| Last year, Lydia DePillis gathered a group of charts from the Economic Policy Institute on the rise of the 401(k) and the fall of the pension. In 1980, 38% of workers had pension plans. In 2008, just 20% did. Retirement saving is now predominantly individual, and reflects wider inequality trends. Since 1990, the retirement savings of the top-fifth income earners have increased more than 3.5 times, "while they've declined or risen only slightly for most everyone else", DePillis writes. If you can't rely on a pension, and have to take matters into your own hands, then you have to pay a lot of attention to fees. Matthew O'Brien shows how a 1.25% difference in fees between an actively managed fund and an index fund can make a six-figure difference in retirement funds. Ron Lieber has an excellent overview of services for people who can't necessarily afford a financial advisor. The idea is that if enough companies try to disrupt the market by setting fees below 0.5% of assets, the price for financial advice may come down across the board. Already Vanguard is disrupting itself: it's replacing one product, with fees of 0.7%, with a replacement that charges just 0.3%. Not everybody takes advice from the New York Times, however, and the Center for American Progress recommends that retirement plan fees should be transparent, to the point of creating a labeling system like the FDA does for food. None of this will solve all the problems with individual retirement saving. There's a whole host of behaviors that mean investors invariably see well below market returns. More profoundly still, as Steve Rattner says, young people, as a generation, simply aren't saving enough on their own. The country as a whole needs to deal with the problem, he says, through "a radical restructuring of our retirement plans, including mandated savings". He proposes something like Australia's mandated savings program that automatically diverts 9% of workers' pay to the country's superannuation fund. In a lengthy thought experiment on the pros and cons of forced savings, Megan McArdle concludes that while there are really good arguments about forced savings on both sides, there is a larger problem: as people spend more time in school and live longer after the retirement age, it may simply not be possible to save enough during a person's expected working years. — Shane Ferro and Ben Walsh On to today's links: Charts
"High poverty rates for children in single mother families is a policy choice" - Matt Bruenig
The housing bust killed consumer spending - Atif Mian and Amir Sufi Bubbly
"Eat when the food is passed": why startups are taking millions they don't need - DealBook Small Victories
Citi earnings get better because fewer bad things happen - Reuters
Citi finds another, much smaller bit of fraud in its Mexican subsidiary - FT Good Luck With That
Yahoo, with "zero cachet and no discernible way forward", wants to make great TV - David Carr Headline of the Day
Stock-Market Jitters Put Investors at Ease - Josh Brown Oxpeckers
If politics makes us stupid, "then what's the point of Vox?" - Will Wilkinson Wonks
HFT: a symbol that America is investing in the wrong infrastructure - Paul Krugman Legal Arcana
The First Amendment lets companies keep quiet about blood diamonds - Matt Levine
Must Reads
Eli Saslow's Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on food stamps - WaPo
Jason Szap and Andrew Marshall's Pulitzer-prize winning report on Myanmar's Rohingya refugees - Reuters | 
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