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.
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.
The later half of the 20th century or so, 50 years and then tack on the 2000s and 2010s to get us 70 years, that is one lifetime. Certainly things were happening before but within this one lifespan the overwhelming amount of suffering that will be wrought on future generations was locked in.
I agree you can think of us being in a ravine in this way, but this is not the ravine I speak of. I am talking about a landform carved from a sense of betrayal and abdication of responsibility for the gift of a bountiful earth given to each generation. That is how people stretching far into the distant future for generations and generations will think of this time period that is coming to a close as the possibility to prevent mass suffering (human and animal) on an unimaginable scale has passed, and all that is left is mitigation.
That time period is the ravine, because in my metaphor the bottom of the canyon represents a mass abandonment of human connections from the past to the future, from parent to child. It can’t be described in any one particular relationship between someone from one generation and another, I am not slinging mud, there are plenty of wonderful people of all ages, I am simply pointing out the degree of severance evident in every aspect of our modern lives between the past and future, between the old and young. In other words, the ravine is everywhere in a way that makes it difficult to put your finger on even describing its boundaries.