While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis by Roger Lowenstein Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis
Book Review: reasonable fear
Summary: 5 Stars
Roger Lowenstein is one of the most accomplished financial writers around. Pensions are a boring subject. Who would ever have drinks, on purpose, with an actuary? Maybe if you were stuck on a plane next to one, and the liquor were free...
Lowenstein is able to make them seem both dramatic and important. Something has escaped our attention. Pension benefits have been piled on by labor unions and politicos without regard to their ultimate cost. Lowenstein makes it pretty clear through several recent and important examples that this is nothing short of a disaster. But why should it matter to us? Because we face a huge pension shortfall as Social Security becomes underfunded, and many states are verging on bankruptcy...
The negotiations Lowenstein depicts are as dramatic as those of The Smartest Guys in the Room - and equally rife with chicanery. Though he's deft with analysis, rendering the complex simple, he's got a knack for characterization and drama that belies what might be considered remote and dull subject matter. Once you read the book though, you won't feel the same way about pensions or even unions - though of course unions have greatly benefited the US at other moments in our history.
So read it and weep! Or get mad and do something about it.
Book Review: Pension plans are not the problem, but the underfunding is
Summary: 5 Stars
I am glad to see the inadequacy of public pension plan funding getting more attention. The book is extremely well written and easy to read. It provides valuable insight into the pension plan decision-making process, and shows the danger in trading benefit improvements for inadequate contributions. As Roger Lowenstein points out, public pension plans themselves are not the problem, the problem is that they are so often underfunded. Contributions to public defined benefit plans calculated under traditional actuarial methods are not necessarily sufficient to make a plan actuarially sound. There is a need to establish rules for funding contribution calculations to strengthen the actuarial soundness of public plans. The current rules allow payments to be made on the unfunded liabilities that are less than the interest on the liability. At least for mature plans that are poorly funded, the payments made on the unfunded pension liabilities should be accelerated. Consideration should be given to requiring minimum contributions to public pension plans. Book Review: Three Good Anecdotes Don't Tell a Complete Story
Summary: 3 Stars
Although Lowenstein is a talented writer and the topic of retirement in America is an important one, the narrow focus of this book makes it hard to recommend. Lowenstein skillfully recounts in detail the pension plan difficulties faced by General Motors, the New York City subway system and San Diego.
However, these three stories seem to exist in isolation. He doesn't spend enough time putting them in the context of other government and private pension and 401(k) plans. Lowenstein seems to have focused on making sure the three stories are easy to read and in this he has succeeded. But in doing so, he has not provided the hard data that a reader needs to really understand the issue. There is not a single chart of table in the book. There are virtually no benchmarks in the book - it's hard to judge the appropriateness of the pay and pensions described in the book without details of the payroll and benefit costs of other American workers.
Although the stories were good, after reading 230 pages I didn't feel that I had learned anything significant that I did not know before.
Book Review: Not a balanced book ,
Summary: 2 Stars
The main message from this book is that unions demanded outrageous pensions which caused all these crises. In the three cases the author presents, the common denominator was negligent management. GM purposely underfunded it's pension system to inflate the value of GM stock which made their stock options much more lucrative to their executives. In the case of New York and San Diego, it was again bad management by government officials who were allowed to willfully underfund their pensions. The fact is that almost every fire and police department in America has a defined pension system and most are working fine. The author also gives scant mention to the looming 401k crisis which is going to be much more of a disaster for middle-class America than the present pension system problem, as most corporations ditched their pensions for the 401k a long time ago. See Jeff Madrick's book review of this book in the New York Times for an in depth review of this book's faults. The author missed on this one by quite a bit.Book Review: Lowenstein Does Not Disappoint
Summary: 5 Stars
Is it just me, or is Roger Lowenstein one of the best writers going. If you liked 'When Genius Failed', 'Buffett, The Making Of An American Capitalist' and 'Origins Of The Crash', you won't be disappointed with 'While America Aged'. Top-notch writing, top-notch research. Brings to light events you may have read about in WSJ and NYT. Always thought unions were a mixed blessing. Now I am certain. Required reading for people who are not saving enough for retirement.