People are being booted out of their jobs at 50

One problem for you might be that, as the retirement age increases, there will be fewer and fewer jobs for people aged 18, who naturally lack some of the skills that their 60-year-old competitors have learned over a lifetime of work.Increasing the retirement age will not necessarily solve the problem, it might just shift the unemployment faced by people aged 50+ onto the youngest age group (who already tend to have low wages and bad job prospects).One solution would be to create more jobs, per se, for both older and younger people.Mick

I suspect that the practical answer people are going to have to get used to is: immigration. This is certainly the view of many professional demographers I have known.This isn't such a problem in the US or Canada, with their proud history of accepting large numbers of immigrants. In the UK (and elsewhere in Europe) it is a political hot potato that people are going to have to grasp sooner or later.

My God, you haven't even got onto .net yet!!! What a loser! This message has been edited by mick, 05-07-2005 09:49 PM

I hate to be the one to tell you this, Phatboy, but social inequality measures are generally similar between US and UK, and the US has inequality rather higher than most european countries.Research carried out by the European Economy Group (2002) showed:On social inequality: Comparing the major economic powers of Europe with the USA, the EEG found: On income mobility there were two results. If we measure the correlation between one's own income and one's father's income: if we measure the ability to move between social classes during one's lifetime USA, Italy and Spain were found to be it seems that social mobility and inequality are best tackled with a German-style social democratic system rather than the freemarket system of US, UK, Italy and Spain.Mick