The U.S. system started out after World War II a bit like the Dutch system -- it was corporations providing pensions for people.And that kind of fell apart during the 1970s, although there are some corporations with pensions still out there and there are definitely a lot of state and local governments that give them.So what we switched to - is the Dutch put this emphasis on keeping it collective -- having everybody in an industry in a pension together or some large corporations have their own pensions.In the U.S. when that system ran into trouble we moved into this totally atomized 401 K system where most people in the private sector are basically responsible on their own for saving for retirement.So what can we take away from that system that we could possibly institute here?One thing that's already happening is sort of automatically setting people up so that they save in an 401K.I think more and more employers, my employer Harvard University just announced this, that unless you tell them not to, they're going to automatically start taking, I think it's 3 percent of your salary initially, and putting it aside.And then increasing it every year by one more percentage point until you've reached statutory limit. And so that's already happening out there.The other thing is on the payout end. Where here you retire at 65 and yea, you'll get Social Security but you're also likely to just to, if you did a good job and saved, have this big lump sum of money and have to figure out what to do with it.
