Advocates of today's defined
benefit teacher
pension plans claim that these
plans encourage workers to stick around and devote their lives to the profession, but there's not much evidence that this is the case.
The original framers of the
pension accounting rules assumed that everyone would be angels, and so they left a lot of flexibility in the accounting rules to
encourage the creation of defined
benefit plans, expecting that men of good will would go out of their way to fund them fully and soon.