Money Talks: What Retirement Crisis?
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Money Talks: Emily Peck is joined by Andrew Biggs, author of The Real Retirement Crisis, to talk about how the data contradicts the so-called "retirement crisis” in the US, what we misunderstand about the system, and what we should be thinking about when it comes to retirement savings.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co-hosts of Slate Money, and I'm here today with Andrew Biggs. |
| 0:16.8 | He's an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, former deputy commissioner in the Social Security Administration, and for our purposes, most importantly, the author most recently of a book titled The Real Retirement Crisis, Colon, why almost everything you know about the U.S. retirement system is wrong. |
| 0:34.7 | Andrew, welcome to Money Talks. |
| 0:36.4 | Well, thanks very much for having me. Great to be with you. |
| 0:38.3 | So, I mean, I'm just going to start with like a small question, which is why is everything I know about the |
| 0:45.7 | retirement system wrong? And could you explain it in one sentence for our listeners right now? |
| 0:50.8 | Well, the short story is that nobody really has the incentive to tell you |
| 0:55.0 | the more encouraging facts. The financial industry has a product to sell. They want you to buy more |
| 1:01.5 | of it, which is investments. The media, they have the incentive to write stories that you'll click on. |
| 1:08.3 | And frightening stories do that. And to be honest, there are people |
| 1:11.7 | in politics and government who also either don't believe that private savings work or, you know, |
| 1:17.9 | want to scare you into their preferred policy solutions. So there's really nobody has the |
| 1:22.0 | incentive to tell you a different story than what you comment here. Okay. So we're going to get into |
| 1:26.9 | Andrew's story, the story that you need to hear, |
| 1:30.2 | the positive take, when we come back, all coming up on Money Talks. |
| 1:40.8 | So I guess we should just start kind of big, which is why I came to you in the first place a few months ago, because I had been told to write about the retirement crisis. |
| 1:50.1 | And I called you, and you were like, well, actually, there is no retirement crisis. |
| 1:55.1 | And I was like, well, shit, that's the story I have to write. |
| 1:57.9 | So what the hell? |
| 2:00.0 | Here's my understanding, which I think isn't |
| 2:02.4 | right or needs more explanation. My understanding is people have 401ks now. They don't have |
... |
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