Age discrimination is widespread and has been for years, everyone just shrugs

 Don't complain when it happens to you. No one cares.

 

More than half, 56%, of full-time workers in their early 50s get pushed out of their jobs (due to circumstances like a layoff) before they’re ready to retire, according to a 2018 paper published by the Urban Institute.

“Job loss at older ages is really consequential,” said Johnson, a report co-author. He attributes much of that workplace dynamic to ageism.

Just 10% who suffered an involuntary job separation in their early 50s ever earn as much per week after their separation as before it, the Urban Institute paper said. In other words, 90% earn less — “often substantially less,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s research shows that in the aftermath of the Great Recession (from 2008 through 2012), workers 50 to 61 years old who lost a job were 20% less likely to be reemployed than workers in their 20s and early 30s. Those age 62 and older were 50% less likely to have a new job.

 

More.

The so-called tight labor market is a euphemism for age discrimination by employers

Employers can't find enough young, cheap labor because of declining birth rates, reducing the available pool (blue line year over year growth in decline on an average basis since the mid-1980s, lower than 1% for 20 years).

There's still plenty of older, more expensive labor out there, but employers keep getting rid of them and won't rehire them (red line year over year growth steady between 2-3% for 20 years).

Age discrimination update: Unemployment rate for those 55+ estimated to be 12%, 2.5 million want to work but can't get hired

Reported by Reuters, here:

Further, if you add jobless workers who gave up looking after more than four weeks, the 55-plus unemployment rate is a whopping 12 percent, SCEPA [Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School] analysis shows. Looked at another way, 2.5 million older Americans want a job but do not have one.

New York Times opinion piece against age discrimination never once mentions the main reason for it: The young can be paid much less

The number one cost of doing business is employees, and employers will do anything they can to reduce it: fire the old and hire the young, ship the jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets, and the coming zinger, automate them out of existence.

From the story here:

The problem is ageism — discrimination on the basis of age. A dumb and destructive obsession with youth so extreme that experience has become a liability. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botox and hair transplants before interviews — and these are skilled, educated, white guys in their 20s, so imagine the effect further down the food chain.

Age discrimination in employment is illegal, but two-thirds of older job seekers report encountering it. At 64, I’m fortunate not to have been one of them, as I work at the American Museum of Natural History, a truly all-age-friendly employer.

I write about ageism, though, so I hear stories all the time. The 51-year-old Uber driver taking me to Los Angeles International Airport at dawn a few weeks ago told me about a marketing position he thought he was eminently qualified for. He did his homework and nailed the interview. On his way out of the building he overheard, “Yeah, he’s perfect, but he’s too old.”

Q2 2012 GDP, First Estimate, Up Only 1.5 Percent. Q1 Revised Up To 2 Percent.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis report may be found here. The customary summer revision of the data going back several years is also part of the release, here.

The revised real GDP numbers going back to 2008 are something of a stunner, revealing no real GDP growth in any year from 2008 at 2.5 percent or above.

I am reminded of this statement attributed to Ben Bernanke three years ago today at Reuters, here:

It takes GDP growth of about 2.5 percent to keep the jobless rate constant, Bernanke noted. But the Fed expects growth of only about 1 percent in the last six months of the year.

"So that's not enough to bring down the unemployment rate," he said.


Since we haven't had annual GDP growth of 2.5 percent for going on five years, declining unemployment obviously has had nothing to do with government action, but rather with the growing number of people not counted as unemployed. Headline unemployment is based on the answer to the question "Did you look for work in the last four weeks?" and if you answered "No" you are not counted as unemployed even if you are.

Americans have dropped out in massive numbers because they are tired of beating their heads against a wall of mismatched skills, massive age discrimination, cheaper foreign labor and inhospitable government policy toward business, and they no longer count, quite literally.

It's no surprise really. 50 million abortions since 1973 haven't counted either. And while a gunman killing a dozen or more in a theatre makes big news for a few days, a similar number of illegals dying in a truck crash a few days later doesn't.

The message of the "modern" world is that lives are expendable, especially unemployed lives, who are now nothing more than "depreciating assets".

The Federal Reserve's ZIRP is Another Form of Age Discrimination

Baby boomers, like Ben Shalom Bernanke, are such a self-loathing brood. First they put us all out of work, and then they pay us nothing on our savings:

[I]t is reasonable to call Bernanke the enemy of savers, because he is the enemy of savers. When one can’t earn anything over one year without risk, something is wrong. ...

Saving deserves a return. Let the Fed raise the Fed funds rate by 1%, and they will see that there is no harm to the banks, and little harm to the economy. Once you have 1% slope between twos and tens you have more than enough oomph to make the economy move. What, does the AARP have to bring a age discrimination lawsuit against the Federal Reserve to make this happen? The Fed is discriminating against the elderly.

David Merkel has more to say here.