Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions - Hardcover

Blackburn, Robin

3.73

11 ratings by Goodreads

9781859847954: Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859847951 ISBN 13: 9781859847954

Publisher: Verso, 2002

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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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About the Author:

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School in New York and the University of Essex in the UK. He is the author of many books, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock, Banking on Death, and The American Crucible.

From Publishers Weekly:

Blackburn's dry and detailed book covers an enormous range. It traces the development of pensions from early modern Europe to the present day and expands the discussion to cover a wide variety of government public assistance programs, annuity products sold by insurance companies and mutual assistance organizations. The author's examination of funding pensions leads to his extensive treatment of topics such as corporate governance, tax policy and executive compensation. Due to the range covered, most of this material is necessarily superficial. The main focus argues Blackburn's position that the workers and citizens should, collectively, take over capitalist institutions, with the goal of the suppression of the fundamental mechanisms of capitalist competition. This is to be accomplished, he says, not through violent revolution, but through tax incentives to worker-controlled not-for-profit pension funds, which would invest in sustainable, progressive and responsible economic projects. However, he does not discuss the discrepancy between the mild means and dramatic ends. Still a visionary, Blackburn later shifts his attention to study the disappearance of the financial services industry and the shift of union pension funds from corruption and inefficiency to a supernaturally wise custodianship. There are, in fact, two unintegrated books here: an extensive history of pensions, and a visionary tract. As a history, the book is uneven, with the best coverage concerning the political maneuvering in the 1970s in the United States and Britain that led to today's state. As a visionary tract, Blackburn's position is unpopular both with radicals and the mainstream, but could convince some.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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