Look at my previous post. Did you fall asleep in the middle somewhere?

I stay awake during such arguments and go on to make more for hours on end.

Thus, my big salary. (Well, not big compared to some of you, but I've been in the "real world" for only 3 years. Cut me some slack.) Okay, there are other reasons, but being into these kinds of issues can make one a pretty penny.

I finished the Gladwell article, and boy, is he really, really wrong on some of these things, and the reason is pretty damn obvious: he's towing the union line and presenting only one side of the equation. He, again, is totally ignoring the fact that nationalizing health care does not fix the problems he pointed out, and the whole pay-as-you-go pension thing is killing Social Security far worse than it's killing private pensions.

And demographics only kill the healthcare provisions, not the pensions: it makes little difference (just a bit of overhead) to GM to pay 5 people $300/month or 1 person $1500/month...if one ignores mortality. The dependency ratio is completely irrelevant there. What with direct deposit, the per transaction cost is negligible. Part of the trouble, and Peter Drucker pointed this out (I've got a book of his on pensions): when the promises made were valued, they made some pretty unrealistic mortality assumptions. Also, they amortized benefit improvements over an unreasonable number of years (Gladwell mentions this) - this has nothing to do with how many employees, and everything to do with level of benefits.

Also, there is a perfect storm with regards to those pensions and healthcare: healthcare has improved greatly in the past several decades in that now years are being "added" at older ages, but at the cost of continuous health care (heart medication, regular angioplasties, other surgical techniques). So there's effective medical care that's really expensive that lets people who used to die in their 60s to live into their 80s... and the company is paying healthcare and pensions for the time these people are living longer. Seriously, smokers, when they had the habit of dying at relatively young ages from cancer and heart disease, had a far less burden on the pensions and retiree healthcare; unfortunately, the company actuaries had no way of knowing that these people would stop smoking and have defibrillators implanted.

I can just imagine what the pension actuaries can do with this. I'm tempted to write a letter myself, but someone more knowledgeable definitely should.