Politics & Power Quote by William Greider

Greider’s line lands like a verdict on an entire era of economic faith: that retirement security could be safely outsourced from institutions to individuals with a 401(k), a target-date fund, and a little grit. Calling it the “do-it-yourself version” is the rhetorical knife twist. It frames privatized pensions not as freedom but as an IKEA kit for old age: technically possible, routinely botched, and unforgiving if you misplace one screw.

The intent is less to shame personal financial habits than to indict the architecture. “Flop” is blunt, almost tabloidy, because the evidence is blunt: uneven access to employer plans, wage stagnation that leaves nothing to save, high-fee products that quietly siphon returns, and the simple math of longevity and healthcare costs. Greider’s subtext is that the marketized retirement model wasn’t a neutral modernization; it was a policy choice that shifted risk downward while maintaining the language of empowerment. The cultural trick was selling insecurity as self-reliance.

Context matters: Greider wrote in the long shadow of the decline of defined-benefit pensions and the normalization of defined-contribution plans, a shift accelerated by corporate cost-cutting and deregulation, then punctured by market crashes that arrived right when many people needed stability most. “Painfully learned” signals lived experience, not theory: the couple who watched a portfolio halve in 2008, the worker who cashed out early to cover a layoff, the gig worker who never had a plan to begin with.

The line works because it refuses the polite fiction that retirement outcomes are mainly a character test. It’s an argument that what failed wasn’t Americans’ discipline, but the promise that everyone could DIY their way past structural risk.