> This doesn't get mentioned often enough when talking about the "1-percenters" and the wealth gap in Western countries, i.e. that most of the capital behind all of the current economic and social system is directly or indirectly held by part of the general populace itself.
I think the keyword there is indirectly. It's still easy to blame the 1-percenters for the proportional lion's share of the blame when the majority of the general populace's influence/control over their investments is intentionally gatekeeped and/or obfuscated by "professional finance" people, many of whom are 1-percenters or wish-they-were.
In the case of legitimate pensions that is top-to-bottom controlled by finance people with almost zero control from the average pension.
In the case of the modern faux-pension, the 401k, while most individuals could take direct control of how they invest those funds, and that's supposedly a feature, very few actually do/will, because the game is rigged (401k providers have a lot of vested interests in promoting their investment products where they make the most fees) and also a full time job that the 401k "owner" doesn't need on top of their existing job that pays into the 401k in the first place (again, giving the 401k providers the benefit of defaulting people their investment products with the most fees).
Even further, the push to "personal responsibility" to the individual in a 401k system also removes a lot of power of the general populace to collectively bargain as investment holders. Under the regime of traditional pension systems a lot of hedge funds were checked by pension managers when employee/pensioner interest was kept in mind (especially in the cases where pensions were managed by Unions rather than employers or outsourced to professional finance firms; there's a good history of hedge funds versus Unions on the books some of which used to stop leverage buyouts).
> And the real numbers tell the story of a society divided in two, a part that will manage to enjoy its pension and the other part that has no clue how will pay for its old age.
Even when federally mandated pensions existed there was always an interesting line between pension-earning work and the rest. It's not an entirely new worry, it's just continuing to get a lot worse.
Even worse is how much the breakdown of the earned pension system to the "privatized" 401k system is creating a weird muddy ground in between the extremes of people that sort of have retirement investments, but no longer have collective bargaining power, often have more middlemen eating their share of the pie, and everything is much more of a gamble.