Last month, the Pension Integrity Project released a critique regarding an overly-narrow perspective on the cost-effectiveness of defined benefit (DB) pension plans compared to defined contribution (DC) plans. The focus of our critique was a paper by the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) analyzing the cost-efficiency of retirement plans, which is just one element that needs to be considered when evaluating retirement plans. A complete perspective on retirement plans must include factors that are even more important to achieving the pension system’s overarching goals—namely benefit efficiency, which is a way to measure how widespread the benefits are distributed among
