A new NBER Working Paper, Countries For Old Men: An Analysis Of The Age Pay Gap by Nicola Bianchi and Matteo Paradisi, reveals, reveals that the pay gap between older and younger workers has been widening for decades across high-income countries, with wages of older workers growing much faster than those of their younger counterparts. The paper uses administrative and survey data to investigate this growing wage disparity.
long comment on my perspective as a younger person, putting behind a spoiler because I don’t want to make people’s thumbs fall off from having to keep swiping to scroll past it lol
I am in my mid 30s and I can honestly I have never worked for a company that was interested in developing my skills.
Every job has tried to devalue me and actively treated any kind of investment in me as a liability or waste of time. Actually when I stop and think about it, every business I have worked for is always trying to fight fires and the people running them say they never have any time to actually train employees. Everyone needs to come in to jobs with the specific qualifications listed needing absolutely zero training even if it is an entry level job in that particular industry.
It doesn’t feel like I am wanted as a human being by my society, my body is wanted for its physical capacity but I inhabiting my body am unwanted. I have no investment in this society and or economy in terms of work because I have always been spit on and treated as useless. Why would a job care about training me and giving me career opportunities when everything is a short term contract or the company will go through layoffs in the next economic cycle just around the corner?
The place I grew up in, my parents generation were the first generation in the area to really populate the rural beach town I grew up in, a lot of people my parents age spent their entire lives there always finding a place they could fit in no matter what stage of life they were in. Not for my generation, housing costs and other local factors lead to the door getting slammed shut on any of us making a life where we were raised… while at the same time we were raised hearing older people talk all the time about how wonderful it is to live their whole lives in this place.
When I think about this and how much my parents generation (boomers) destroyed the planet and locked us into a warming trajectory that will lead to millions and millions (if not billions, honestly who actually knows?) of people dying from climate related wars or famines not to mention the extinction of countless species, I feel this deep sense that there is no bridge between me and my parents nor between my generation and theirs.
We stand, each on opposing cliffs, with the remnants of a bridge far below in the canyon, and I watch as the wealthy of the older generation pack up everything and recede into retirement (“fuck you I got mine”). I turn around and look to the future and see that a division like this, of this supremely existential severity, is unlikely to happen again soon in humanity. For an entire generation of wealthy boomers to so catastrophically foreclose the futures of their children and betray their basic responsibility to pass the future on to the next generation is honestly disgusting and future generations will not and can not make the same mistake.
Boomers always get upset when I say this and say stuff like “Not all Boomers ok!” and yes I get that (I understand there are many people from the boomer generation who care and fought hard!) but I really think older people in general have zero fucking clue how their generation will be remembered for tens of thousands of years at a minimum for destroying the planet.
I don’t consider my parents my family, and I don’t consider the older people around me as possessing an adult wisdom that will be passed on to me about how to steward our lives and the landscape around us, they are part of a sickness of ideology that forces me into a much closer identification with the masses of unborn future humans who will have to also deal with the catastrophic consequences of the later half of the 20th century.
I share nothing in common with the vast majority of older people on the other side of the cliff, especially because most of them pretend it was a normal healthy thing that they blew up the bridge between their generation and the next generation of young people, and I just want to punch older people in the face when they start hemming and hawing about whether climate change is real seeing as they won’t have to really deal with it even though they participated every day of their lives in causing it.
Idk the economic division this article talks about makes perfect sense to me, it feels like a direct embodiment of what it is like to be a young person and feel that your future has been foreclosed.
Pack it up, by and large this is the experience now. Skeleton crews, no training, get out there and make it happen. They’ve drilled down their extraction formula to vacuum all that it can in the shortest amount of time. I’m watching it happen in real time as my company purchases many others, it is the birth of a monopoly, and they’re using the same tactics as any “Big X”. Its all just about funneling money upwards, the rest be damned. They told me I’d make 65k at 1 year, I’m coming up to my 4th year here still under that. Nobody at the top cares. Each one is just another duke out to carve his feifdom.
Perfectly said. You speak my experience, here in the US.
I feel like we’ve been taken hostage, forced to watch atrocities, and made powerless to stop them. I remember being outright mocked by my adults when I tried to do the least thing to change it all. I thought by the time I was an adult, I could do something… but those same adults are still alive. They’re still mocking me.
A snapshot; when I was in high school, I watched No Child Left Behind pass. I wasn’t old enough to vote. I knew how fucked every single student would be who came after me. I talked about it with my classmates! Not one had anything positive to say about it! I called my representatives. No one listened. They told me to grow up and change it myself, then stood in my way when I tried.
I hate knowing that the dread over it all and the soul-crushing inability to change anything is still going to be preferable to trying to survive what’s coming. It only makes me feel more guilty.
Thanks for the reply, yeah, a lot of the negative emotions stem from grief, and I think that grief is actually perfectly rational when we consider grief as an emotion that can interface with modalities other than individual relations.
The biosphere of this planet is being obliterated and sea surface temperatures are off the charts, it makes sense that we grieve for these things as we do other forms of more individual death, but we rarely extend the grace to ourselves to let us just feel those emotions without contorting them into guilt about “feeling bad for no reason about things we can’t control”.
CBT is like “you can’t control this thing, there for it is a waste of time investing negative energy in thinking about it” and it is great advice if the thing you are worrying about is an asteroid randomly coming out of the sky and crushing you, or what someone else’s opinion of you is.
It becomes harder to apply when the situation is rather that you are having trouble enjoying the riverboat ride when you know you are headed over a waterfall (but the river is lazy and calm here, sit down have a drink!).
I’m in my early 40s, and my experience is a polar opposite of yours. I worked for a company straight out of college that, like your experience, didn’t value me or really want to train me.
After 5 years, I moved to a nonprofit and just celebrated my 14 year anniversary there. They have bankrolled several professional certifications and have a genuine interest in developing my career. I have moved into a leadership position, and while I have always been challenged in my growth process, and don’t make near as much as I could at a for-profit company, my salary and work life balance is fantastic.
What industry are you in? Cybersecurity for me. Maybe a different employer might make a difference for you? I’m not sure what your details are, but there are jobs like mine out there.
I couldn’t imagine starting at ground zero today, however. I can appreciate just how hard today’s youth have it, which likely will be similar for my young boys as they reach working age.
GIS, geology and land surveying are the fields I have experience in.
I know there are jobs out there that are good, but there is a part of me inside that is broken from the way that I can feel myself and other people my age being rejected from having a future. Even if I get lucky and get a nice job, I got lucky, things didn’t get better for everybody and… I don’t know it makes sparking fires in my heart like trying to start a campfire with a bunch of damp logs. You can kinda do it… but it always feels like you are putting in more energy than you are getting out.
How do you raise a generation into adulthood while teaching them that they have the privilege of being the particular generation to witness the destruction of our planet as we know it? To understand that their elders are not holders of stories and wisdom but strangers from the world before who still cling violently to their past realities? I know it is a distraction to speak of one generation vs. another generation, that the causes of these problems have to do with wealth inequality and capitalism not some genetic wiring to a particular generation of people (generalizations are always wrong too)… but while recognizing that there is no war but the class war… I also feel compelled to take the long view (I am trained as a geologist after all) that this is a unique period of history where by and large the parents of one generation collectively abandoned a sense of responsibility towards passing on a world to the children of the next generation (and their children and so on). There is a ravine here, between future generations (my generation included) and my parents generation, and I am convinced it will be a ravine that will be spoken of for a very very very long time (it isn’t hyperbolic to say thousands of years assuming humanity goes on that long). It is weird to be living through the middle of it forming.
I’m not ready to crush their spirit yet with the cold truth, as they’re both under 10. However, I’m certainly not going to go the “well just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” approach that my Boomer parents generation took towards younger generations.
I’m also not going to do this reply any justice typing on my phone, but the destruction you speak of (and I don’t disagree that it’s happening) has been occurring for decades, it’s not a recent development, although it has definitely sped up during my lifetime.
I don’t disagree with your thought that there’s a ravine. It’s going to be my generation and younger ones that have to pull us out of it (in the sense of taking responsibility and shepherding our children forward), which is not going to be easy.
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Are they hiring ?
Yes, they are almost always hiring, I will DM you
I think the issue is that jobs that aren’t like your job exist. Glad you’re doing good. We all deserve to thrive, not just survive.