The Retirement Challenge: What's Wrong with America's System and a Sensible Way to Fix It

In The Retirement Challenge, influential former White House economists Martin Neil Baily and Benjamin H. Harris explore America's outdated retirement system and explain how improving retirement requires changes by families, employers, and policymakers alike. The central premise of the book is that the only plausible path to success is to build on the current system, with improvements to both public programs, retirement saving accounts, and private insurance markets.

Martin Neil Baily is a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Brookings Institution, and was previously the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development at Brookings from 2007-2020. Baily served in President's Clinton's Cabinet from 1999 to 2001 as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and he was a Member of the Council from 1994 to 1996. He was a Partner at McKinsey & Company 1996 to 1999 and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute 2001 to 2007. He has taught at MIT, Yale, and the University of Maryland. He is a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company and the Albright Stonebridge Group. He has written extensively on productivity, financial regulation, and retirement policy. He has often been interviewed in the media and is the author of many op-eds in leading newspapers.

Benjamin H. Harris is a long-time economic adviser to President Joe Biden. He was President Biden's chief economist from 2014 until the end of the Obama administration and was the senior economic adviser for the Biden's campaign. He is now Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, previously serving as Counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Harris was previously a Professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, a Senior Economist with President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Senior Economist for the House Budget Committee, Policy Director for the Hamilton Project, and Deputy Director of the Brookings Institution's Retirement Security Project. He has published widely in academic journals and the popular press, including regular contributions to the Wall Street Journal on issues related to retirement and personal finance.