What Companies Owe Retirees

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IBM’s new pension program may not change the game for workers. But it raises big questions about what companies owe their employees, and how existing retirement structures could better serve them.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Texas’s social-media law is dangerous. Striking it down could be worse.
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• Solzhenitsyn’s warning for the United States

A One-Off?

In the heyday of the private-sector pension, CDs were just starting to appear on shelves, Prince Charles was courting Lady Diana Spencer, and perms were ubiquitous. Defined-benefit pension plans—with those regular payment checks that—were widespread across a range of corporations in the 1980s. Now only a very small slice of nongovernment employees retires with such a pension.