The retirement-account pyramid shifts from employer-funded toward self-funded tiers

Evidence

But the explicit discrimination of the FLSA laid the groundwork for the implicit discrimination that is alive and well in the labor market today, excluding black Americans from jobs that offer health insurance and retirement accounts. If we think of retirement accounts as a pyramid (the way we did with higher education), then the best, those at the top, are defined benefit plans, followed by employer-matching defined contribution accounts. At the bottom are IRAs: They’re available to anyone with earned income, but employees are responsible for funding them and paying any fees associated with them. Over the last few decades, the percentage of employees covered by defined contribution as opposed to defined benefit plans has significantly increased—from 41 percent in 1985 to 61.3 percent in 2010, according to my research. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 363

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the retirement-account hierarchy: defined benefit plans on top, defined contribution in the middle, IRAs at the bottom — a workable framework for explaining who gets tax perks.
• XREF: Builds the pyramid framing the reader already saw applied to higher education earlier in the book.