The retirement financial crisis will affect far more people than baby boomers, and certainly it will affect their children. Most of the retirees and near-retirees with whom we talked, said that they were extremely reluctant to have to depend on their children financially, or to think of moving in with their children. But the mere fact that they were discussing those issues indicates that some of them have already figured out that that is what lies ahead for them.

In Western Europe, most countries have variations of the lifetime pension system for most workers so they are keeping the system that we are walking away from. By comparison, 50% of the American workforce is not offered any retirement plan by their employers. And of those who are offered a plan, roughly 25% do not choose to join. In other words, everything is voluntary, and that's one of the reasons our results are so perilous for most people.

It's usually much easier for people with professional skills to find work for themselves or even possibly to continue with their old employer, but on a part-time basis. Some labor economists predict that in about five years there will be a labor shortage in the United States and that demand for retirees to work part-time will grow naturally. I don't know if that's true or just wishful predicting.

There is no question that policy makers, corporate leaders, pension consultants, and journalists too have to get out into the real world to at least see the pain of retirement woes before they start to prescribe policies and solutions.

It is absolutely stunning. You cannot read numbers that communicate what the reality is. That's part of what I'm trying to get across and that's partly why I use video.

If the experts are right in their calculations, then we face the prospect of millions of people retiring into poverty from the American middle class in the years ahead. That has all kinds of social and economic consequences. We need to anticipate those and start tackling the problem in a constructive way.

One of the strongest lessons I learned in doing six months of work on retirement topic was how absolutely crucial the Social Security system is for the great mass of Americans. The research of professionals and our own reporting convinced me that many millions of people are not capable of effectively managing the finances for their own retirement.