Bosses want hard workers, so they’re hiring older people
wsj.com
wsj.com
> people are living longer and having fewer children—and some retirement-age folks have little choice but to work because of inflation and a weak stock market.
... This is a dystopian story wrapped up in a weird, feel good narrative. First of all, the big position described as an example is a part-time one and at a package-shipping station. Sure, that's work that needs to be done, but it's not going to do anything for a young person looking to afford rent near a urban center, or even buy a house. Of course, the older folks can work there. They don't have to pay rent anymore. They've got their house. Usually near city centers.
Let's say that most jobs are not the sort above, i.e. full-time and paying somewhat average. If those are being taken by older folks who are coming out of retirement because "inflation and a weak stock market" ... well, that certainly tells you all you need to know about this. What is this? We, as a society, have created a world where younger folks aren't incentivised to put in any hard work because it gets them nothing while older folks who are meant to be retired are now forced to work even more.
> There is no official measure of discrimination claims on the basis of being too young because federal law protects only workers over 40
I don't see the need for one to exist honestly but this is the prefect example of the world being slanted against young folks.
It is called capitalism for a reason...
How out of touch one has to be to be calling the result of the latest mega bull-run on US stocks "a weak stock market"? If you want to see a real "weak stock market", check out Warsaw Stock Exchange, where stocks trade at 50% of their 2007 value - whereas, the US market is at 270% of its 2007 value, so basically doing 5x better.
[1] https://gieldomania.pl/bananowa-gielda-dlaczego-mowimy-tak-n...
How fast is your precious stock market gonna plummet once the world starts abandoning the USD as its reserve currency?
Agreed. But to be fair. There are three Wes here.
We #1 who made it happen. That is, government (both right and left), big business, special interests, the media, etc.
We #2 who watched and allowed it to happen.
We #3 who made attempts to push back but were marginalized as Luddites, xenophobic, etc. Mind you some of this energy has been misguided but that should detract from the underlying cause of the frustrations. Unfortunately, it has.
The current situation isn't sustainable. Unfortunately, We #1 has refused to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the situation. Whether that intentional or negligence, it doesn't matter. The situation is heating up. Dangerously.
p.s. Slightly off topic, this is why I'm *always* suspect of jobs reports. "X jobs were created..." Ok? But of what quality? $15 p/h or $40 p/h. It it was the latter, I'm sure they would let us know.
While 80% of retirees in the US own their own home (and let's not pretend that 20% is a small number), slightly more than half of those homeowners haven't paid off their mortgage.
So, most retirees in the US still have to either pay rent or make mortgage payments.
A mortgage is far cheaper than rent. Even though that hypothetical cohort still has debts to pay, their cost of living is far more affordable than renting an equivalent place on the same spot.
Also, due to the ongoing rural-urban migration and gentrification, a house bought a couple of decades ago in the outskirts tends to be far more central and with far more benefits than those in the market right now with an equivalent cost.
I don't know the general stats of this at all. But of the people I personally know, their mortgage payments tend to be on par with what renting a comparable house would cost.
The financial advantage to buying vs renting isn't a smaller monthly bill, it's that you're building equity if you're buying.
In a few more years after that, inflation will have started to tilt the advantage substantially in favor of the mortgage over renting, as the latter can freely recalibrate to the market while the former is locked in at the time of signing.
The only downsides for mortgage versus rent are ongoing property taxes and upkeep, which are highly variable from one case to the next, but nowhere approach the cost of paying an equivalent amount of rent. And of course you have to discount equity as well.
I think what the OP meant is a mortgage that was initiated 15 to 20 years ago is far cheaper than rent today which is true.
of comparable size/desirability. The thing with a mortgage is, you're likely 'stuck' with the property you have, and so you may be stuck paying more money than you really need to pay. Likely if instead you just were renting, you could rent something far smaller with smaller payments, and be ahead.
Why is WSJ spinning this as some sort of upbeat champion story. Rather than the bleak distopia it clearly illustrated? Oh yeah, psychopaths.
Isn’t the whole point of progress that ... you know … we progress towards something better ?
What is the point of the productivity gains we had due to automation, if we never get to enjoy the benefits of that ?
Every parent wants their child to have a better life than them, better life to most means more opportunities. More opportunities to do what exactly ? More opportunities to work more hours ?
I understand the economy does not quite work like that, but I still think it is something we should strive for.
When I hear complaints like this I tend to ask myself "is this a staff problem or a management failure?" And most of the time, IME it's the latter.
If you have kids, that's a given - kids get sick, and so do you, and most get kids in their 20s and 30s...but it is curious that many senior workers have practically spotless records, compared to their younger peers.
From then moment on (8y have passed), I hover around 7-12 days per year. Quite a change.
> I regularly just feel like shit for basically no reason, and will want to take a day off because of that.
I feel like I've seen a rise in this. I'm not sure if older generations sucked it up or if it's a new thing.
But then I visit reddit, and I despair. Or my wife comes back from substitute teaching at the junior high or high school and tells me what she saw.
It's definitely a mixed bag.
If you won't be able to afford a house anyway, why bother working hard? Just do the bare minimum and at least enjoy some of your free time in a minimalist way.
It's a consequence of economic inequality we have created. If you want people to work hard you have to make it worth it for them, otherwise they check out of the economy, check out of having kids, etc. and blaming them for buying lattes, avocado toast and airpods isn't the real problem no matter how much you call them lazy and entitled.
Worker productivity has skyrocketed since the '70, but the workers' wage growth lagged far behind. What didn't lag behind was basic necessities like housing, education, healthcare, childcare. Good thing commodities like cars, TVs and smartphones got cheaper though, amirite?
People worked hard in the past because the local company they worked for contributed back to the community and was owned by locals you could see, interact with, hold accountable or riot against them, so even though those were still ruthless capitalists, they also had their limits at which they would exploit their own living environment and contributed back to the community in some way (trainings, apprenticeships, schools, hospitals, charities, kindergartens, etc.)
But now, after decades of corporate mergers and acquisitions, when most land, natural resource and means of production is owned by some giant faceless publicly traded mega-corp with HQ in some offshore tax heaven, who's only interest is extracting as much as possible from your community for the benefit of the shareholders, without giving anything back (not even taxes), and you are just a disposable commodity in an excel sheet for them, then why bother?
And yet, having a good leader for a manger or boss will still get me to work hard(er), but that is such a rare occurrence.
By far the most important trait is that they know their team and their strengths and weaknesses, put them doing the right tasks for their skillset, and trust them to get the job done.
The second most important trait is a clear vision. They know what they need to achieve, what resources they need and/or have available, and don't waste time on pointless busywork (like scrum poker)
Working with someone like that makes work very rewarding. It is unfortunately almost impossible to find such a leader in most big companies as their company structure with 30 layers and PMs and what not simply does not allow it.
Competent, has solid strategy, can execute it.
I used to work at a summer camp and during meal time, it was easy to tell who the good leaders were.
They weren't the people at the front of the line before their campers. The good leaders made sure their subordinates ate first and they waited to eat last and ate with their campers, rather than the staff table.
If anything, I guess finally US is catching up with the fact that most countries don't have a workaholic culture, and people rather work to live, not live to work.
You are right. There is nothing in for young people working in a company their dream they don't share. It doesn't even make the ends meet, so why bother?
1.8 million people over the age of 55 die every year in the US (per US CDC). This labor pool will dwindle over time.
Spoiler alert: those 4m people aging into over 55 were likely already working, so they're not taking a bunch of 'new jobs' , just shifting roles (and vacating their previous roles). You're still losing that 1.8m per year.
You have to look at the other end of the job pool for new entrants, those turning 18, and see what their attitudes are. That's the parent comment's argument. The younger people will take up a larger and larger percentage of the 'under 55 year old workforce' and have a very different relationship with work than those that are currently over 55.
Eventually they'll take enough of a chunk of the workforce that corporations will have no choice but to accommodate, because they can't just keep tapping into the dwindling 'people who will overwork themselves into an early grave' demographic to make up for it.
Nothing has been left for the kids. Everything has been financialized, and the effect of that is that everything is priced so that you can't get much out of it.
Smart kid, likes math and science? You used to be able to get into a university relatively easily, with decent but not top few percent grades. When you got there you wouldn't be saddled with huge debt. When you finished there was a decent chance to stay in the academy. Try getting tenure now.
When you left uni you could find a job because not everyone wanted the same few jobs. People aren't stupid, they've realised some jobs get all the pay. Now it's either the dream job, or get a job that you can't be happy with.
Now try buying a house with that average job. You can't, not even with years of work.
On top of it all the ideology of the previous generation is that it's all your own fault. People who had a huge leg up after the war seem to believe it was all them and everyone should should just work harder.
Edit: Let me continue my rant:
Not only is everything a contest, it starts at a young age, before you even know what you want to be when you grow up. If your parents are rich, they know what levers to pull. If kiddo is gonna work in banking, they will find someone to let junior sit on a desk for a week so they can say they have experience. If you have a selective school system, the parents will spend money on tutors. I was astonished to find my kid was the only one not being tutored right through the summer, several times a week. I watched a documentary about Korean schools where the kids are in school during their entire waking hours. There's got to be a different sort of childhood.
Back to economics. We have instituted a system where the incumbents are bailed out when they mess up. It used to be that some old guy who had gotten out of touch with his customers would hit the rocks and have to close down. That would create an opening for some younger person, probably an employee in that industry. Every level in the food chain benefits from this, whether it's a multinational breaking up their widget division or the local restaurant. Nowadays, biding your time is wasting your time. You're in a pyramid that gets very sharp at the top, and there are no pieces falling off.
Finally, voting and demographics. People who are retiring in the next few years are a huge voting block across many countries (even ones that aren't democratic, lol) and they will want their needs met by people who are working. It's not going to be viable to tell them "hey you didn't in aggregate raise enough productive kids, you made your bed now lie in it". So the terms of trade with younger generations will simply be changed so that younger people face worse and worse deals than the boomers.
Academics, or even "smart" work aside, you used to be able to pay rent, buy a car, and save for a house on minimum wage, and later still with a strong entry level salary in pretty much any blue collar work.
Now, minimum wage will leave you homeless in most places.
> On top of it all the ideology of the previous generation is that it's all your own fault.
We're a few generations past the boomers, but you're right, Millenials and Zoomers (and the oldest of gen Alpha) definitely have to deal with this
The city did not like all those cars parked out front so they instituted a policy which targeted these people, levying fines through shady and aggressive tow companies.
You had to have a car to get to work though - and although they could partly solve this by painting bike lanes to make biking more viable, they did not do that either.
But the city wanted to have its cake and eat it too - so it incentivized local factories to expand their operations to bring more of these folks to the city to work, making the problem worse.
It is like that scene from "History of the world Pt. 1". Fuck the poor!
Why would getting tenure be harder nowadays? If it really is, probably because there are more people getting a PhD in the first place (because more people are going to university in the first place).
But perhaps this is also somewhat of a tangent to your main point.
It seems to be partly volume but also that universities are very reluctant to give tenure. If you're a younger academic you're probably working at multiple universities on short term contract. My wife is taking some university courses and one of her professors works at 4 different schools to make ends meet.
I sound like Karl Marx himself when I say it, but it's the capitalists extracting as much work as possible from the helpless workers. (I don't think I'm normally even on the left, but here we are.)
So what are we going to do about it? I suspect nothing until people start rioting
Yes, housing is a problem. But then fix the regulation that inhibits development of housing and makes it more expensive. And then go work in construction as houses don't build themselves. Wealth is to be created not to be redistributed until there is nothing left.
The current trend is reaching the breaking point.
You're neglecting the fact that nowadays there is very little actual use for a university. If I want to study something, I have instant access to it.
Ok, so as long as we're clear you're asserting this claim without any evidence, just your belief that reading a book somehow grants the same education as, say, a higher level formal education.
I've been told on numerous occasions by people that I was right about university (I've been telling people not to bother for like 7 years now), and that it wasted their time and drained their bank account for nothing.
Unless you're trying to convince someone else you did those things.
> I've been told on numerous occasions by people that I was right about university (I've been telling people not to bother for like 7 years now), and that it wasted their time and drained their bank account for nothing.
People can say lots of things, until there's proof there's no reason to believe it. Again, if you have examples please let me know.
This is very easy to do if you've actually done those things.
If Ramanujan did it you can too.
No, no, you've skipped the vital steps - how do they get the work? Just reading a book or three doesn't give you the ability to get that work. Or are you of the belief that if you watch an online lecture and read a couple of books you can start making valuable contributions to mathematics? Again, examples would be good.
> If Ramanujan did it you can too.
I'm just going to say if you're most contemporary example you can come up with is from 150 years ago you may have a problem with your argument. The academic landscape has slighty changed in that time. But I'm feeling generous, I will accept that one person every 100 years can probably do it. That doesn't make it "very easy to do", in fact it's an argument for the opposite. It would seem it's easier to become president given that there have been a lot more example of those in the last 100 years.
Yes.
I sometimes wonder if Boomers find it funny when people say things like "people who had a huge leg up after the war" given what that leg up consisted of.
The problem isn't the work. Houses are so different today (considerably larger and built with amenities like air conditioning, fireplaces, dishwashers, garbage disposals) that you are simply not buying the same thing. A house was apparently as likely to lack running water in 1950 as it is to lack air conditioning today. Same deal with cars - a household then would only have one and by modern standards it was an unsafe gas guzzling under-powered abomination.
The problem is not that your income is low compared to your parents (it is not; they were statistically probably impoverished compared to you), the problem is it's impossible and in some cases literally illegal to buy stuff as crappy as what they owned. We've priced the poor out not by cutting their salaries but by destroying old housing stocks, NIMBYing out affordable housing, imposing fuel economy standards, killing acid rain, and just generally making the entry level of everything more luxurious because the economy was awash with easy money.
The exception (as Yglesias notes) is university, which really is generally more expensive for the same or probably lower quality.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/nostalgia-economics-is-totally-...
It is not the house that is expensive, it is the real estate.
(Prefab houses today are built far more efficiently than anything before, accounting for both materials and man hours. Same with cars.)
But as the Yglesias article points out, your parents (unless very rich) were probably not buying a new house. They had old housing stock lying around. You don't. And if you want to build a new modular home, it's probably illegal to put it where you want and probably impossible to finance it if you can:
https://www.finelinehomes.com/biggest-problems-modular-homes...
Even if your parents bought a house twice as expensive, it would be cheaper. They could have used the extra money on insulation or piping or whatever the difference was, they just didn't.
Besides this is like saying televisions were all crappy black and white units so your parents didn't have it so easy. But the hedonic adjustment is just that, you can't buy a crappy unit now so you pretend the difference matters.
What went for a house then has got to be the standard, surely.
The point is the hedonic adjustment. It's not that the kids don't live like the Boomers because they can't, it's that they don't live like the Boomers because both the government and the market wouldn't let them if they wanted to, which they don't.
> You can afford a 1950s house
Where I am from in Europe, most houses from 1950s are in use. The apartment buildings are generally constructed to higher standards than modern ones (thicker concrete, less use of aerated concrete, no plasterboard interior walls, and so on). Apartment buildings from maybe 1890-1940 are considered premium due to better architecture, higher ceilings, robustness etc. New buildings to those standards are simply not possible.
Old buildings have been continually updated with amenities; water and sewage, central heating, internet. The cost of these are rounding errors compared to the market value.
Modern buildings are cost-optimized to a whole new level. If you honestly have difficulties understanding this; it's equivalent to comparing modern flatpack furnitures with semi-handbuilt ones from 1950s factories. The cost in man-hours and materials of modern furnitures is a fraction of the old ones.
"In 1989, when baby boomers were around the same age as millennials are today, they controlled 21% of the nation’s wealth. That’s almost five times as much as what millennials own today."
On top of that housing and university costs have exploded in the same time. And now inflation counters even investing in a good mutual fund. I have had to move to a third world country, working remotely in tech, to even have a chance at a normal family like I grew up in.
Then there's the media manipulation. Both domestic political parties, as well as foreign states, have become extremely adept at making us hate each other. There's no philia left at all.
When I extrapolate all this out, my kids will be poor and my grandkids will be revolutionaries.
I personally feel much better if I use all my brain and a ton of energy at work. I've had a couple of jobs where this wasn't the case, and I found myself much less happy and, ironically, exhausted. At least in my case, working hard has led to a lot of opportunities for learning and growing, and money followed too. Not enough to buy a house, that's true, but I live a more comfortable life than my parents who did have a house.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while the game might be rigged at a high level, my personal experience is that working hard still puts me where I would like to be.
It's always been the case and research shows that when employees feel that they are valued, trusted, and fairly compensated their performance improves (for examples see https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2012/03/well-being or https://www.hindawi.com/journals/edri/2021/1751495/ or https://www.ijlass.org/data/frontImages/gallery/Vol._3_No._1...)
> They did it out of necessity, cultural expectations and personal fulfillment.
Necessity and cultural expectations might make someone seek and maintain employment, but being treated fairly makes them work harder, makes them more loyal, and leads to better outcomes. Demoralizing employees is always going to result in reduced productivity. It may be true that the work you do is is fulfilling enough to prevent you from being demoralized even if your employer treats you like shit, but I doubt most people feel that strongly about their work. If they aren't earning enough to take care of themselves, let alone their families, morale isn't going to be very high.
Hard work can lead to financial security, fair compensation, and professional fulfillment, but there is no guarantee that it will. It's an employers job to convince their employees that their hard work is worthwhile and will pay off for them in the end.
You're assuming "young people" can even find a job, considering employers now just collect resumes for a rainy day, or something. I'm aging out of being young, and when I read about that I kinda just wondered what the point of applying to jobs even is anymore.
And maybe that has something to do with making more money and being able to afford more things?
Slightly exaggerated, but from surveys in Germany, I gather that young people want to retire at 60, work part time, have at least 30 days of vacation per year, earn enough to afford "a good life" (large flat, vacations, parties), and do something interesting at work that "vibes" with them.
Those don't mix well for most people and jobs, because few people get paid well to do their hobbies part-time. And how could they? They'll spend 20-25 years until they start working, then spend 35-40 years working (with a sabbatical or two thrown in), then they'll spend another 30 years retired (life expectancy is rising).
And maybe there's also a social contagion. Individually, people might come to a different conclusion, but if a large number of their peers rejects the opportunities, there's a good chance they'll let that affect their judgement.
My grandfather worked ~20 years in mines. That was very hard work. He got nothing for it. The house he had to turn in (wasn't his) when the war (WW2) broke out. He had 5 kids (which was not a particularly high number). He managed to make it work by making wood furniture (mostly windows and window related stuff). He didn't make much from that either, but more than in the mine. He claims it was MUCH less intense work.
After the war, he got a job as a police officer. He did essentially nothing for another ~45 years (yes, he worked from 11 to 67 I believe). He's not rich but on that wage he eventually got 13 kids total (Christmas parties no longer fit in their house once half his kids got married), put 3 through university, and all of them through higher education.
We don't pay for hard work. Not back then. Not now. Plumber still makes a lot less than software engineer, and software engineer is not hard work.
This impression is an artifact of comparing apples and oranges. Many sectors have seen almost zero real productivity growth in decades, such as the hospitality industry (waiters and waitresses). See: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/07/21/look-to...
The median worker does not work in a sector that has seen high productivity growth, even if the economy as a whole has seen high productivity growth.