[...] Neither the financial advisor nor the plan administrator is liable for results. Under the new scheme, a much larger portion of the same pot of retirement money could be extracted in fees to support the careers of many more financial advisors and services, since now everyone gets a customized, personal account.

Financial firms also won a vast pool of new clients with very little financial acumen and no real bargaining power—a far cry from the professional, corporate pension managers of the past. The industry made every effort to market retirement plans as tools of empowerment for individuals. As their own marketing research shows, however, they were actually pitting the unique weaknesses of individual investors against themselves, leveraging the investors’ ignorance of the marketplace and its rules, as well as known gaps—what gamers would call “exploits”—in people’s financial psychology [...]