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Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Every village needs an idiot
Posted by Jill | 7:27 AM

...and at the Village of the New York Times, the idiot is John Tierney. Are there no limits to the willingness of this man to look foolish in public print?

Having exhausted the "Women hate competition and ambition" meme, he's now moved on to the Lazy Elderly:

Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.

The problem isn't that Americans have gotten intrinsically lazier. They're just responding to a wonderfully intentioned system that in practice promotes greed and sloth. Social Security is widely thought of as a kumbaya program that unites Americans in caring for the elderly, but it actually creates ugly political battles among generations.

With the help of groups like AARP, the elderly have learned to fight for the right to retire earlier and get bigger benefits than the previous generation - all financed by making succeeding generations pay higher taxes than they ever did themselves.

The result is a system that burdens the young and creates perverse incentives for people to retire when they're still middle-aged. Once you've worked 35 years, more work often yields only a tiny increase in your benefits (sometimes none at all), but you still have to keep paying the onerous Social Security tax, which has more than doubled over the last half century.

If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and fewer struggling young families. There would be more national wealth and tax revenue available to help the needy, including people no longer able to work as well as the many elderly below the poverty line because they get so little Social Security.


First of all, the reason Social Security benefits become "bigger" than those for the previous generation is because of rising prices. A cup of coffee in a diner is now a dollar, instead of the twenty-five cents it was when I was a kid. Does that mean the diner is now gouging the customer?

As for the "perverse incentives to retire in middle age", obviously Mr Tierney has never tried to get a job once past fifty. Why would he, when he has news outlets like the Times willing to pay him for his idiocy? But the fact of the matter is that as American workplaces contract, the middle-aged are the first to go. All over this country, downsized and outsourced middle-aged professionals are now working at jobs that often pay only a third -- if that -- of their former salaries. Companies may be hiring now, but they are NOT going to take on a fifty-year-old when they can get a twenty-two-year-old for less money, and delude themselves that they're going to get forty years out of said new graduate.

There are many of us in middle age who would work longer if it were possible, but jobs are getting more difficult to find. I am a Web developer about to turn 50 in a matter of days, and I can tell you: if something were to happen to my current job, my income would collapse. I'm a woman, preposterously healthy and relatively fit, with good cholesterol levels and 120/70 blood pressure and a five-day-a week workout schedule -- but I'm overweight and therefore automatically assumed to be both lazy and a health risk. Web work is a young person's game, and the age discrimination starts kicking in at 40 for men, and around 35 for women.

Before moving to my current job at a quasi-government nonprofit research facility where the demographic skews forty-plus, I interviewed at a major media outlet. I had just turned 45 at the time. The distractingly friendly HR staffer who did the initial screening asked me a number of "cultural reference" questions clearly designed to discern my age (since I don't put unrelated positions on my resume). Alas, I didn't see what he was doing, and as soon as I knew what a slide rule was and how to use it, I could tell that the interview process would be shortened. Oh, I was allowed to meet with the twenty-something department supervisors, but that five-minute portion of the interview was a perfunctory description of the job. I was asked no questions, and when the HR staffer picked me up to escort me out of the building, his demeanor was no completely different, and he said, curtly, "I don't think you'd be a good fit here." Translation: This is a young group, and you're not.

I wonder how Mr. Tierney proposes that the middle-aged people he wants to work till they drop deal with this? Presumably he would advocate plastic surgery for everyone -- though if you can't pay for that, you're out of luck. Perhaps his next column will deal with why we should execute anyone who can't afford to stay young forever.
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