Overview

Banking on Death offers a panoramic view of the history and future of pension provision. A work of unique scope, it traces the origins and development of the pension idea, from the days of the French Revolution to the troubles of the modern welfare state. As we live longer, employers are closing their pension schemes and many claim that public treasuries will not be able to cope with the retirement of the babyboomers. Banking on Death analyzes the challenge facing public schemes and the malfunctioning of private retirement provision, concluding with a bold proposal for how to pay for decent pensions for all. Robin Blackburn argues that pension funds have been depleted by wasteful promotion and used as gambling chips by ruthless and overpaid top executives. This is the world of 'gray capitalism,' where employees' savings are sequestrated from them and pressed into the service of corporate aggrandizement. Even the best companies find it hard to run a business and a pension fund at the same time-especially when the latter is larger than the former. The fund managers' notorious short-termism and herd instinct, and their failure to curb the greed and irresponsibility of the corporate elite, lead to obscene inequalities and a blighted social landscape. The pension privatization lobby, Blackburn shows, has lost major battles in France and Germany, the United States and Italy, because of the popular fears it evokes. And the case for privatization looks intellectually threadbare after withering critiques from such notable theorists as Joseph Stiglitz and Pierre Bourdieu. Banking on Death shows that pensions are political dynamite, and have undone governments from France and Italy to Argentina. Popular outcries led Reagan, Clinton, and Blair to change tack: will this happen to George W. Bush too? Blackburn argues that the aging society will generate increased costs but, so long as the new life course is properly financed, all age groups will gain. He proposes a public regime of asset-based welfare, drawing on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Rudolf Meidner, that could ensure secondary pensions for all and foster a more responsible, egalitarian and humane pattern of economic development.

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9781859847954

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In stormy waters and under darkening skies, Banking on Death stands like a lighthouse, providing a beam of orientation on a solid rock of research. --Goran Therborn

An academic who works both sides of the Atlantic takes a serious look at the dire condition of Anglo-Saxon pensions. Blackburn (History/The New School; Sociology/Univ. of Essex) surveys the support of oldsters through history with some attention to the contributions of Gladstone, Bismarck, and the French Revolution. What's new, of course, is the cheery report that most of us are living longer, an actuarial certainty that heralds scary demographics for national and private pension schemes. Just as menacing is the accountability deficit that places control of capital in the hands of managers rather than owners. Blackburn calls it grey capitalism : pension assets trapped in a web of interlocking relationships among fund managers, trustees, advisors, investment bankers, and union and corporate sponsors, who all reap real profits. It should be no surprise that the hope of privatization is constantly pleasing to rogue entities (think Enron and Arthur Andersen) as well as firms in a louche financial industry always blowing bubbles. Pensioners, the nominal beneficiaries, are commodities like Gogol's dead souls. Whether defined benefit (like many union-sponsored plans) or defined contribution (like the ubiquitous 401[k]), the plans naturally fall prey to excessive self-dealing and meager returns. After much investigation, Blackburn suggests pre-funded asset based welfare : in summary, a dollop of capitalism wrapped in socialized pensions to be paid from college, employer, and locally based funds to which employees, employers, and the government would contribute, all supervised by a board or two. It's neither a simple nor an easy sale. The author supports his study with global illustrations, giving particular attention to Wall Street and the City of London. The British-American comparison is undeniably useful, but it tends to bloat the text with material from one side of the pond that may hold little interest to those on the opposite shore. Thoughtful and massive: too much for any but the most serious public-policy wonk. (Kirkus Reviews)

If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be in the British Library devouring everything he could find on pension funds: new fuel of global capitalism. Robin Blackburn has read everything and in this urgent and brilliant book, proposed a new strategy that unites the workers of the world around the democratic control of their own savings

Blackburn is particularly good at disentangling the different dynamics that make the pensions problem so intractable for mature, ageing economies.--Sir Howard Davis

Author Information

Robin Blackburn teaches at the University of Essex and is an editor at New Left Review. He is the author of many books, including The American Crucible, The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock and Banking on Death.

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