America's Retirement System Is Too Inconsistent

The U.S. is exceptional, and therefore an outlier in lots of international comparisons. Our incomes are high and our taxes are low, which is good. But our health-care bills are astronomical and our infant mortality rate is awfully high, too (for a wealthy country), which is bad.

When it come to pensions and other retirement income, though, the U.S. is pretty average. That, at least, is my reading of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's biennial "Pensions at a Glance" report, which came out Tuesday. "Pensions at a Glance" is a terribly misleading name for a document that fills 167 densely packed pages, and you may interpret the scads of data in it differently. But I at least have backup from the 2017 Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index, which was released in October and has a couple of handy rankings graphics that can in fact be perused at a glance and put the U.S. right around the middle of the 30 countries rated: just behind the U.K. and France, just ahead of Malaysia and Poland.