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As we live longer, employers are closing their pension schemes and many claim that public treasuries will not be able to cope with the retirement of the babyboomers. Banking on Death analyses the challenge facing public schemes and the malfunctioning of private retirement provision, concluding with a bold proposal for how to pay for decent pensions for all.
Robin Blackburn argues that pension funds have been depleted by wasteful promotion and used as gambling chips by ruthless and overpaid top executives. This is the world of “grey capitalism,” where employees' savings are sequestrated from them and pressed into the service of corporate aggrandisement. Even the best companies find it hard to run a business and a pension fund at the same time - especially when the latter is larger than the former. The fund managers' notorious short-termism and herd instinct, and their failure to curb the greed and irresponsibility of the corporate elite, lead to obscene inequalities and a blighted social landscape.
The pension privatisation lobby, Blackburn shows, has lost major battles in France and Germany, the United States and Italy, because of the popular fears it evokes. And the case for privatisation looks intellectually threadbare after withering critiques from such notable theorists as Joseph Stiglitz and Pierre Bourdieu. Banking on Death shows that pensions are political dynamite, and have undone governments from France and Italy to Argentina. Popular outcries led Reagan, Clinton, and Blair to change tack: will this happen to George W. Bush too? Blackburn argues that the ageing society will generate increased costs but, so long as the new life course is properly financed, all age groups will gain. He proposes a public regime of asset-based welfare, drawing on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Rudolf Meidner, that could ensure secondary pensions for all and foster a more responsible, egalitarian and humane pattern of economic development.
“Banking on Death ... is more timely and important reading than we could have guessed a year ago.... He's certainly right about the great potential for reshaping taxes, property rights, corporate governance and federal regulation of finance.” – Kevin Phillips, Los Angeles Times
“This is an important and disturbing book. Blackburn is a master of the complexities of pension provision. He unsettles belief in a commerical fix to the challenge of social insurance.” — Richard Sennett
“This book provides plenty of food for thought — and could be read with profit by anyone seriously concerned with pensions issues.... Those of us who believe that free market economics has achieved more for the prosperity and individual freedom of citizens than the grand designs of meddling politicians ... do ourselves no service by defending bad practices and taking a Panglossian view of the problems Blackburn raises. The ‘thinking City’ ... know that Adam Smith's ‘invisible hand’ is only too often to be found in the till, and accept and can add to, Blackburn's lovingly collected examples of capitalist malpractice.” — John Chown, Times Literary Supplement
“If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be in the British Library devouring everything he could find on pension funds: the new fuel of global capitalism. Robin Blackburn has read everything, and in this urgent and brilliant book, proposes a new strategy that unites workers of the world around the democratic control of their savings.” — Mike Davis
Reviews
The Economist
Robin Blackburn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review. He is the author of The Making of New World Slavery and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, and edited the collection After the Fall: The Collapse of Communism and the Future of Socialism.
Publication
Cloth: June 2002
Paper: Nov. 2003
550 pages
Cloth
1 85984 795 1
£20 / US$30
Paper
1 85984 409 X
£15 / US$19
