“The baby boomer attitude to debt has not turned out to be as frugal as you would think it would be, having parents who lived through the Depression. Partly it’s because they have jobs that don’t keep up with inflation and they might have to have five or six jobs to make ends meet,” says Kevin Leicht, head of the sociology department at the University of Illinois. “And if the company they work for gets rid of defined benefit pensions, then that puts an incredible onus on them, and on top of that [there is] all sorts of easy access to credit. “They have to be really skilled to come out the other side with a pension they can live on for 25 years. Companies have offloaded all the risk on to employees.”

https://www.ft.com/content/a180501e-b8a3-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c