Jeez, someone tell Grandpa Simpson over there to stop rambling.
1: We pay guest posters by the word, so you kinda can't blame him.
I have some related thoughts on my blog (which I have linked before).
As I get into my mid-thirties I'm aware that there are several ways in which my brain just doesn't work as well as it used to.
Well, we all have bad mornings, but I doubt that someone in their thirties has suffered cognitive decline. Your self-critical faculties might have sharpened, though. I saw a BBC presentation of a study where a group of people who took an IQ test at 11 were tested again at the age of 70, or so. They all did better.
One of the reasons that labor economists posit for the "underpay younger people, overpay older people" model is that it serves as an incentive structure to cut turnover. If people develop institutional knowledge that makes them more valuable to one workplace than to others (who to ask when you need a document proofread properly, the best way to get new projects approved, etc.), then it makes sense to underpay new hires and give them extra reason to stick around and build that institutional knowledge. I'm not sure how much I believe this model. I've certainly seen a lot of people stick around for a number of years without seeming to learn much from it.
Interesting that you would mention that knowledge worker jobs tend to encourage people to work later into life, or at least make it easier to work later. I'd say (in my admittedly limited experience) that those seem to be the jobs where it's easiest to upset the "older workers are paid more" model. Many big companies have explicit or guidance salary bands for various technical and research positions. There's a fast track toward partner and big bonus culture at consultancies, financial firms, law firms, etc. Knowledge firms seem to be the first places growing comfortable with 40 year olds reporting to late 20-somethings, and ultimately the "my boss is a lot younger than me" phenomenon is going to be common when longer career arcs start to include a shift down as well as the long plateau.
... My first realization is that it makes me much more sympathetic to transfer payments from the young to the old, ...
I find these hard to defend when the old are better off than the young so your transfer payments are from the poor to the rich (on average).
I saw a BBC presentation of a study where a group of people who took an IQ test at 11 were tested again at the age of 70, or so. They all did better.
11 year olds seem kinda dumb though...
Yeah, but how many could you beat up at once?
I dunno... 2-4 depending on tiredness? I bet they fight dirty, and if I remember middle school correctly, they're persistently vicious creatures once they smell blood.
So mostly, I think that older workers are genuinely going to be worth a premium over younger workers. The worry in situations like education is that people who really don't give a damn about results are going to fire their more experienced, more effective, more expensive employees, hire cheap kids to save money, and not care that work product suffers.
I think older workers being worth a premium is often wishful thinking. Experience is worth something but so are energy, enthusiasm and quickness. In the case of teachers studies have shown that experience helps a bit for the first couple of years but doesn't matter much after that. So I believe older teachers (in a typical seniority based pay system) are objectively less cost effective (and this is one reason districts would like to be able to fire them). Note seniority based pay for teachers (and others) does have an important disadvantage for employees, you are locked in to one employer and region of the country. If for example you (or your spouse) need to move for some reason you take a big hit starting over in a new school district.
Situations where older workers are genuinely less valuable than younger workers are harder. ...
The don't have to be less valuable, they just have worth less than the expected premium. Note this premium is not just in wages, typical benefit packages are costlier for older, more experienced, employees as well.
Oh, sorry, and another couple inter-related thoughts tying to the end of Nick's comment and LB's reply:
This issue seems like it largely comes down to the universal problem in society of applying principles that hold for large groups at the individual level.
LB points out that she's getting better at her job every year she does it, and that's likely true. I believe at a certain point there is a decline in energy and mental faculties that starts to counteract the effects of experience, but it's way off in the future for both Nick and LB, and the timing and rate of that decline vastly depends on the person. However, that improvement from experience tends to be a highly-individual point. Many people just don't seem to improve much, or they improve from such a low base that that new hire next to them is better within a year. That's why applying a "years worked" criterion for pay and/or as a performance proxy may work somewhat on an individual level, but gets swamped by individual variation when applied company- or society-wide. Something akin to a "true merit" system (unattainable in the real world, admittedly) would likely see higher paid people be somewhat older, but there would be a lot more cases of younger people being paid more than their seniors.
This also applies to Nick's point that each individual wants to see their pay rise over time, and it's useful to get a social contract fulfilling that possibility. This desire actually pushes toward younger workers being even more underpaid due to individual differences in how far people will rise.
If someone stays in the bottom few job levels for most of their career, you need to start the salary pretty low to give them room to rise without being priced out within the decade. Someone who gets promoted into higher levels and bigger salaries does not need the extra-low starting base, but it's impossible to identify those people at hire. So providing that flexibility for individual variance and trying to keep everyone on an escalator salary leads to super-underpaying new hires.
Okay, so the big category here seems to me to be assuming that those differences in performance between older and younger (or more and less experienced) workers are going to be similar to the differences intrinsic to a particular worker. "But we've always done it this way" is one of the tropes that tends to undercut any benefit that mere age and experience confers.
Thinking back to my experiences with Big Corporate, one thing that seems clear is that, much of the time, most people who are making decisions about compensation, retention, turnover, performance evaluation, etc. are relying not so much on any studied, objective determination, but rather on whatever sounds reasonable and will rock the boat least/be most beneficial to their department/not bring attention to their own failings/cause them the least amount of work. I have yet to meet a supervisor or manager who is either (a) enthusiastic about doing performance reviews or (b) has enough time to complete them in a meaningful fashion.
My point is: for the most part, everybody is phoning it in, all the time. That's why I'm suspicious of all of these criticisms of unions, tenure, and job protection schemes of any type. If everything about hiring and firing is, at best, arbitrary, or at worst, based on the fickleness and whims of supervisors, then workers need every protection they can get. Yes, it's easy to point to the fellow who's been sitting at the same desk for 20 years, seemingly more inefficient with every month that passes, but would the ultimate goals of the organization really have been served by replacing that position five or 10 times? I doubt it.
Employers may trade off some inexperience for naïveté, and prefer younger workers. Or put another way,
avoid bitter jaded experienced and capable workers.
The Dangle: Illusory Promises of rewards in the future for work performed now.Ahhh, the dangle. In my career on Wall Street, I have discovered the dangle to be an effective way
to get something for nothing from some sucker. It is a way for someone with the appearance of power
and money to obtain goods and services for free, for a mere promise of future benefits. Early in my
career, I fell for the dangle. No more.
1: Sorry, I knew it was a little long, but I didn't realize it was that bad until I saw it posted (btw, is it possible to edit it so that the links are links?)
Also I'm glad to see JBS commenting, in part because I don't have any actual knowledge about how business handles this issue.
I saw a BBC presentation of a study where a group of people who took an IQ test at 11 were tested again at the age of 70, or so. They all did better.
Curves for IQ tend to have a very sharp rise, a sort of plateau from the early twenties towards the thirties, and then a mild, fairly linear decline for decades thereafter. Based on the average, you wouldn't expect somebody's IQ performance to dip below their performance as an eleven year old until very late in life, if ever.
In general -- and this is a point I made in another thread, about when a brain was "fully developed" -- it's a reductive mistake to talk about people "peaking" cognitively in their mid-20s. For one thing, performance on many tests of cognitive ability (things like vocabulary tests, for instance, and tests of social ability) increases basically linearly over the lifetime. Other tests peak in the mid-30s or later. For another thing, the correspondence between laboratory tests of cognitive ability and practical skill is anything but simple. Shearer's points about energy and enthusiasm are probably valid, but could easily (and, to my mind, much more plausibly) be ascribed to life stage and relative expectations as opposed to anything directly linked to physical age.
5
Well, we all have bad mornings, but I doubt that someone in their thirties has suffered cognitive decline. ...
According to wikipedia :
The peak of capacity for both fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence occurs at age 26. This is followed by a slow decline.
This is consistent with my experience and the common belief that mathematicians generally do their best work before age 30. The declines are slow at first but at 56 I am definitely not as "quick" as I used to be and I find learning new material more painful.
17: Assumes that mathematicians are an adequate stand-in for all workers. This may not be correct.
Most teacher pay scales I've seen top out at 15 years, after that the only way to get more than COLA is by more education/professional development. So it's not like the 35 year 60-year old veterans are grossly more expensive than the people in their late 30s.
I have yet to meet a supervisor or manager who is either (a) enthusiastic about doing performance reviews or (b) has enough time to complete them in a meaningful fashion.
There's a big difference between being enthusiastic about performance reviews and being enthusiastic about reviewing performance, if you get me. Any boss, to be halfway decent, needs to give people time to develop and guidance in how well they're doing. This guidance generally fits very poorly with the constricted boxes and rigid schedules of annual or semi-annual performance reviews, but those are a necessary evil required by HR. And a necessary evil for managers with no spine or tact.
I'll admit that there are a LOT of shitty managers out there, so this is only a limited excuse. Being on the other side of that desk helped me appreciate how difficult the job is, but I didn't gain any sympathy for how crappy most managers are.
The peak of capacity for both fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence occurs at age 26. This is followed by a slow decline.
This is a vast simplification that relies on a pretty arbitary division of intelligence capacity. There is no real evidence that "fluid" and "crystallized" intelligence have neural correlates, and if you slice the age-related data differently (or even if you sample over the whole age curve, which most studies don't do, as it's very difficult to get a large enough and heterogeneous enough subject population) you can get very different effects (see above re: vocabulary tests).
21 cont'd: and as far as the thing about mathematicians doing their best work before thirty goes, one, I'm not sure it holds up in practice (I'd love to see real data), but two extracting any real cognitive effect from the twin effects of life stage and expectation seems largely impossible.
22 cont'd: which is not to say that there isn't a decline in a person's raw ability to acquire new skills after the mid-twenties or so; that does seem to hold up. But that pure skill per se isn't the most important thing in the world.
The point about it being psychologically useful for incomes to increase over one's lifetime sort of runs the other way to something I was thinking about recently. While I'm not often around people who are seriously struggling to make ends meet, it's definitely the case that the people I know who are stretched the most thin, financially and otherwise, are mostly people in their late 20s or early-to-mid 30s with young children and house payments. I was guessing (though I haven't posed the question to anyone) that a lot of those people would probably be willing to sacrifice income later in life for more of it now, when they have probably the largest set of financial demands they'll ever have to face (assuming, I guess, that they have a reasonable medical plan forever, which is a fishy assumption, I realize). But, in the absence of employers who expect that they will work for them for life, negotiating a deal like that sounds impossible.
Relating to the cognitive decline issue:
I remember this coming up in labor econ classes and one professor drawing the "average performance vs age" line as a sharp early rise in the early 20s, steady slower rise through until about the mid 40s, plateau through the 40s to early 50s, then decline. That should be taken with a whopping grain of salt, since I can't remember what this line came from, how the data was determined, etc. However, it does seem to fit closer to my personal understanding of how most people perform over the course of their lifetime.
The real problem for an age vs performance standpoint isn't 45 year olds. They've still got a good amount of energy, one hell of a lot of useful experience, and still tend to be pretty quick and picking up the new changes in the field. It's more an issue of the 60 year olds, the 65 year olds who will be staying in the workplace as retirement pushes later and who very rarely are at their peak productivity anymore.
17 This is consistent with my experience and the common belief that mathematicians generally do their best work before age 30.
This seems pretty weird to me, given that mathematics is arguably the field where one has to accumulate the largest amount of background knowledge to get to the forefront of research and begin to make any contributions. Aside from a handful of extreme prodigies, it seems like few people publish much of anything in math until around their mid-twenties. So you're saying the best work usually happens almost immediately, and the decades of productivity afterwards are all downhill? Seems implausible.
(In the rather different world of theoretical physics, my sense is that most people have a large span of years in which they're capable of doing their best work. The only place where young people win is in quickly getting papers out on topics that are active enough that many people are capable of having the right insight at around the same time.)
Loosely related: I speak Spanish as part of my job. Recently, I was mistaken (by phone) for a Cuban. I think this means I'm about fifty years too late for spy work. Sigh.
So, industries I've worked in include food service, financial, journalism, non-profit arts and university administration. Not as broad a range as some people have seen at my age, but not exactly limited either. And I just don't see a lot of room to generalize about performance within or between them.
I've seen people in their fifties doing food service work with an aplomb that put people in their late-teens/early-twenties to shame. And I've seen young people in the financial industry who had a much better intuitive grasp of customer service ideals than folx who'd been at it for 30 years. And I've seen "lifers" in university jobs who weren't 30 yet, and journalists in their late 40s who were much more energetic and incisive about pursuing stories than their counterparts who were a quarter century younger.
I can see why it's tempting to generalize from some fields like mathematics or physics where your genius or lack thereof is pretty much confirmed by the time you're 30. But I don't see much in the way of evidence for the position that we should succumb to that temptation -- not even anecdotal evidence.
If we're considering a person's whole job performance -- not just one or two easy-to-measure metrics, then we have to admit that there are countless factors that play into it. How are they doing at home? How is their general health? Do they have a second job? Are they going to school and working at the same time? What hobbies or interests do they have that help or hinder their work performance? How good is their supervisor? How good are their underlings? What are the structural supports or impediments to them doing their job within the organization? What benefits them or oppresses them within the larger society? What does the general state of their industry do to affect their performance? It seems to me that many of these factors are going to massively overdetermine performance in a way that the experience/mental agility dichotomy doesn't even begin to do. It's easy enough to say "all other things being equal", except for the fact that they never are.
Also, Nick, I wouldn't be too worried about psychologically coping with being overpaid someday. Human thought processes seem built to ensure that no one ever feels overpaid. Sure, that old bastard next to you who always reads ESPN may be overpaid, but not you. After all, you're just on the BBC site because it's your break.
some fields like mathematics or physics where your genius or lack thereof is pretty much confirmed by the time you're 30.
This is bullshit, though.
I think I peaked right after my first manual release. Isn't it ironic?
15
Also I'm glad to see JBS commenting, in part because I don't have any actual knowledge about how business handles this issue.
When I was laid off from IBM they gave us (probably because it was legally required) a list of the ages and job titles of everyone laid off (and I guess not laid off). I don't remember the exact figures but older (50+) workers were definitely more at risk (2+ times as likely to be laid off).
In my case my productivity was definitely down. I had become a specialist in a very narrow area which they no longer needed and I had difficulty finding something else to do. I think this difficulty was in part age related, I had become less flexible, less energetic and less willing and able to learn new stuff and acquire new skills. On the other hand I think the company could have done a bit more to find me something useful to do (although the culture expected the employee to be more proactive than I was comfortable with).
I did receive a reasonable severance package (in return of course for waiving my rights to sue).
I lucked into another job but I think in general employment prospects for laid off mid 50s professionals are pretty grim.
28: fields like mathematics or physics where your genius or lack thereof is pretty much confirmed by the time you're 30
To amplify this a bit: My sense is that you get to hear a lot about the brilliant new hard-sciences person who's made a big splash at 25, and almost nothing about the people who are steadily chipping away at important problems well into their 70s. If the only scientists in the world were ones who'd won a Nobel Prize, we'd be pretty screwed. Generalizing seems foolish at best, but generalizing from the very utmost outliers on the curve seems particularly asinine.
Shearer's points about energy and enthusiasm are probably valid, but could easily (and, to my mind, much more plausibly) be ascribed to life stage and relative expectations as opposed to anything directly linked to physical age.
This is probably true. I suspect that I am overestimating the effects of cognitive decline. I do feel like my memory isn't as good as it used to be, but I also feel like I've worked to optimize my brain for different tasks, so I'm not sure its a useful comparison.
But, in my case, there's the added element of working with computers where the sense of falling behind technically adds to whatever other worries I might have about aging.
I would note, in response to LB's objection, that lawyers and academics are overrepresented at the mineshaft and I feel like those are two fields that are unusual in the degree to which it's normal for people to continue to contribute at a high level into their 60s or 70s.
Also, Nick, I wouldn't be too worried about psychologically coping with being overpaid someday. Human thought processes seem built to ensure that no one ever feels overpaid.
As I've been thinking about this topic I've found that it's made me much more sympathetic to the idea of aging athletes who aren't willing to admit that they're in decline.
Another important thing to remember on the cognitive side (to which I am largely limiting myself in the hope that I'll be slightly less ignorant) is that introspection really doesn't buy you very much clarity. Your intuitive sense of your own relative capacity/skill might or might not have anything to do with actual function.
30: My point is, if you're a Kolthoff or an Erdős, it will be apparent that early, but that doesn't mean that those are the only people who contribute.
it's made me much more sympathetic to the idea of aging athletes who aren't willing to admit that they're in decline
Never be sympathetic to Favre. Never.
Erdös is actually sort of the canonical counter-example to the premise that mathematicians don't do useful work after thirty.
I think I peaked right after my first manual release
I've hit many peaks, but for sure the first of them corresponded exactly with my first manual release.
28.last: Obviously, the really important factor missing from my list is "Do they regularly comment on Unfogged?"
38: But wasn't it obvious that he was a genius by the time he was 30?
I have some related thoughts on my blog (which I have linked before).
That is well put, and looks particularly concise compared to my rambling. Although it still leaves the question of what to do as seniority pay comes under attack.
One other related thought. If you believe that people in the public sector have more job security as they age than people in the private sector, I don't know if that's reflected in the charts that show that total compensation for public employees isn't any higher than their private counterparts (controlling for education).
The chart that I've seen is based on annualized figures for compensation, but obviously years work is a important number as well, which is sometimes, but not always, something that the employees can decide.
23
cont'd: which is not to say that there isn't a decline in a person's raw ability to acquire new skills after the mid-twenties or so; that does seem to hold up. But that pure skill per se isn't the most important thing in the world.
Maybe not but in any industry where the technology is changing rapidly (which is quite a few these days) it really is pretty important.
Never be sympathetic to Favre. Never.
I'm safe there, the NBA is the only sport that I care about. But I'm dangerously close to feeling sympathy for Kobe, and I'm not okay with that.
Actually Shaq would be a better example of an NBA player still wanting to be a go-to scorer even as they lose their touch, but I'm not really okay with feeling sympathy for him either.
43: well, maybe? The thing is the acquisition of skills in the real world doesn't happen in a vacuum; unless (as I think people have noted above) the change is happening so rapidly that prior knowledge is totally irrelevant to skills acquisition, the actual process of learning is going to be more complex than just "pick up this new thing". And, in any case, the decline is very moderate for several decades after the peak.
42
One other related thought. If you believe that people in the public sector have more job security as they age than people in the private sector, I don't know if that's reflected in the charts that show that total compensation for public employees isn't any higher than their private counterparts (controlling for education).
I have seen claims that the greater job security in the public sector (which I don't think is in dispute) is valuable to workers (as in worth 10-15% of salary) and this should be reflected in pay comparisons so presumeably it currently isn't.
38
Erdös is actually sort of the canonical counter-example to the premise that mathematicians don't do useful work after thirty.
But the question is when they peak. No one is claiming they suddenly become morons shortly thereafter, the decline is gradual so if the peak is high enough you can continue to contribute for some time (just like athletes).
But most mathmeticians if I recall correctly publish no more than 1 or 2 papers (perhaps the work in their PhD thesis). I have published about 50 papers but the vast majority were when I was young, I haven't published at all in recent years.
But most mathmeticians if I recall correctly publish no more than 1 or 2 papers (perhaps the work in their PhD thesis).
And manage to maintain an academic job? That seems implausible. If most of them publish 1 or 2 papers because after that they go get a job as a computer programmer or working at a bank, it doesn't say much about the decline of their skills with time.
One more somewhat tangential thought on the subject:
the old are better off than the young so your transfer payments are from the poor to the rich (on average).
There are a couple of different ways to look at this. One, that occurs to me now, is that if you have a social structure that structured so that young people are under compensated and old people are overcompensated, then you can think about it as if young people have an implicit claim to a share of societal resources in later life, and so part of the difference in wealth between young people and old people is that old people have converted that claim into wealth, which young people haven't, and that equalizes the differences somewhat.
This is related to my caveat in the post about investment -- interest is a way of paying people for their formal claim to a share of future resources, but somebody could have the claim without it being a current resource (it makes sense to me).
The other important caveat, however, is that the young and old are not the same population. Particularly if employment is the major mechanism re-distributing resources.
Almost everyone who is young will become old. But not everyone who is young and employed will become old and employed.
[I]n any case, the decline is very moderate for several decades after the peak.
That is reassuring to hear.
I guess the caveat to 48 is that some teaching jobs, like (if I understand correctly) heebie's, might not require one to publish. But again, this doesn't say anything about skill declining with time.
the average person is underpaid for a period of time when they're young
Hahahaha. I think you haven't woken up to how useless you were the last 15 years. I say that as someone who's probably been overpaid in every capacity except cab driver. There I earned my keep.
I haven't read the thread yet, but I've heard it said that people who accomplish anything really significant in pure mathematics do it before they're 30. Of course, this is a group of people, and they probably continue to be good teachers and advisors. But as raw researchers they are considered inferior.
I'm not overpaid, I just underwork.
On the math publishing phenomenon, I'm in a field that doesn't attract nearly that level of intellectual firepower. But it's my experience that the smarter folks mostly left academics. Publishing is a measure of something important, but it's not intellectual capability.
55: But it's my experience that the smarter folks are mostly left academics and lawyers.
Fixed that to fit better with the general tone of the blog.
But as raw researchers they are considered inferior ...by the mineshaft and other people not actually in mathematics. (?)
||
I can't bring myself to announce the death of Knut in traditional ATM fashion. Poor thing.
|>
Anyway, doesn't it just seem like common sense that cognitive skills don't decline sharply at any point during the bulk of one's adult years? Does anyone here really think that the typical fifty-year-old they know is notably less sharp than the typical thirty-year-old they know?
Anyway, doesn't it just seem like common sense that cognitive skills don't decline sharply at any point during the bulk of one's adult years? Does anyone here really think that the typical fifty-year-old they know is notably less sharp than the typical thirty-year-old they know?
Okay but . . . I know that I used the concern about mental decline as my opener, but look at the list that I gave later, ". . . resistant to institutional change, behind the curve technically, and/or lacking passion for the work." All of those seem like reasonable fears.
48
And manage to maintain an academic job? That seems implausible. If most of them publish 1 or 2 papers because after that they go get a job as a computer programmer or working at a bank, it doesn't say much about the decline of their skills with time.
No, these are mostly people who weren't good enough to get an academic job but were good enough to get a PhD which in theory means you were capable (however briefly) of doing research level mathematics.
But it is like athletics, a long career (or publishing record) generally means you were really good at your peak.
59- Depends on where you draw the line between adult and elderly, since it's common sense that at a certain point cognitive skills do decline. And I don't think it's uncommon as an adult to be disturbed at noticing your own aging process, combined with a more developed self-criticism, and exaggerate the decline of one's own abilities. But yeah, thirty to fifty, probably no less sharp.
On preview: I think the fears in 60 are less about cognition and more about falling out of fashion, like the graphic designer doing paste-up, right?
49
There are a couple of different ways to look at this. One, that occurs to me now, is that if you have a social structure that structured so that young people are under compensated and old people are overcompensated, then you can think about it as if young people have an implicit claim to a share of societal resources in later life, and so part of the difference in wealth between young people and old people is that old people have converted that claim into wealth, which young people haven't, and that equalizes the differences somewhat.
Or you can think of it as old people have rigged the system in their favor.
Further, I think the "resistance to change and new technology" is a real thing, but it's not a sign of mental decline or calcification, it's a sign of experience. You've sunk costs into gain experience in a certain skill, and there's a difficulty in accepting its obsolescence.
59
Anyway, doesn't it just seem like common sense that cognitive skills don't decline sharply at any point during the bulk of one's adult years? Does anyone here really think that the typical fifty-year-old they know is notably less sharp than the typical thirty-year-old they know?
This is a little misleading if you are in an environment which selects for smart people. The people who can't keep up leave.
I believe I am notably less sharp than I used to be in certain areas (Putnam problem solving for example) and I believe others my age are (and generally perceive themselves as) less capable in these areas as well.
Or maybe young people overestimate their cognitive abilities and older people underestimate their.
63: Or you could look at it as the way adults in society promote their own psychological security, which makes perfect sense.
66: Or maybe young people overestimate their cognitive abilities and older people underestimate their ability to complete sentences.
67
Or you could look at it as the way adults in society promote their own psychological security, which makes perfect sense.
Sure it is understandable that people should promote their self-interest but this may not be good for society as a whole when it is at the expense of others. I don't think old people are underrepresented politically.
66: I'm trying to rack my brain now to think of overconfidence studies that measure effects relative to age.
My first thought would be that there is a statistical relationship of overconfidence to age, but not a particularly strong one. There's good evidence for a relationship between testosterone levels and overconfidence that's supported in both cross-sectional and intertemporal studies, which is probably part of the reason women tend to be less overconfident, and probably also leads to men being less overconfident with time.
But we make up for it by growing more cussed.
I work in a field (Marketing) where there just aren't a lot of older workers--you either move up or you get moved out. If I'm lucky, I have one more level I can go up. I figure I can do that for another 10-15 years provided I can stay on top of technological trends faster than my peers at the same level, but realistically I'm assuming that my career arc will largely be done by the time I'm 55, and potentially much sooner. I can potentially squeeze in a few more years as a consultant after that, but no way am I making it to 67 doing the kind of work I do now (nor do I want to--this shit is STRESSFUL, yo). Throw into it that my industry (medical device) may start going into steep decline in the next 5-10 years as stem cell and (potentially) nanotech therapies start to come online, and I really either need to make my nut in the next 10 years, prepare for a career change, or get ready to accept a steep decline in earning power--and possibly all three.
Or you can think of it as old people have rigged the system in their favor.
Part of my argument was that, if you believe people are on average happier if they are wealthier in old age than they were when they were young rather than visa versa, you can look at the fact that old people are wealthier than young people as the sign of a successful social bargain, rather than as the system being captured by the old.
I would note that the same argument would also push towards significant inheritance taxes.
69- It's so heartwarming, James, seeing your remarkable capacity for selflessness in the service of our youth dismantling safety nets. I hope you're deliberately misreading my point about society as a whole, including the young, benefiting from a sense of security, because I'd hoped that was obvious.
I know it's uncool to link Yggles these days and all, but: this.
73
It's so heartwarming, James, seeing your remarkable capacity for selflessness in the service of our youth dismantling safety nets. I hope you're deliberately misreading my point about society as a whole, including the young, benefiting from a sense of security, because I'd hoped that was obvious.
Do you believe our political system is currently biased towards the interests of the young versus those of the old? It looks like the other way round to me.
I'm now trying to imagine what the country would be like if it were run by three year olds.
76: Thanks for the reminder, and gratifyingly clear here.
76 reminds me of this Chas Addams cartoon.
As I've been thinking about this topic I've found that it's made me much more sympathetic to the idea of aging athletes who aren't willing to admit that they're in decline.
I always find this line of argument vexing. These individuals have spent their careers competing. The 40-year-old who can no longer cut it is no different from the 20-year-old who can't quite cut it. In each case, it's entirely predictable that many of them are going to fight being sidelined. Further, it's often admirable.
I have been gratified to find that, as I age, my most productive colleagues are the older ones (and I mean "productive" by measurable, objective standards).
I wonder how many of my/our assumptions about older people are a product of prejudice. I think it's important to be double-careful when you're generalizing about areas where there is a strong societal bias.
(That said, I don't dispute that people slow down in many ways as they age. But I think the compensating advantages of experience are often underestimated.)
Was just having this discussion (in a broad sense) at work yesterday. Many, many angles to this, and the considerations differ by type of work and organization (and country/society). There are certainly situations where it is "not right" or at least no longer useful. It is certainly intertwined with the social contract between generations and that makes it hard to change without opening up a lot of politically exploitable wedge issues*. It's most justifiable manifestation is almost certainly in relation to union protections for manual labor jobs that do have steeper age declines.
*And the current big demographic bubble hitting amid other economic woes and increasing opportunities for global labor arbitrage make it a tinderbox; try to have this discussion at Pandagon or Balloon Juice.
I wonder how many of my/our assumptions about older people are a product of prejudice.
I was wondering how much the underlying traits (if there are any) are a result of nurture instead of nature. It seems really likely to me that people, as they age, tend to become (a) more powerful (from moving up ladders) and/or (b) better at doing things the same way they've been doing them all along (from practice). It might be harder to learn new technologies etc when you're older just because you're out of practice at learning new technologies.
57: I heard it from a bio physicist who did a lot of mathy work.
82: The discussion at work yesterday took a more sci-fi/alternate history turn which explored the following: Given humans with their current intellectual capacities but a potentially longer (or shorter) productive lifespan, what is the optimum lifespan for rate of progress in things like science. All agreed that short and really long slowed things down. But would it be longer or shorter than what we actually have?
I am intrigued by James's apparent assumption (in 11 and elsewhere) that employers do not maximize profits. We're talking about free markets here, after all.
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... But would it be longer or shorter than what we actually have?
I would guess longer in mathematics and physics. In many areas you are spending a big part of your potentially most productive years just learning what is already known. Note feeding gifted students into accelerated courses would also help here. I think I could have learned the math I learned in college in high school and the math I learned in grad school in college. Of course this might have made me a bigger social misfit than I already was and might not have actually been in my best interest.
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I am intrigued by James's apparent assumption (in 11 and elsewhere) that employers do not maximize profits. We're talking about free markets here, after all.
Profit is certainly not the only thing employers consider when making decisions (however much libertarian types might desire otherwise). Even if it were, there are legal and social constraints on what employers are allowed to do. And of course there are complicated tradeoffs between short term and long term profit maximization.
JBS I wonder about that. To an extent, if native ability really pushes the limit then other things being equal, shorter generations might be better (i.e. The more people who come to live the better because you sample more of the high end of the distribution).
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JBS I wonder about that. To an extent, if native ability really pushes the limit then other things being equal, shorter generations might be better (i.e. The more people who come to live the better because you sample more of the high end of the distribution).
Well it depends on what you mean by all other things being equal. You could have people living twice as long with the same number of births and deaths every year (and twice the population) or half the number of births and deaths every year with the same population.
In any case I don't think sampling twice as many potential geniuses (if people lived half as long) would come close to making up for the shorter productive lives. Perhaps living say 100 times as long the smaller sample would start to be important (as well as the slower acceptance of new ideas). It also matters what the current level is, you didn't use to have to learn as much to get to the research frontier.
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My point is, if you're a Kolthoff or an Erdős, it will be apparent that early, but that doesn't mean that those are the only people who contribute.
Actually in mathematics the top people are largely the only people who matter as far as advancing the field goes. Most of the rest are just churning out mediocre papers of no lasting interest or value.
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Most teacher pay scales I've seen top out at 15 years, after that the only way to get more than COLA is by more education/professional development. So it's not like the 35 year 60-year old veterans are grossly more expensive than the people in their late 30s.
In NYC the scale apparently tops out at 22 years with a big jump between 18 and 22. And I expect the older teachers are much more expensive in terms of benefits as well.
BTW studies have repeatedly shown extra educational credentials have no discernable effect on average teaching performance.
It's an interesting question, how things would work with significantly enhanced lifespans. I wonder if Einstein would have ever gotten back to productive work, if he had lived a few more decades, or if he would have kept chasing a misguided pet idea. A fairly large number of people seem to do that as they age. But then there are the people who stay on top of things and productive for decades. I'm not sure it's possible to tell when people are young which one they'll turn out to be.
if he would have kept chasing a misguided pet idea
He might have moved on to a misguided pot idea. For example, one of those upside-down tomato plants.
I'm not sure it's possible to tell when people are young which one they'll turn out to be.
Although it's pretty clear that "productive" will always be a stretch for me, at least as long as blogs exist....
Who was the crazier one - Watson or Crick? I can't remember. But I'm sure that wild post-double helix line of research would have panned out. I can't remember it either. I'd google, but someone younger should do it.
Watson is the bigoted asshole who's still alive. Crick is dead.
96: why choose? They both got pretty crazy, in different directions.
Oh, for some reason I thought one of them just sort of stagnated.
JBS, I was envisioning a "Logan's Run" future, basically, only everybody drops dead around 50.
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It's an interesting question, how things would work with significantly enhanced lifespans. I wonder if Einstein would have ever gotten back to productive work, if he had lived a few more decades, or if he would have kept chasing a misguided pet idea. A fairly large number of people seem to do that as they age. But then there are the people who stay on top of things and productive for decades. I'm not sure it's possible to tell when people are young which one they'll turn out to be.
I think the idea isn't that you just tack years on at the end which in my opinion wouldn't help much but that you extend each life stage proportionately so that Einstein's productive period would have been twice as long (but also starting later after an extended childhood).
93: You guys are being a bit more precise and analytical than I had been. Merely noted that at some point a shorter productive period becomes too short for any one to really advance stuff (not necessarily the initial discovery, but short on time for a lot of the hard practice and engineering and documentation and writing books etc.) and that if it is too long human nature gets in your way as you have long-lived powerful academics and other thought-leaders etc. getting stuck on their original claims to fame (maybe a bit of Kuhn in the argument, too).
100 made me laugh, for better or worse.
103: It's better to die on the young side than to see the language debased by shortcuts and abbreviations.
With private employers no longer having pensions, I think older workers will be getting lower salaries since they have no leverage because they can't retire.
I think older workers will be getting lower salaries since they have no leverage because they can't retire.
Yes, that would be another example of the problem that concerned me in the original post.
Part of what started my on that train of thought was that I was thinking about saving money, and thinking that the question of how much I should be saving depends significantly on how much I expect to earn in the future.
The more predictable my future earnings are the more rational I can be about savings decisions. If I can't make an accurate prediction -- perhaps because there's such a wide range of outcomes for people between 55-65, than it's harder to plan.
Judgement about dealing with disorienting technical change does not decay with age. Neither does an understanding of what's essential, which is useful in evaluating where new technologies have weaknesses.
Energy and enthusiasm, definitely these matter, but I question how closely these are necessarily linked to age. If you know your fate is to work at a position that won't change much, you retire in place relatively young, voluntarily impoverishing your own mental environment. Unrelenting change may help keep people young. That's my line at least.
As for pay scales-- fields change more quickly than they used to. Starting over or something like, with a likely pay cut, will I expect be more common and have less stigma than it used to.
Is there any evidence that mental calisthenics of any kind (memory games, arithmetic or chess or whatever) have an effect? It's an appealing idea, but I haven't found keywords for a useful search or cites to any studies.
Unrelenting change may help keep people young. That's my line at least.
Word. I'm not terrible at settling on one career. I'm invested in mental agility!
This thread kind of makes me want to throw myself into a wood chipper.
109: younger academics could make it into the wood chipper much more quickly.
Word. I'm not terrible at settling on one career. I'm invested in mental agility!
You're just min-maxing. It's more efficient to spend your points on IQ first, and then buy skills afterward.
I think the official view is that general education is best modeled as buying IQ. Of course Kromm isn't sure about that.
This thread kind of makes me want to throw myself into a wood chipper.
Sorry.
This topic may have gloomy implications for those who work in academia, but I think the general national defunding of 4-year public colleges means we'll go back to jobs that don't require any knowledge or experience also not requiring a college education. Which means people can enter the work force earlier in their lives, assuming there is a work force, and save more to be prepared for the absence of pensions or Social Security.
If that happens, it's going to be a brutal transition while industry decides that there aren't enough college grads to fill the open jobs.
I'm pretty dubious that we should pay people `incorrectly' because people like to get more money as they age. That's a big, capturable lever to put in the economy for the sake of an urge that seems unsatisfiable.
About college educations becoming rarer; I've been assuming that we were using them to warehouse unwanted middle-class labor, pretty much the way mandatory highschool warehoused unwanted labor in the Great Depression. (Possibly we have actually reached the Purple Wage, but aren't allowed to enjoy it openly because of... oh, pick your conspiracy, but joyless Puritanism coupled with consumer-debt-fueled capitalism will do for me.)
I'm pretty dubious that we should pay people `incorrectly' because people like to get more money as they age. That's a big, capturable lever to put in the economy for the sake of an urge that seems unsatisfiable.
About college educations becoming rarer; I've been assuming that we were using them to warehouse unwanted middle-class labor, pretty much the way mandatory highschool warehoused unwanted labor in the Great Depression. (Possibly we have actually reached the Purple Wage, but aren't allowed to enjoy it openly because of... oh, pick your conspiracy, but joyless Puritanism coupled with consumer-debt-fueled capitalism will do for me.)
I'm pretty dubious that we should pay people `incorrectly' because people like to get more money as they age. That's a big, capturable lever to put in the economy for the sake of an urge that seems unsatisfiable.
Well, okay, so what do you want?
Let me put it this way, I suspect that most people, given the opportunity, would try to negotiate for increased job security and the regular opportunity for raises -- even at the cost of reduced short-term income. Certainly these are common items for unions to negotiate for.
Speaking broadly should we make it easier or more difficult for people to bargain for those condition? Because my sense is that right now that's a pretty difficult thing to find outside of the public sector and there is a lot of vitriol directed at people who are in position that have that sort of security.
So, from my perspective, I don't feel like I'm arguing in favor of shifting the economy from the recent status quo towards favoring old people. Rather I see the country moving away from that bargain -- in the name of cutting labor costs, and it concerns me.
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I think the official view is that general education is best modeled as buying IQ. ...
Education (within the range commonly found in the US) has little effect on IQ. I think education is best modeled as an elaborate aptitude test. If you have enough IQ and conscientiousness to do well in school you are also well suited for many jobs.
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Speaking broadly should we make it easier or more difficult for people to bargain for those condition? ...
Do you have concrete proposals in mind? There are broad social and economic trends (more international trade, more immigration, women in the work force, technological changes, people having fewer children, more mobility) involved which are not all that easy to do anything about even if you should want to.
Education (within the range commonly found in the US) has little effect on IQ.
I was making a (silly) RPG joke, as the link was supposed to indicate.
Do you have concrete proposals in mind? There are broad social and economic trends (more international trade, more immigration, women in the work force, technological changes, people having fewer children, more mobility) involved which are not all that easy to do anything about even if you should want to.
The short answer is no, I don't.
As I say in the post, I am inclined to strongly oppose increasing the eligibility age for Social Security, and it makes me more sympathetic to unions (when I started thinking about this it seemed relevant to the discussions about Wisconsin), but I also recognize that (a) policies that are explicitly designed to project job security of older workers are likely to be extremely unpopular and (b) I don't entirely disagree with clew -- I'm not sure how much weight I should put on this idea.
The longer answer is that I think it's an important thing to think about. As a liberal I'm inclined to connect it to other parts of my liberal beliefs. I was thinking yesterday that this line of thinking dovetails nicely with the idea that "The Great Risk Shift" is a problem -- people are just not good about assessing risk 20 or 30 years in the future, and that it's better to have structures in place to buffer risk rather than depending on individuals to make those choices.
It also seems like (to me) a powerful example of a situation where arguments about "economic efficiency" are going to directly conflict with people's preferences, and that it makes more inclined to push back against "economic efficiency" as an catch-all argument.
It also puts in the small-c conservative mood of thinking that there are reasons why social structures and social conventions evolve the way that they do, and to reflect the limitations of any ones person perspective are a reason to be cautious about being too dismissive of them.
But none of those are policy proposals.
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... policies that are explicitly designed to project job security of older workers are likely to be extremely unpopular ...
Maybe not, I don't think the age discimination in employment act (which only protects older workers) is particularly unpopular.
It also seems like (to me) a powerful example of a situation where arguments about "economic efficiency" are going to directly conflict with people's preferences, and that it makes more inclined to push back against "economic efficiency" as an catch-all argument.
I am not convinced that the changes don't actually reflect people's preferences among alternatives. As I mentioned earlier I definitely prefer a 401K type plan to a defined benefit plan of the same actuarial value as a defined contribution plan is more flexible and transparent.
I am not convinced that the changes don't actually reflect people's preferences among alternatives.
Of course that's possible, what would you consider to be evidence one way or the other.
I realize that I don't have a lot of evidence to offer, except that I see the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions as occurring at the same time as a decrease in the bargaining power of workers, which makes me suspect that it doesn't reflect a change in preference.
But I'd be open to actual data.
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I realize that I don't have a lot of evidence to offer, except that I see the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions as occurring at the same time as a decrease in the bargaining power of workers, which makes me suspect that it doesn't reflect a change in preference.
I don't see how a decrease in worker bargaining power predicts a shift to defined contribution pension plans. Companies could just offer less generous defined benefit plans. My theory is that companies have been forced to account for more of the true cost of defined benefit plans and when comparing plans of equal cost to the company (when correctly accounted for) workers prefer defined contribution plans so that is what companies are shifting to. Why would companies systematically spend their compensation budget in an inefficient way by ignoring worker preferences? Now you might believe the preference I (and I believe most other workers) have for defined contribution plans is misguided but that is a different argument.
We might indeed believe that and if we're right you might have just spent 4 lines blabbering.
Why would companies systematically spend their compensation budget in an inefficient way by ignoring worker preferences?
This assumes that workers have a well-formed opinion about their preferences. I would suggest that there's significant research out there which shows that (generalizing wildly) (a) variability makes people unhappy and (b) people prefer not to have to make decisions if they don't have to.
I saw an article recently (I thought it was at Yglesias's) which talked about when the number of possible investments available for a 401K increased it lead to two negative outcomes, fewer people participated and the people who did got lower returns.
I did find this which quotes Felix Salmon, "This is a serious problem with defined-contribution pensions in general: they place an onerous set of responsibilities onto individuals who are wholly unqualified to discharge them in a sensible manner."
I would also note that there's a bunch of research that shows that if people are asked in the abstract, "would you like to chose [x]" they unusually answer "yes", but oftentimes the group of people that didn't have a choice is happier with their outcomes than the people that did (see this book).
I don't deny that defined contribution plans have their advantages particularly for people who want to be actively involved in managing their pension but I'm skeptical that there is a broad preference for it.
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This assumes that workers have a well-formed opinion about their preferences. I would suggest that there's significant research out there which shows that (generalizing wildly) (a) variability makes people unhappy and (b) people prefer not to have to make decisions if they don't have to.
What IBM's HR people told us when they changed over entirely to defined contribution plans is that potential hires would, when comparing offers, totally discount the value of IBM's defined benefit plan. This is in effect expressing a preference for defined contribution plans.
I don't deny that defined contribution plans have their advantages particularly for people who want to be actively involved in managing their pension but I'm skeptical that there is a broad preference for it.
Actually the main advantages from an employee point of view are that they don't tie you to one employer and that their value is more transparent (I always had a much better idea of what my 401k was worth than what my defined benefit pension was worth when I was at IBM).
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I saw an article recently (I thought it was at Yglesias's) which talked about when the number of possible investments available for a 401K increased it lead to two negative outcomes, fewer people participated and the people who did got lower returns.
Offering a lot of choices is a bit of a hassle for the employer so again I assume the reason they do it is employee preference. As I recall at IBM the number of choices steadily increased but a relatively small number were emphasized.
And my new employer was quite aggressive about pushing a default fund.
I would worry more about a possible lack of low fee choices than about too many choices.
