Or perhaps we shouldn't have killed off the concept of pensions in the United States so we weren't all beholden to godforsaken 401Ks?

To be fair, the pensions also exploded in a lot of cases.

We really just need a more centralized and reliable method of holding money for retirement. Which we have, but we need to expand - SS.

Of course, lots of people think SS will explode, too. But it hasn't! Yet!

This is pretty myopic, or something. Shows, at least, a real ignorance about the available possibilities (or lack thereof)—at scale—to the common worker for “saving for a later day”.

But I’m all ears. Now that you’ve diagnosed how 401K investing fools get what they deserve, care to offer any alternative solutions as to the entire work force should have been saving towards retirement.

(kinda unrelated but) I personally hate these forced savings schemes from the government. At least in my country the rates are low so it almost feels like I'm donating the entire difference in rates between the pension scheme and the S&P500 + taxes straight to the government.

At least give those of us brave (or stupid) enough to do something different with the money the option to.

401k is voluntary

I guess. My company (and I believe most) highly incentivize it by offering matching funds. The company says, "want to save $1000 of your paycheck? We'll throw in $500". The general wisdom is, you'd be an idiot to leave money like that going unreclaimed.

Where I am there's actually a %-age of your salary/wage that's "returned" to you when you retire. You don't get a choice.

You can choose to contribute to an employer-match scheme (I do) or even fund your own pension account with monthly payments to a pension provider. But these are in addition to the above forced pension.

Pensioners don’t have a choice where their stuff goes. A teacher or something simply doesn’t deserve that kind of hardship.

Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.

Deserve is a strong word.

We're talking about regular folks who want to do nothing else but secure their future in the face of a market that regularly tries to screw it up.

Can you explain why you suggest "deserve"?