Messrs Orszag and Snower would allow workers to transfer any remaining balances in their accounts into their pensions on retirement.

ECONOMIST: Against the day when you lose your job

To illustrate this new world of multiple demands, Mr Snower describes a recent visit from a mechanic to repair his dishwasher.

ECONOMIST: Why pay is becoming less equal

At a conference convened last August by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, Dennis Snower, professor of economics at Birkbeck College in London, suggested that the main force behind income inequality might be changes in the way companies are organised.

ECONOMIST: Why pay is becoming less equal

Mr Snower complains that most of his colleagues' thinking about the economy has been conditioned by the Industrial Revolution, and that he and Assar Lindbeck, the Swedish economist with whom he has been studying this change, have had to come up with a new set of analytical tools to examine it.

ECONOMIST: Why pay is becoming less equal