Empty Nest Egg

By JEFF MADRICK

WHILE AMERICA AGED
How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis.
By Roger Lowenstein.
274 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

The future of Americans’ pensions has not become a serious campaign issue so far this election season. It’s hard to get retirement issues to the front of the line when the nation faces soaring health care costs, global warming, $100-a-barrel oil, a likely recession and collapsing housing prices. There is also the little matter of the worst credit crisis since the 1930s.

That is too bad, because, as Roger Lowenstein nicely illustrates in “While America Aged,” the country “is sitting on a retirement time bomb.” He is not talking about Social Security, which, he writes, is among the more manageable of future concerns. He is addressing the large-scale failure of America’s once-enviable private pension system.