I'm over 50, and out of work right now. I watched the 2009 George Clooney movie, "Up in the Air" last night, and as much as I like Clooney as an actor, I felt some major depression as the credits rolled. Basically, Clooney's character was a hired gun who is brought in to fire people from their jobs.
Then this morning, I get up, and check my email. Every Sunday, I get a listing of NPR's most emailed stories from the past week. Normally, I don't find much worth reading - I gave up on listening to NPR when the political slant of the network tilted toward Fox's "fair and balanced" model several years back during the Ken Tomlinson era at NPR. Today, though, I found several NPR stories intriguing. Among them was a piece titled, "Jobless After 50? You May Be Out of Luck."
Yeah. Just what I needed to start my day...
The lede to the story ends with:
The typical unemployed worker spends about eight months out of a job, but for people over 50, finding a new job can take a lot longer — if it happens at all.
Pout.
Jeez, I know that. Truly. I was first laid off in late 2008, in a manner not unlike that depicted in "Up in the Air". It took me nearly 15 months to find another job, in late January of this year. And then the axe fell again, six short months later in July, when a planned expansion at my place of employment was dialed back. Since that time, I've experienced much of what Cyndi Norton describes:
"I've done everything I possibly can to find work. I've signed up with temp agencies, I've taken all the tests. I'm a nationally certified medical assistant. I tried to retrain — school loan coming due in December which I can't pay. [I've] basically put ads on Craigslist for everything from caretaker to secretary to house-sitter. ... It's very disheartening, because I know I can do what's required of me."
I don't think I'm telling anyone here anything they don't already know when I say that experience no longer matters all that much in the workplace, at least in most professions. What matters is how 'flexible' you are in giving up your life outside the workplace (how many hours are you willing to work because the employer won't hire enough people to cover all the work in an 8 hour day), and how 'reasonable' you're willing to be when it comes to compensation - in other words, how low can you go?
So yeah, we boomers, the middle aged folks among us who are out of work have a real uphill climb, not the least among the personal mountains to summit is the concept of very diminished expectations. We came of employment age in an era when there was at least still a modicum of corporate loyalty to the employee. There was an intrinsic value to experience and longevity on the job. Times change. We all know that's not the case anymore.
But I digress. In the NPR article, Paul Krugman once again goes after the need for bold and unprecedented government intervention, simply because the private sector will not cover the massive employment gap (at least in the near term) during the second great depression that we're in right now:
"It's just crazy that we’re talking about possibly canceling a much-needed tunnel under the Hudson at a time when we have mass unemployment, and those construction workers, if not employed building that tunnel, will not be employed doing anything else."
If the government doesn’t make more stimulus money available, Krugman says, "enormous harm" will come to American families. "You just need to think about how many people are unemployed now for long periods of time. Large numbers of people who have lost their jobs and will never get another if we don't change our policies."
This is true. But what Krugman and other economists are completely missing, and not talking about, is that as long as real unemployment continues to hover near 20%, those of us in a less desirable age demographic are even further behind the eight ball.
One of the more radical ideas that's been casually tossed around on DKos is actually lowering the retirement age, rather than increasing it. Get the unemployed boomers out of the job market to open up space for the unemployed youngsters. I've always thought the idea was rather silly, because not only do I feel I have something of value to offer to an employer, but it just doesn't seem to be a fiscally sound policy. However, I'm coming around to the point of view that there might be at least a bit of validity to the concept. Here's why:
I read still another NPR article, "How Fake Money Saved Brazil", and a thought hit me like a bolt of lightening. The ultimate solution to high unemployment (as we're seeing in the U.S. right now) might be similar to one of the tools that the Brazilian government used to tame rampant inflation in the mid-90's: a simple change in perception on a mass scale. Let's set the table.
The problem went back to the 1950s, when the government printed money to build a new capital in Brasilia. By the 1980s, the inflation pattern was in place.
It went something like this:
- New President comes in with a new plan.
- President freezes prices and/or bank accounts.
- President fails.
- President gets voted out or impeached.
- Repeat.
The plans succeeded at only one thing: Convincing every Brazilian the government was helpless to control inflation.
I know this is getting long, but bear with me. Read that bolded sentence again. Now apply it to today's employment situation in the U.S. Most Americans are convinced right now that government is helpless to control unemployment. Here's where the correlation comes in - let's take a look at one of the cures for Brazilian hyperinflation:
...you have to stabilize people's faith in money itself. People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.
The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy. The only catch: This currency would not be real. No coins, no bills. It was fake.
"We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV," Bacha says. "It was virtual; it didn't exist in fact."
...
Say, for example, that milk costs 1 URV. On a given day, 1 URV might be worth 10 cruzeiros. A month later, milk would still cost 1 URV. But that 1 URV might be worth 20 cruzeiros...
What this monetary move did was alter perceptions on a mass scale. And it was quick, only a matter of months. There's much more to the Brazilian economic story, but creation of the URV was a key piece. Now let's apply that same concept to unemployed, middle aged Americans. If the retirement age was lowered to, say, 55 (just throwing a number out there), the national unemployment rate drops immediately. This thins the potential labor pool for companies looking to hire. But most importantly, it changes perception (and reality) on a mass scale that there are less people looking for work, and increases competition to hire those that are.
So, we solve two problems by lowering the retirement age. We give those who have crossed that age-unemployable threshold an economic lifeline, and change the national perception that government can not control unemployment. Couple this with Krugman's prescription for bold government jobs creation programs and additional stimulus, and we might actually start to turn this thing around for everyone.
I hope I've been clear in this dairy. I've connected the dots fairly well in my own head, but I'm not sure, even with several readings, that I've expressed my intent well enough. Maybe I'm way off base, and some of the smarter economic minds on DKos will disabuse me of my notion of thinking way out of the box. But as someone in the age-unemployable demographic, it seems to make some sense to me.
Update: There seems to be some consensus around the idea that lowering the retirement age is not a bad idea, for a whole lot of reasons. As some comments have suggested, though, there's the financial angle. How do we cover those "early retirements"?
I don't know. My brain isn't big enough to totally wrap around an answer. If it were ever possible, though, to reach a broad political and societal consensus that the concept had merit, in my mind that's more than half the battle in creating the environment for such a radical paradigm shift.
If we are indeed in a "new economy" and dealing with an issue that isn't simply going to melt away over time (nearly 20% real unemployment), then the impetus to figure out the finances will follow.