The risk of being poor or near-poor in old age is growing for the first time in two generations because the American pension system has failed. The American system evolved into a patchwork of loosely connected private-public programs that many people have tried to rationalize by describing the system with various metaphors of stability-a three-layered stool, a multi pillar system, and a layered pyramid. I use the pyramid metaphor describing the relative sizes of the sources of income to middle

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... lass elderly-Social Security is the most important so it sits on the bottom, employment-based retirement plans sit in the middle, and personal assets are the least important-that layer sits at the very top. But the system is a crumbling, unstable pyramid that is creating serious sources of inequality in retirement security. A main cause is that employer-based pensions have been transformed over the last 35 years to "do-it-yourself" financial-based accounts and away from a system based on social insurance principles.