I recently came across a fascinating discussion thread on Reddit posing a deceptively simple question:
“What statistic makes you think society is quietly breaking?”
Thousands of responses followed. People pointed to rising loneliness, declining mental health, distrust in institutions, falling birth rates, worsening educational outcomes, digital addiction, and the growing sense that modern society itself feels increasingly fragile.
At first glance, these seem like separate problems.
But what if they are all connected?
The obvious answer might be economic inequality.
But I would argue inequality itself is not the root cause.
The deeper issue may be something far more fundamental:
The concentration of power.
Over the past several decades, economic, political, and corporate power has increasingly concentrated into fewer hands.
Markets have consolidated.
Corporate profits have accelerated.
Executive compensation has exploded while wages for ordinary workers have struggled to keep pace.
Political systems increasingly depend on major donors and corporate influence.
Labor bargaining power has weakened.
The result is not simply inequality.
The result is an economic structure increasingly designed to benefit those who already possess power.
And inequality becomes the natural byproduct.
Consider housing.
As wealth concentrates, housing increasingly shifts from being shelter to becoming an investment vehicle. Large institutional investors purchase residential real estate, affordability declines, and younger generations find home ownership moving further out of reach.
People delay marriage.
Families postpone having children.
Communities become less stable as individuals move frequently in search of affordability.
Social isolation begins to grow.
Consider mental health.
The American Psychological Association has repeatedly documented the growing connection between financial stress and anxiety, depression, and chronic psychological strain.
Economic insecurity creates persistent uncertainty.
And uncertainty is exhausting.
Consider trust in institutions.
When workers watch corporate profits reach record highs while wages stagnate, when healthcare becomes increasingly expensive while executives prosper, when economic mobility feels harder than it did for previous generations, people begin reaching an uncomfortable conclusion:
The system is not designed for them.
Distrust grows.
Not because institutions suddenly became less competent.
But because people increasingly believe institutions serve concentrated power rather than the public.
Education follows the same pattern.
Communities with wealth maintain access to opportunity while underfunded schools increasingly struggle. Education ceases to function as an equalizer.
Instead, it becomes a sorting mechanism.
Birth rates decline.
Not necessarily because younger generations reject family formation.
But because housing, childcare, healthcare, and financial stability have become increasingly unaffordable.
Even empathy itself may be affected.
Behavioral economics research increasingly shows that scarcity changes behavior. When individuals feel economically vulnerable, they become more defensive, less trusting, and more tribal.
What often appears as declining empathy may partly reflect populations under constant financial pressure.
All of these trends point back to a single system.
Concentrated power creates economic inequality. Economic inequality creates instability. Instability weakens society.
Which brings us directly to retirement planning.
The retirement industry often frames the retirement crisis as a behavioral problem.
Employees are not saving enough.
Workers need more education.
Plans need higher contribution rates.
Participants need lifetime income products.
But what if we are misdiagnosing the problem?
If workers cannot afford housing, struggle with healthcare costs, carry student debt, and live paycheck to paycheck, no amount of participant education changes that reality.
The problem is not simply a lack of financial literacy.
The problem may be structural economic insecurity.
So what solutions should we consider?
One possibility is confronting wages directly.
The discussion around a living wage is often treated politically, but economically it may be central to retirement security itself.
Workers cannot adequately save if compensation fails to cover basic living expenses.
A second possibility is the growing push toward lifetime income solutions inside defined contribution plans.
Companies like Fidelity increasingly argue that workers want their 401(k) plans to behave more like pensions.
There is truth to this.
Workers increasingly seek certainty.
But this raises an uncomfortable irony.
Corporate America spent decades moving away from defined benefit pension plans in order to eliminate long-term liability and transfer retirement risk onto employees.
Now the retirement industry increasingly attempts to recreate pension-like outcomes through annuities and lifetime income products, often products that financially benefit insurance companies while workers remain responsible for funding them.
This raises an important question.
Are workers demanding annuities?
Or are workers simply responding rationally to broader economic instability?
Do we need lifetime income solutions?
Possibly.
Do we need stronger retirement guarantees?
Probably.
Should we revisit aspects of the defined benefit pension system that provided predictable lifetime income and shared risk between employers and workers?
Perhaps more seriously than we have been willing to admit.
But none of these retirement solutions address the deeper structural problem.
Perhaps America does not have a retirement crisis.
Perhaps retirement insecurity is simply one of the clearest warning signs that economic power has become too concentrated in too few hands.
For decades, we have attempted to solve structural economic instability by designing increasingly sophisticated financial products — auto-enrollment, managed accounts, annuity solutions, lifetime income guarantees.
But financial engineering cannot solve economic imbalance.
If wages remain insufficient, housing remains unaffordable, healthcare continues to strain working families, and economic power remains concentrated at the top, retirement insecurity will persist no matter how advanced our retirement products become.
The Parting Glass
Until we address the concentration of power itself, we will continue asking workers to solve individually what are fundamentally systemic economic failures.