Mike Piper discusses Social Security benefit calculations in the following article.
Piper's Prose

Following are excerpts from a current NPR report:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced Thursday that it "will soon implement agency-wide organizational restructuring that will include significant workforce reductions."
The planned cuts, which are in line with an executive order from President Trump to broadly slash the federal workforce, are raising concerns about staffing at the agency that disburses retirement savings, as well as disability and survivor benefits, to tens of millions of Americans.
Advocates say long wait times for services have plagued the agency for years, and its staffing of some 60,000 employees is already at about a 50-year low. Ahead of the looming broader cuts, at least five of eight regional commissioners have recently resigned, according to a senior SSA official who was not authorized to speak to the press.
Morale at the agency is extremely low, the source said, as staff are crying in meetings and managers are trying to reassure their employees during a time of great uncertainty.
"The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this," the source wrote to NPR. "Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don't arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late."
Trump has said that Social Security "won't be touched" as he continues to make sweeping cuts to the federal government.
Until now, the SSA has been largely spared from efforts, mainly overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, to slash the size of the federal government. That includes a federal hiring freeze and more recent dismissals of large numbers of mostly newer workers. But in the last week or so, the agency has faced much of the same chaos and disruption that has been experienced by other federal departments. Changes at the agency are also leading to worries among employees and cybersecurity experts about the protection of sensitive records.
The agency's prior acting commissioner, Michelle King, was recently replaced after clashing with associates of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency who sought access to sensitive personal data held by the agency. King has been replaced by Leland Dudek, who was being investigated internally before being promoted, according to the SSA official.
The protection of sensitive data is one of the top concerns for SSA employees: "SSA is incredibly risk averse. And for good reason," the SSA official said. "The data we house is intimate and comprehensive. Every U.S. man, woman and child (living and dead), has a Social Security Number and records of their work, income, tax, disability and civil relationships. And now DOGE has access to all of it."
The SSA's servers are vast, complex and archaic, processing billions of data points a day, often using programming languages that few people are familiar with, the source continued. Those systems are already under constant attack by digital adversaries from around the world, creating a constant challenge for those tasked with protecting the systems.
There are no indications that the engineers working with DOGE have gone through required training to protect federal records, the source said, nor specific agency-level training to work in each department's unique systems. Lawmakers have already begun to raise the alarm about cybersecurity concerns of DOGE's access to federal systems, while legal cases about DOGE's access are ongoing.
Max Richtman, president & CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR that the process to get disability benefits, in particular, is "so cumbersome and difficult to navigate" and insufficiently staffed that in the last couple of years, "about 10,000 claimants who appealed for their benefits die waiting for their claim to be resolved."

I would not overreact to these numbers. The still very high percentage (a record high at last check) of retail investor wealth held in stocks is much more telling. I’m willing to give some credence to the theory among some that the passive index based equity flows, largely into retirement accounts, is fueling the passive bid and keeping the most expensive market segments aloft. I can’t prove that, but I am exercising more than an ounce of caution.
Unrelated perhaps - But just as retail investor interest in gold was ramping up the metal has lost a bit of steam - off more than $100 from its record high of a week ago near $2900. $3,000. That’s chump change as gold goes at this point. I suspect gold will run a lot higher. But not willing to take a chance on it. Have a very small hold in GGN which has (somewhat surprisingly) lost a bit over the short time since buying. If my eyes are not deceiving me, oil has fallen below $70 today which, along with gold, helps explain the hit to GGN.
The 10 year chart at M* doesn’t reflect the disastrous runs gold and gold & p/c mining funds endured in the past. Pulling up 15-20 year charts for gold & mining funds would be very enlightening. Look before you jump.

Stable-Value (SV) Rates, 3/1/25
TIAA Traditional Annuity (Accumulation) Rates
No changes; early release; new declaration yr starts
Restricted RC 5.50%, RA 5.25%
Flexible RCP 4.75%, SRA 4.50%, IRA-101110+ 4.75%
TSP G Fund 4.250% (previous 4.625%). (Edited 3/3/25)
Options outside of workplace retirement plans include m-mkt funds, bank m-mkt accounts (FDIC insured), T-Bills, short-term brokered CDs.
#StableValue #401k #403b #TIAA #TSP
https://ybbpersonalfinance.proboards.com/post/1892/thread

I suspect all of us on the board, followers of David and MFO, me since 2011 and before that with Fund Alarm, look to build our own FOFs.
David publishes his periodically.
In recent years, the proliferation of model portfolios, do essentially provide FOFs.
Ditto most FAs or RIAs, either those they download from their platforms, likely sponsored, or those they create on their own ... the more independent and thoughtful ones, perhaps.
Target Retirement Funds are essentially FOFs too.
At quick search on MFOP shows there are presently 1719 FOFs offered in the US: 1276 are Mixed-Asset, nearly all "actively managed," including 386 Insurance Funds.
Focusing just on actively managed OEFs and ETFs, Federated Hermes Global Allocation (FSTBX) is the oldest at 65 years. And, not surprisingly, Vanguard Target Retirement funds are the largest, followed by American Funds Target Date Retirement funds.

Thanks JD_co. I'd use HELO but I probably will set up Fidelity automatic recurring withdrawals in retirement (my retirement paycheck) so I would need the mutual fund version for that.

What do you all think of JHQAX as a primary holding in a taxable account, in retirement?

Low SD, decent returns and minimal distributions of any kind. So why not, especially for retirees.
I use HELO. They perform similarly.

What do you all think of JHQAX as a primary holding in a taxable account, in retirement?

hank, I have been doing something similar since 2000.
I select the best risk/reward up to 5 funds within top 1-2 categories for my criteria and keep changing. Then, every fund must be in the top 20-30%. Risk control is a lot more important to me.
The more money I have and the best I got, I started using only 2-3 funds.
Stocks: 1995-2000 + after 2010 = mostly LC tilting growth. 2000-2010=Value, SC, International.
Bonds: Preparing for retirement, PIMIX was my first bond fund. I started investing in it in 2010 and it grew to over 50% until I sold it in 01/2018.
Basically, I modeled it after basketball, a game that I played over 4 decades. As a coach, you want to go to the playoffs every year. Winning isn't a guarantee. Why would someone hold value when growth is so much better for many years?
You play your best 5 players every time. Superstars play more, and you give them more rope. A superstar isn't guaranteed. You want to play your best 5 at any moment. You can't have a bad player on the court.
All my funds must perform well within their category. Reliability is worth a lot. I don't play with emotion. A bad fund must be replaced. It gets very easy over the years.
I never diversified since the first day I started investing. Diversification = I must have LC,SC,value,growth,international and others. If US LC does well, it's the easiest to make money. If it doesn't, you diversify more.
What's the catch? when and how to replace funds. That takes discipline and a lot of experience. You can't learn swimming by reading a book. My goals have changed too and that changed my trading too.
Exceptions exist: every several years you find funds/managers that beat the odds. Think PRWCX,PIMIX for many years; I held SGIIX,FAIRX,OAKBX for 8+ years during 2000-10. Some managers do great in specific markets.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1047712/000119312525030708/d835373d497.htm
497 1 d835373d497.htm UNDISCOVERED MANAGERS FUNDS
UNDISCOVERED MANAGERS FUNDS
Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund
(the “Fund”)
(All Share Classes)
Supplement dated February 20, 2025
to the Current Prospectuses, Summary Prospectuses and Statements of Additional
Information, as supplemented
Effective as of the close of business on April 1, 2025 (the “Closing Date”), the Fund is offered on a limited basis and investors are not eligible to purchase shares of the Fund, except as described below. In addition, both before and after the Closing Date, the Fund may from time to time, in its sole discretion based on the Fund’s net asset levels and other factors, limit new purchases into the Fund or otherwise modify the closure policy at any time on a case-by-case basis.
The following groups will be permitted to continue to purchase Fund shares. Except as otherwise described below, shareholders of record are permitted to continue to purchase shares; if the shareholder of record is an omnibus account, beneficial owners in that account as of the applicable closing date are permitted to continue to purchase:
•Shareholders of record of the Fund as of the Closing Date are able to continue to purchase additional shares in their existing Fund accounts and may continue to reinvest dividends or capital gains distributions from shares owned in the Fund;
•Shareholders of record of the Fund as of the Closing Date are able to add to their existing Fund accounts through exchanges from other J.P. Morgan Funds;
•Group Retirement Plans (as defined in the glossary) (and their successor, related and affiliated plans), which have the Fund available to participants on or before the Closing Date may continue to open accounts for new participants and can purchase additional shares in existing participant accounts. A new Group Retirement Plan may establish a new account with the Fund only if the Group Retirement Plan has been accepted for investment by the Fund and its distributor by May 1, 2025 and the plan’s account with the Fund must be either funded by the plan or available to participant directed investments by October 31, 2025. The funding date for plans approved by May 1st may be extended with approval by the Fund and its distributor;
•Fully discretionary fee-based advisory programs, where investment discretion (fund and investment allocations) solely reside with the Financial Intermediary’s home office and where the Financial Intermediary’s home office has full authority to make investment changes without approval from the shareholder, may continue to utilize the Fund for new and existing program accounts. This includes affiliated platforms that have approval from the Fund and its distributor. These programs must be accepted for continued investment by the Fund and its distributor by the Closing Date. Additionally, after the Closing Date, new fully discretionary fee-based advisory programs may utilize the Fund for program accounts only with the approval by the Fund and its distributor;
•Registered Investment Advisory firms who have included the Fund in their discretionary models by the closing date and utilize an approved clearing platform may continue to make Fund shares available to new and existing accounts. These particular firms must be accepted for continued investment by the Fund and its distributor on or before the Closing Date;
•Other fee-based advisory programs (including Rep as Advisor and Portfolio Manager programs) may continue to utilize the Fund for existing program accounts, but will not be able to open new program accounts after the Closing Date;
•Model portfolios directed by J.P. Morgan Investment Management Inc. (“JPMIM”), and J.P. Morgan Funds that are permitted to invest in other J.P. Morgan Funds, may purchase shares of the Fund; and
•Named investment professionals listed in the Fund’s prospectus may utilize the Fund for both new accounts and existing Fund accounts.
INVESTORS SHOULD RETAIN THIS SUPPLEMENT WITH THE
PROSPECTUSES, SUMMARY PROSPECTUSES AND
STATEMENTS OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

Its funny what we consider "employment" and what we consider important "statistics".
I stopped my "full time career employment" at age 51. I spent the next 7 years caring for my elderly mom. I went from a well paying 8 hour job to a non-paying 24 hour job. Since this new job paid nothing and provided no resources it required many long nights of research to identify resources and funds for my mom's care. Over these eight years, I managed both my mom's diminishing health and her dwindling net worth.
Most of my other seven siblings were too busy with their employed lives to help much when it came to this non-paying family care position. As alone as I was, I am not the only one who has taken on this type of non-paying work.
From young Moms and Dads who stay at home to care for their children to middle aged adults taking care of their elderly parents, many working age Americans choose to work outside of the workforce, often for their entire working life.
My mom raised 8 Kids; never took a day off in her life, but also never had an "employment record". When my dad passed, at age 54, she received nothing more than a survivor's benefit. At age 88, adjusted for inflation, her survivor benefit was a meager $800/month.
For me, working until 65 would have made a huge difference in my retirement savings, but I am not sure I could have lived with that decision. I chose to care for my mom because she chose to care for the eight of us.
These articles focus on workplace employment statistics, yet ignore the very important non-paying and non-workplace work many of us chose to do for our loved ones and how these hard choices impact the workplace.

@rforno and any other TIAA customers: I have been tempted to consolidate my TIAA retirement (403b mostly) with our Schwab joint brokerage account and two Roths in anticipation of the day when I could no longer manage the accounts. My wife would not be in a position to do what I do, nor is there an heir who fits the bill. I trust my TIAA Wealth Advisor, but I use him very little and I have never paid a wrap fee to any entity. However, having either Schwab or TIAA manage the whole ball of wax seems a sensible thing to do. I’m not enthusiastic about admitting that I could start declining mentally any day now. BTW, I turned 83 yesterday. Anyone who has experience with TIAA in this regard is welcome to comment. I’d also like to know what others think about using a single brokerage to handle all the family assets. FWIIW, the local Schwab rep, who is my titular contact, does not impress me much.

FWIW, we get 1099-R for retirement accounts only when we withdraw from them.
Taxable a/c do have consolidated 1099.

”We've heard over and over, do not let the political environment sway your investing decisions.”
@Crash - That’s probably great advice for 80-90% of investors - mostly younger and employed - who research shows are usually better off letting it ride. I’d still give that advice to a 25 year old just starting out with maybe 40 years to retirement.
But take a look at the “Buy Sell” thread. ”Set-it- and-forget-it” ? Huh? ISTM most who frequent financial forums like this one do alter their investments quite a bit year-to-year. So, of course, political climate affects their decision making and is worth discussing.

Right. Dare I assert that most of us here are NOT spring chickens anymore? I'm having repeat surgery coming up in March.... As Leonard Cohen said: "I ache in the places where I used to play." (Tower Of Song.)
**********
Skip right to 0:20. (LOUD start!)
Crescent Street mural, Montreal:

”We've heard over and over, do not let the political environment sway your investing decisions.”
@Crash - That’s probably great advice for 80-90% of investors - mostly younger and employed - who research shows are usually better off letting it ride. I’d still give that advice to a 25 year old just starting out with maybe 40 years to retirement.
But take a look at the “Buy Sell” thread. ”Set-it- and-forget-it” ? Huh? Not to pick on the thread … but ISTM most who frequent financial forums like this one do alter their investments quite a bit year-to-year. So, of course, political climate affects their decision making along with a myriad of other considerations / assessments and may be worth discussion.

Full service and discount Brokerage Firms have Service Models for different clients. They are in the business of creating wealth and if you make money, they make money etc. The firm has the right to do what they feel is best for business and we have the right to transact/interract how we want. Their has to be a middle of the road, right?
You have the choice to stay or leave. Find a Firm that fits what you like to do...trade infrequently? Self-directed? Manage your own assets? Have a few different Brokers?
For most Firms, there is more to their business than just having an investment account. Retirement Planning, Income Solutions, Cash Management, Long Term Care, Charitable Giving, Estate Planning...so, you see, the change that is happening is the firms will allow you to stay but you're going to be in a specific 'model' that doesn't need any of these services. For the most part, the Firms are just changing to adapt to the competition.

My wife is unable to hold ETFs or CEFs in her employer's retirement account, but this fund is an option.
Any insights or thoughts on this one?
Seems to track the performance of the major gold ETFs and CEFs pretty well.

Seniors often have nothing but there nest egg to crack over inflation (higher prices).
IMHO this is one of the strongest reasons to defer taking SS as long as possible. Rather than taking SS at full retirement age (FRA) or earlier and investing the extra assets in, well, fixed income, one might spend down those assets when they are worth more and implicitly "invest" in a larger future SS income stream. That stream is designed to keep up with inflation, more or less, as opposed to being fixed.
Of course this assumes that one has those assets to spend down (or is working more years) to be able to defer SS. Many people cannot do that.

relatedly:
Springtime for Scammers
Financial predation now has friends in high places
Paul Krugman
Feb 11
Just over two years ago Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3.7 billion — $1.7 billion in penalties and $2 billion in damages — to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As the New York Times report put it, the payments were
to settle claims that it engaged in an array of banking violations over the last decade that harmed millions of consumers
The Times went on to explain:
The consumer protection bureau said Wells Fargo did not record customer payments on home and auto loans properly, wrongfully repossessed some borrowers’ cars and homes and charged overdraft fees even when customers had enough money to cover purchases they made with their bank cards.
This settlement followed earlier scandals at Wells Fargo, notably the “cross-selling scandal” in which, among other things, bank employees opened as many as 2 million accounts in customers’ names without their authorization. Altogether the bank has paid $6.2 billion in penalties since 2016.
Overall, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who conceived of CFPB, the bureau “has returned over $21 billion to families cheated by Wall Street.”
But now the agency that won those settlements has been effectively abolished. On Monday Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget and now CFPB’s acting head, sent the email above to all of the agency’s staff telling them to stay away from the office and do no work.
What’s this about? Let’s start by asking why CFPB was created.
The truth is that defending oneself against financial fraud is hard work. Do you carefully go through your bank statement every month, looking for possible unjustified fees? I know a few people who do, but most of us have too much else going on in our lives. When you take out a car loan, or invest for your retirement, do you go over the fine print with a magnifying glass, making sure you understand everything? Probably not. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live. Cognitive overload is a real thing, and it’s worse the further down the income scale you go — the cognitive burden of poverty has been extensively documented.
So what we do, most of the time, is trust financial institutions to be relatively honest, if only to protect their reputations. And we expect government regulators to step in when financial players abuse that trust.
What we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was that much of this trust had been misplaced. Corporate cultures in the financial industry came to prioritize short-run profits over long-term reputation. Deregulation and lax regulation permitted widespread abuses. Most notably, the boom in subprime lending led to many families being sold financial products they didn’t understand, with lower-income borrowers receiving the worst treatment. As the late Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to warn his colleagues about the dangers, wrote:
Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.
But why create a new agency to limit these abuses? Don’t we already have bank regulators? Yes, but these regulators are primarily focused on securing the stability of the financial system. Protecting consumers from fraud is at best an afterthought.
Warren’s insight was that protecting consumers required creating a separate agency with its own institutional imperatives. And she was right: By any reasonable standard, CFPB has been an outstanding success story.
Why, then, rush to shutter the agency? By the way, this action, like much of what the Trump administration is doing, is almost surely illegal. It probably also won’t surprise you to learn that DOGE appears to have illegally been given access to much of the agency’s data.
Well, it’s illuminating to read the section on abolishing CFPB in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. According to the Mandate,
the agency has been assailed by critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits
Notice the careful wording: The document doesn’t assert that CFPB actually is a “shakedown mechanism” (which might have led to a lawsuit) but merely that “critics” have made that accusation. And if you follow the footnotes, the assault by critics appears to consist solely of three opinion pieces, one in the New York Post, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in Investors’ Business Daily.
Incidentally, that Investors’ Business Daily article accuses CFPB of funneling money to “radical Acorn-style pressure groups.” Does anyone not deeply mired in the fever swamps of right-wing conspiracy theory even remember what Acorn — a political association that was disbanded in 2010 — was?
Overall, Project 2025’s attack on the CFPB bears a family resemblance to Elon Musk’s claim that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” It’s a bit milder, but equally absurd, and is clearly not the real reason for killing the agency.
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.
And let’s not forget that crypto, which has gained a lot of influence with this administration, has yet to find a real-world use case other than money laundering.
So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again.

https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/01/16/never-too-much-the-crisis-of-democratic-capitalism-wolf/
Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
January 16, 2025 issue
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin Wolf
Penguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00
Illustration by Matt Dorfman
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure.
Most people have accurately realized “that these failings were the result not just of stupidity but of the intellectual and moral corruption of decision-makers and opinion formers at all levels—in the financial sector, regulatory bodies, academia, media, and politics.” And thus his conclusion: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality. That also is its death.” Forty years of the corruption of our plutocratic elites has now led to what he views as an alarming populist reaction. Voters, especially young ones in the core democratic capitalist countries, have lost faith in the power of markets and liberalism. Serious international rivals have also emerged, in the forms of “demagogic authoritarian capitalism” in places like Turkey and Russia, and “bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism” in China, and Wolf views these systems, unlike earlier systemic rivals like communism, as serious threats. Liberal democratic capitalism is in danger both from within and without.
It’s a grim picture, and one that nearly any reader of any political persuasion can agree with. But for Wolf, these epochal global crises do not require radical change. The motto of the book (as he puts it) is “Never too much,” and he maintains that “reform is not revolution, but its opposite.” He is consistently contemptuous of any sort of structural change, quick to invoke despotism as the inevitable outcome of utopian thinking and to cite Edmund Burke on the inhumanity and impossibility of rebuilding society around first principles.
Instead, he prefers “piecemeal social engineering,” an idea that he adopts from the unconventional libertarian philosopher Karl Popper, and that he takes to mean “change targeted at remedying specific ills.” His targeted solutions for the specific ills that constitute the global crisis of democratic capitalism run from the anodyne to the surreal. Examples of the former include the idea that “public sector cash-flow accounts should be complemented with worked-out public sector balance sheets and accrual accounts,” or the need for corporations to have “excellent accounting standards” and diligent, independent auditors. Both are very reasonable proposals, and perhaps, at the margin, they really would erode the grip of plutocracy.
Others are standard repressive-technocrat fare. He rejects free higher education because too many people would go to college, imposing too high a fiscal burden on governments, and he doubts whether taxpayers should have to guarantee tertiary education as a universal right. He thinks there should be “controls on immigration that recognize the potential economic gains while also being politically acceptable and effective.” He thinks that defined-benefit retirement plans should be replaced by large-scale defined-contribution plans run by trustees who “would be allowed to adjust pensions in light of investment performance.” It is difficult to imagine many people democratically choosing a system in which unelected trustees could cut their pensions when the stock market does poorly, and there are good reasons to think that education is advantageous to both capitalism and democracy.