This week the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) published a short article claiming that “New Data Shows Drop in Retirement Coverage for All Income Levels,” contributing to the narrative that Americans face a “retirement crisis” that government must step in to address. In reality, the article should have been titled “Bad Data Show Drop in Retirement Coverage for All Income Levels,” because the decline in retirement plan coverage reported by SCEPA is almost surely a problem with the data SCEPA uses rather than the retirement saving environment.

The SCEPA article relies on the Current Population Survey, which is jointly conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. The CPS figures for retirement plan coverage are frightening. In 1979, roughly half of full-time workers reported being offered a retirement plan at work. In 2013, the figure was again about one-half. But from 2013 through 2016 reported retirement plan coverage dropped from 47% to 37%, with only a modest rebound to 38% by 2017. If true, these data show a precipitous decline in the share of workers who are offered a retirement plan at work, which is the most common way in which Americans save for old age.

So what happened? Well, what didn’t happen is that employers abandoned retirement plans in droves. If nearly one-in-five employees lost their retirement plan coverage over the space of four years, that would make headlines. We’d know of big, prominent companies that had discontinued their 401(k) or other retirement plan. Can you name one? Me, neither.

What actually happened has very little to do with pension coverage and a lot to do with how we measure pension coverage. In 2014 the Current Population Survey redesigned how it asks households about both retirement plan coverage and the income they receive from those plans in retirement. The Employee Benefit Research Institute has paid a lot of attention to this issue; you can read more about it here. While it’s not clearly understood why, that redesign produced a dramatic reduction in the percentage of workers who say they’re offered a retirement plan at work. EBRI warned that the most recent CPS data

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