"Fidelity, the nation's largest provider of workplace retirement savings plans, says the average 401(k) account balance is only $62,000.

Beyond that, the national savings rate - the difference between after-tax income and expenditures - is actually negative, government statistics show.

Nevertheless, a small band of economists from universities, research institutions and the government are clearly expressing the blasphemy that many Americans could be saving less than they are being told to by the financial services industry - and spending more - while they are younger. The negative savings rate, they say, is wildly distorted.

According to them, the financial industry, with its ostensibly objective online calculators, overstates how much money someone will need in retirement. Some, in fact, contend that financial firms have a pointed interest in persuading people to save much more than they need because the companies earn fees on managing that money.

...Nevertheless, the loose confederation of well-regarded economists, who have not been working in concert, say their research points to the startling conclusion that many Americans are saving too much, not too little. Indeed, their studies of the savings and spending habits of the generation born between 1931 and 1941 revealed that at least 80 percent had accumulated more than enough wealth for retirement. While they have not studied the baby boom generation as closely, they believe that the greater wealth of that generation should also leave those retirees secure.

A study last October by another group of economists, including two working for the Federal Reserve Board, found 88 percent of retirees age 51 and older had adequate wealth.

'Even the most casual reading of the popular press will have you convinced that Americans are heading like lemmings over a cliff,' said John Karl Scholz, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 'Going into this, I had no idea that we'd find any results anything like this.'

...'There is risk in saving too much,' Mr. Kotlikoff said. 'You could end up squandering your youth rather than your money.'

...The one exception to this optimism involves people who enter retirement single, either because their spouse died early, they divorced, or they never married. The studies found this group did not save enough."

"Shopping at Costco often goes something like this: Customer comes to buy bulk necessities like toilet paper and dish detergent. Customer buys those items, as well as a pack of giant muffins, three cashmere sweaters and a power tool.

It's more than impulse buying. It is a calculated part of the company's business plan. Call it the Costco effect.

'We always come out with too much,' said Linda Curtis Schneider, who lives in Nashville. 'It's hard to get out of there for under $200.'

...Psychological factors can strongly influence buying behavior, according to Pamela N. Danziger, author of 'Shopping: Why We Love It and How Retailers Can Create the Ultimate Customer Experience' (2006). Shoppers can experience an emotional thrill when they spot a deep discount, or find a particular item before it disappears from the shelves, she said, and creating those kinds of feelings has helped Costco. 'Shopping is recreational there,' she said. 'People seek out this psychological reward.'"

Though progressive commentators generally view it as a fully acceptable substitute for marriage, nonmarital cohabitation offers little to children. For cohabiting parents typically part with so much of their money at tobacco and liquor stores that they have little left to spend on their children. Indeed, the dubious spending practices of cohabiting parents stir deep concerns among economists from the University of Chicago and Michigan State University who examine them in a study recently published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Scrutinizing data collected between 1982 and 1998 for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Chicago and Michigan State scholars discern a pattern that indicates that "cohabiting-parent families allocate their budgets differently than do married-parent families." The differences appear "both in the level and in the share of expenditures allocated to different expenditure categories." In particular, the researchers find in quarter-by-quarter assessments that "cohabiting-parent families spend a greater amount on two adult goods - alcohol ($124.78) and tobacco ($170.18) - than do married-parent [families] ($80.06 on alcohol, $107.53 on tobacco)." Expenditure differences are statistically significant (p <  0.01) for both types of adult goods.

On the other hand, cohabiting parents spend significantly less than married parents on their children's education ($204.90 vs. $283.32; p < 0.01). They also spend significantly less than married parents on their children's health care ($381.30 vs. $440.42; p < 0.01), though the researchers acknowledge that this difference may reflect the fact that "cohabiting parents are more likely to be covered by Medicaid than are married-parent families (36% vs. 15%)."

It troubles the authors of the new study both that "cohabitors do not invest as much in the children in their households" as do married peers and that "they spend their income in ways less beneficial to healthy child environments."

The researchers speculate that many male cohabitators "invest less in the children's well-being" because they are "not biologically related" to the children in the home. However, they emphasize that "even biological cohabitors ... may have a different set of expectations, values, and lifestyle preferences than do biological fathers in married households." Thus, contrary to the theorizing of progressives that would define it as the functional equivalent of marriage, this new study provides strong "evidence that cohabitation is a distinct family type from marriage."