per Patrick, the business lost relevancy and slowly went bankrupt.