Do you have 1 million saved for retirement? May not be enough.

[Orrex]

260. Damn that sucks.

Parts of DU demonstrate a recurring bootstrap delusion in which the individual is empowered to command her own destiny regardless of prevailing political or economic conditions. I've seen in scolding pronouncements about how to make yourself indispensible and in the current crop of scolding "you should have been saving" admonitions.

The ability of the individual to safeguard her financial future is uttery dwarfed by the ability of larger economic forces to decimate that future, often with the stroke of a pen, and then those individuals get to look forward to a scolding because they hadn't proven their value.

When Lehman crashed, my department was downsized, and the workers who serviced the Lehman relationship specifically were let go. Not because we weren't valuable, but because the 20-person department was split into dedicated teams for each major client. When Lehman vanished, we became a 16-person department, and those 4 people could do nothing to have any impact on their terminations.

A year or so earlier the retirement accounts team was liquidated. 30 people eliminated because they apparently weren't "valuable" enough.


You said it exactly correctly: the invisible hand is always trying to pick your pocket, and too often it gets plenty of help.