Companies Will Now Have to Think Carefully Before Firing Older Workers Many companies will find it challenging to fire older "overpaid" workers and replace them with young workers whom they can pay a lot less. It's unfortunate that many young milennial people lack the minimum social, analytical, and technical skills to hold a job. This is going to be quite a concern in a few years as they enter the workforce while baby boomers leave. But the silver lining (pun intended) to this is that baby boomer employees will tend to be more secure in their jobs as there will be less competent and motivated younger people to step in and take over. Indeed, companies may start giving out bonuses to older employees to put off their retirements and stay in their jobs.
Relying upon the private sector alone to both generate high-skill jobs and then to prepare workers to fill them is folly. It takes a national human resource strategy with a partnership between government, employers, and skills providers (tertiary education and training institutions). Until we come together to provide some direction, we'll stay in this rut of low-skill jobs and workers here competing with cheaper workers overseas in a mad rush to the bottom.
The title is misleading. The article included data on people all the way up to the age of 65. Also, while many other developing countries are ahead of us, our reading and math levels have not declined. They have remained relatively flat as other countries surpass us. Americans used to be some of the tallest people out of the industrialized nations, but that's no longer the case. We haven't gotten shorter (well, the increasing number of Hispanics does hold the average down); other nations have gotten taller as nutrition approved after WWII. Speaking of Hispanics (and blacks), most other developed nations have very little ethnic and racial diversity, and they've done a much better job at reducing child poverty. It's easier to tailor education policies for a homogeneous society.
