Tbf, $170k is also the max that Amazon pays (more or less) in cash. I think the issue here is that the government is overweighting the value of pensions over stock, and underweighting quality of life concerns.
1) The expected financial value of a pension. Especially assuming that the millenial in question won’t be willing to tolerate poor quality of life long enough to make it lucrative.
2) Belief that the institution backing the pension will be willing and capable of meeting their obligations in N years.
Personally, I think I’d say that the pension would be close to the value of stock options, but I’d be unwilling to tolerate the crap long enough to actually earn a useful percentage of its theoretical value.
I only had one offer of working at a company with a pension program. The recruiter highlighted that the pension "existed" but was unlikely to pay out for a new employee.
I knew someone who was close to hitting their 20 year pension in the private sector, but the company instead decided they had a performance problem in year 19.
While the federal government has less incentive to play such games, betting on illiquid financial offerings that are contingent on a single entity liking you for N decades and still being around after Y decades is pretty suspect.
Yeah, there’s no way I’d value a private pension as worth more than $0. That requires orders of magnitude more trust in for profit corporations than I actually have.
With the government I’m confident that they’ll pay, I’m just not confident I personally would be willing to deal with it for 2-3 decades.