And, as the author of the piece says, if you did have an overstuffed pension fund that caused problems too both with the IRS and because of LBOs.

Of course, a lot of benefits choices are driven by laws/accounting rules/taxes. Ideally companies want to give benefits that cost them less (however they look at cost) than their value to the employee. Once that balance flips, that benefit makes a lot less sense.

That said, a benefit structure that assumes long-term employment with a single company doesn't make a lot of sense for most people or most companies today. (Though I'm probably unusual among this readership is that I actually will have a modest pension from a past employer.)

But most employers in the developed world shifted to defined contribution benefits ages ago. I was part of that first generation of workers to be told that my pension was going to be a moveable feast and not something that I could have specific expectations about, and that was back in the early 90s. Defined benefits pensions are indeed still expensive for companies and local governments that owe them to older workers, but they've been moving away from taking on such obligations for a long time now.

The shift to 401K is more about the financial industry rigging the system so that they have more of other people's money to play with. Need a bigger slush fund? Lobby Congress to make pensions unfeasible through carefully constructed legislation and wait 10 years for the payoff to start rolling in.

Clearly, employers underfunding pensions and then going bankrupt causing retired employees to go broke was not a real problem.

Pensions were always unfeasible. ERISA simply requires employers to properly account for that.