> Defined benefit plans would be better for a lot of people although they have their own issues--including underfunding and, at least historically, a very strong bias towards long-term employment at a single company.

I came to the opposite conclusion: Defined benefit plans tend to be suboptimal. As you mention, underfunding is a problem. In the private sector what protections are there if the fund goes bankrupt because they overpromised? The safe thing is to make the defined benefits smaller so the account is always funded, but that's leaving money on the table. At least with my 401K (with decent low cost fund choices), I never have to worry about this. The money is mine and it cannot go bankrupt (unless the market dies, of course).

My state's employee pension is a defined benefit pension and everyone who is not a state employee agrees that we're heading for disaster. There's no bankruptcy escape clause - the Supreme Court has ruled that what has been promised must be paid out - even if it means raising everyone's taxes or shutting down all non-essential services. The fund doesn't have enough to pay what's been promised, so the state keeps borrowing money to pay existing pensioners. All the mayors in the city hate it, because pretty much any time they get extra money (via taxes, etc) almost all the money must be diverted to pay the existing pensions. Some smaller towns have increased in population quite a bit in the last decade, yet the cities cannot afford to increase the capacity of schools or increase police/fire presence because all the extra tax money from the new residents needs to be diverted to the pension funds.

Also, there is no cap to the benefit - and it is based on your income while you worked. So we have one retired person getting paid $80K/month from the pension because he was the president of a state university.

It's gotten to the point where many people automatically vote against any increase in funding in, say, schools etc because they know the money will simply be diverted to pay pensions. So legislators try playing games by adding riders to bills that say "None of the extra money raised by this bill can be used for pensions" - but of course that doesn't work because they simply shift the money from elsewhere.

For private pensions, there's the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation which is doubtless not perfect but makes things not entirely at the whim of the original company that created the pension.

Certainly public pensions in particular have been a big issue because of overpromising and underfunding. But, from the perspective of the worker, they do provide a level of (mostly) guaranteed retirement payments that lots of people end up not getting through a 401K. Sure, we can take the attitude as a society that's not our problem but it sort of is.

Personally I will have a somewhat nominal pension through a private employer in addition to savings but I understand why we may issues down the road where many people have nothing besides Social Security as opposed to more common defined benefit pensions as in times past.

Opening up the full contribution level for all employees and the self-employed, and simply mandating minimums of employer contribution (to keep them from withdrawing their contributions with this change and not simply adding it on to employee income, pocketing it instead, to avoid disrupting anyone's current retirement benefit) would do a lot to help. Though yeah, touching them in any way will be painted as "trying to take away your retirement", even if it's exactly the opposite.