People are being booted out of their jobs at 50

Troy writes:

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Oh sure, you can point out isolated cases of people having the energy after 60.

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Actually, most of them are. That is the reason why people are living longer: Better health care has resulted in people living longer and being more productive as they get older.Yes, the average lifespan is in the mid-70s these days. But does that mean that a person who is 55 is more or less likely to make it to 75 and a person who is 25? One of the strange facts of the matter is that the older you get, the more likely you are to live to see the next year.In 2002, the life expectancy at birth was about 77 years. But if you were already 65, you had a life expectancy of another 18 years or 83. And if you were already 75, you had a life expectancy of another 11 years or 86.In the 1900s, the life expectancy was just under 50 years old. When Social Security was instituted, 65 was actually beyond when most people were expected to die. If the retirement age had kept up with the extended expected lifespan, it would be 80 years old today.I'm not defending any particular practice. I'm just pointing out that the demographics of work and age have changed dramatically.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

berberry responds to me:

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In 2002, the life expectancy at birth was about 77 years. But if you were already 65, you had a life expectancy of another 18 years or 83. And if you were already 75, you had a life expectancy of another 11 years or 86.

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Can you give an explanation of how expectancy is calculated for those who've already reached a certain age, such as 65 or 75? Does the calculation assume that such a person is in excellent health or only average health? Are your numbers for males or females, or at that age does it matter?

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I pulled my numbers from the CDC at National Center for Health Statistics.The second file has some information on how things are calculated. The short answer is that they are going off of past census data relating to births and deaths. With a longitudinal study, you take a look at how many people are around and how old they are.To find out the probability of living to, say, age 80 given that you are already 25, you would divide the number of people who are 80 by the number of people who are 25. But note, that "number of people" is a generated number. The math looks at the trends of the data that we have and then generates a list of 100,000 people and indicates when they would eventually die.There are no assumptions about the health of the individuals involved. It is simply looking to see if you are alive or not.The numbers I gave are for the population as a whole. Race and sex have a bearing on expected lifespan. For example, in 2002 the life expectancy for white females was about 80, for white males and black females, it was 75, and for black males it was about 69.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Percy responds to me:

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Actually, most of them are. That is the reason why people are living longer: Better health care has resulted in people living longer and being more productive as they get older.

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There's a reason few can play professional sports much beyond age 30.

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So if you cannot play professional sports beyond age 30, there is absolutely no job you can perform?I understand that there are professions that can only be handled by those with certain physical skills which are more likely to be concentrated in the young.But how many of those jobs would you find advertised in the Help Wanted section of the paper? People who are 40+ are not the physical weaklings you are making them out to be nor are the jobs that we have in this country primarily suited to those who are capable of performing physical labor.

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There's a reason world chess champions come from the ranks of the under 40 crowd and that Nobel prizes are awarded primarily for the accomplishments of 20 and 30-year olds.

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And how many jobs requires the ability to think 12 moves ahead in a chess game? Again, you don't see those advertised on Monster. While it is true that with the pace of technology, people are going to need to be continuously trained. We've seen the issues that programmers have with the introduction of new langauges and methodologies. But there is no reason to think that an older person can't learn the languages if trained to do so. The reason why the younger people seem to be such hotshots at it is because they have more time available to them to train how to get good at it.I'm in a project management class right now. One of the examples given with regard to human resources had to deal with a company that was switching its accounting system over from one system architecture to another. There are a couple ways to do this: Hire outside people to build it or train the people who are already using it in how to build it.You can see the issue here: If you bring in outsiders, they're going to ask the people who are there and using it what they do, how it should work, etc., but then those people are going to have no idea how the final product actually works...and thus will start to wonder how long they're going to remain employed.Instead, they chose to train the people already there how to build the new system.

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The physiological and intellectual changes are well documented.

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But not nearly as drastic as you are making out. And the vast majority of jobs we have don't require Olympic athletes or Nobel Prize winners.

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A healthy 70-year old is not a just a 20-year old with wrinkles.

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Of course not.But what makes you think the 70-year-old can't do the job? The job doesn't require him to run a 6 minute mile, lift 300 pounds over his head, or solve four questions on the current Putnam exam.Our economy is becoming increasingly service-based. This makes for a much longer productive lifespan.

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I want the companies I invest in to be cold-hearted slaves to the bottom line, not social welfare organizations.

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Then you'll be poor. Why do you think there has been such financial difficulties for so many companies of late? Why do you think so many jobs are going overseas? Why do you think so many companies are setting up shop overseas?In being "cold-hearted slaves to the bottom line," they leave or they collapse. No company can run that way. Who wants to work for a company that will toss you out the moment you appear to be maybe not performing?Churn hurts.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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There is a difference between being able to live longer and having the energy to compete with the younger generation.

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I know, but you seem to have the same misconception that Percy has that the modern job market requires you to be of the most rare caliber in order to succeed.

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Sure, if a person really tries he can sit in front of his computer until he's 70 or 75. But can you really say that a construction worker or a garbage man could have the strength to do those kinds of jobs beyond 60?

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How many construction workers are there compared to service-sector workers? You keep leaping to the corner cases. Logical error of the excluded middle. Are you saying that someone who can't lift an 8x12 panel of sheetrock over his head and screw it in single-handed has absolutely no use in the job market?

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Again, we shouldn't penalize the rest of society just because a few people could go on forever.

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But we shouldn't let society starve just because you don't think they're useful anymore. Social Security is the most successful anti-poverty program ever. The poverty rate in 1966 for seniors was 30%. When LBJ expanded SSI in 66, the poverty rate for seniors plummeted to less than half of that by the mid-90s.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy writes:

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If I'm not mistaken, you were at least implying that since it is realistic for you to go on into your 90's, it must be realistic for everyone to go into his 90's.

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No, not everyone. But a significant portion.Remember, the average life expectancy is just that...an average. For white women, it's 80 years these days. In order for it to be that high, there needs to be a significant number of white women living longer than 80 years in order to balance out all the women who didn't live that long.No, not everybody is going to make it to 90, but we're going to have a fair amount of people who do because so many almost make it there.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

RAZD responds to me:

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the expectancy of a 50 year old getting to 80 is higher than it is for a 20 year old because they have already survived to 50.

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Indeed and I said that in my first post. The longer you live, the more likely you are to live to see the next year. While a person at birth has a life expectancy of 77 these days, someone who is already 77 actually has an expected life span of another 10-20 years.

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this is a major problem when comparing life expectancies of different cultures, where one could have very high infant mortality but subsequent better health than the other.

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And this is true even in our own culture. If you look at the mortality rates, the first year is one of the most problematic. It wasn't until 1980 that the number of years you are expected to continue living given your current age steadily decreased from birth. Before that, you had a shorter life expectancy at birth than you did at 1 year.At the turn of the century, life expectancy for a newborn was 49.24 years. For a 1-year-old, it was an additional 55.20 years.And, of course, these are still averages. There were plenty of 70-year-olds wandering around in the 1900s.Ah, statistics.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Percy responds to me:

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Rrhain, the examples of athletes and chess masters and Nobel prize winners were provided as evidence of decline with age.

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Yes, but you are dealing with a corner case. The difference between first and second place at such a high level is the smallest of increments.Even though the 40-year-old chess master is unlikely to be able to compete on an extended basis with the latest prodigy, he's still going to beat the pants off the rest of us.Martina Navratilova is pushing 50. Do you think the average Joe who plays tennis maybe every other week at best would be able to take her?For someone who is four deviations above the norm to fall to three or even two simply isn't such a dramatic change. He's still much more talented than the rest of us and still highly productive.This was a huge point when I was an undergrad. I was at the #1 school of science and enigneering in the world, surrounded by the best and the brightest. But here's the thing: Somebody needs to be at the bottom of the list. After a dozen years of school being at the top of every class, you are thrown in with people who had the exact same experience as you of being at the top. The pond suddenly got much smaller and filled with the biggest fish around.Even if we take the least of these fish, however, they're still going to be much farther along than most everybody else.

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The greatest accomplishments are reserved for the young, because the inevitable decline that accompanies age makes performance at such high levels impossible.

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But the world doesn't run on the greatest accomplishments. And don't make the mistake of reversing the arrow. While the greatest accomplishments tend to show up from the hands of the young, the vast majority of the young will never achieve any great accomplishment.

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If you go back to post 1 and read Lam's introductory post you'll see that this thread is about older workers being replaced with younger ones.

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Indeed.And you were the one who brought up grand masters and Olympic athletes. But the job market doesn't need every position filled by such a person. In fact, it is a bad thing if they are because the workers will be quite unsatisfied with their jobs and performance will decrease.

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It isn't that the 70 year old is expected to lift 300 pounds, it's that however much he's supposed to lift, someone younger can do it better and cheaper and all day long.

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Huh? That makes no sense. If the task simply requires you to tie your shoes, are you seriously saying that someone who's been tying his shoes for 40 years will be less competent at it than someone who's only been doing it for 10?The majority of work in the industrialized world doesn't have nearly the requirements you seem to be indicating it does.

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you take a job selling cars, like the former Digital Equipment Corporation lifer who sold me my current car back in the days when, like you, I thought I'd never slow down, never see kids as competition, never worry about being unemployable and unable to support my family.

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(*chuckle*)Just how old do you think I am?Here's a hint: I remember Nixon's resignation.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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Then what do you suggest we do with the portion that do not or could not go on working in a competitive job market?

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One thing is to get over the misconception that they could not go on working in a competitive job market. They can.One solution can be applied across more than just this problem: Retraining. We have this problem with single-industry communities such as in the rust belt where the overwhelming majority of the economy is driven by a single company. When the company closes shop, the community literally dies. The problem is not that the workers are incapable of working in a competitive job market. It's that the market abandoned them. They need retraining. One possibility, for example, is to stop outsourcing the jobs overseas and instead to send them to these depressed communities.It isn't a panacea, but it's something.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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No, but it is a fact that the older you are the less chance you'll have at getting another job after getting booted out of your old one.

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Indeed, but not because you are not as productive. It's because you're older. Your salary history will haunt you. One job transitio of mine had me going from direct hire to a contractor. When the contract ended and I was looking for new work, the exorbitant amount of money I had been making as a contractor was suddenly a huge impediment. Nobody wanted me because they didn't think they could afford me, that I would be upset at taking a significant salary cut, etc., etc.

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I am saying, however, that private organizations are more likely to hire fresh and young workers who can have the same skills but can work much longer for much lesser salary.

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Except for that last part, you're wrong. They don't have the same skills because they don't have the experience. They aren't capable of working longer hours. The only thing they have over the more experienced workers is the fact that they can be hired for less money.

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I occasionally apply for jobs at places and there are always older applicants there. The thing is the younger ones are the ones that get hired most of the time.

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But not because they're better workers. They're hired because they're cheaper.

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But we shouldn't let society starve just because you don't think they're useful anymore.

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What on Earth are you talking about?

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That government and society has a responsibility to make sure that the citizenry isn't starving. That's why Social Security was instituted.

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If you go back and read all my posts, you will see that I never even implied that our elders have outlived their usefulness.

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Did you or did you not say: That seems to be an indication that they have outlived their usefulness.Did you or did you not say: "Penalize"? Just what sort of "penalty" are you talking about? What is the problem about "going on forever"? They're still productive members of society. Isn't that a good thing?

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there should be a happy medium somewhere where people are not hired strictly based on how cheap and how much they could work and not turn our country into one big social welfare organization.

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One of the most important things to realize in order to accomplish that, however, is that the people you think are part of the "big social welfare organization" aren't.There is a significant problem of "mandatory retirement." These workers are not ready to go.Perhaps it would help if you would define what you mean by "one big social welfare organization."

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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I don't know about you, but I know with absolute certainty that it is almost impossible for my dad to relearn something new.

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Irrelevant. Your father is not the typical case. How many times do I have to say it before you remember it?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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You keep missing the point, Rrhain.

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Incorrect. I get your point. It's just that your point is wrong. The older worker can go all day long, just as the younger worker can.The only difference is that the older worker, because of the experience and work history, will cost more. It isn't that the work won't get done. It isn't that it won't be of as high quality. It isn't that it won't be done on schedule.It's money.

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Probably not, but nevertheless they can work longer hours for less pay.

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No, they can't. They can work for less pay, but not for longer hours.You have severely underestimated the capabilities of the older workforce and that is precisely the problem the older workforce is facing: People think that they're not up to it despite all indications that they are.

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In fact, I would argue that in today's economy 10 not-so-well-built but workable and cheap computers are prefered over 1 well-built and expensive computer.

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Irrelevant. Workers are not computers. The analogy fails.

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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It doesn't matter if they are useless or not. It's hard for them to find another job, period.

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Then why did you bring it up? You're the one who was saying they don't have the energy, can't put in the hours, etc., etc. Well, they have. They can. They do.So if it isn't that they aren't as productive, why did you bring it up?

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Except for that last part, you're wrong. They don't have the same skills because they don't have the experience. They aren't capable of working longer hours. The only thing they have over the more experienced workers is the fact that they can be hired for less money.

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You kidding?

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No.

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But not because they're better workers. They're hired because they're cheaper.

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And your point is? since when did I say they are better workers?

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Did you or did you not just say, "You kidding?" in response to a claim that younger workers don't have the same skills and experience as older workers? Is that or is that not an indication that you think younger workers are better workers?Perhaps you could define what you mean by "better"?

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There is a difference between being able to live longer and having the energy to compete with the younger generation.

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I don't know how this got translated to outliving one's usefulness.

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"Having the energy to compete."What do you think that means?

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My point has always been that at least some members of society don't have the strength to go on working 40 hours a week.

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Indeed. That's why SSI also covers disability.They are not as numerous as you are making out.

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You seem to be saying something like "since some members of society can keep working until they die of old age, it should be the case that every member of society should be expected to do the same."

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You've got the implication backwards. What I am saying is that even though some members of society are not able to keep working as they reach seniority, it should not be assumed that all or even most should be expected to be the same.Given that our economy has shifted significantly from being primarily labor-based, we find that the older workforce is just as productive as the younger workforce and that they can work well into seniority. The fact that there are those that can't should not be held against those that can.

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I am, however, opposed to keep moving the retirement age back and back and back and finally to "until death do you stop working."

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Even when the retirement age is well within the productive years of a worker? When SSI was instituted, the age of benefits was 65...a few years more than the average life expectancy. In a labor-based economy where you can easily have worked your body to death by the time you made it to 65.We don't live in such a world anymore. We need to reconsider some things. One of those is that older workers are less productive than younger ones. Since they are going to need to plan and prepare for living a life that extends far beyond what has commonly been called "retirement age," they do not deserve to be considered "not having the energy" of a younger worker. The reason that they are going to be living so far beyond what has commonly been called "retirement age" is that they do have the energy.

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Perhaps it would help if you would define what you mean by "one big social welfare organization."

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Has it occured to you that it wasn't meant to be taken literally?

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Did you or did you not say: I took the introductory phrase "What I have been saying" to mean that what was to follow was your point.I wasn't supposed to take your point seriously?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Troy responds to me:

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I just showed you at least one case where a person is worn out at a relatively early age.

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Are you seriously claiming that your father is representative of the typical person over the age of seniority?How do you rectify that with your immediate followup to the example of your father with someone who seems to be quite the industrial person?Part of the problem older people have in trying to find work is that people think they "don't have the energy" of younger workers. That is nothing more than a euphemism for "not as good a worker."Are you trying to say that your father is the typical case?

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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!