Comment on Fewer People 55-And-Over Choose To Work. But Why?
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoFirst, finding examples of age bias obviously doesn’t automatically prove that age discrimination is widespread. But it also doesn’t make those examples irrelevant. If the question is whether age bias exists or can affect people in hiring and employment, you don’t need to prove that literally every employer is doing it. You need to establish that it happens often enough, and in circumstances important enough, to have a meaningful effect.
Second, the unemployment rate really isn’t enough to settle the question. Unemployment numbers tell you how many people are unemployed among people who are actively participating in the labor market. They don’t tell you everything about why someone is unemployed, how long they’ve been looking, whether they’ve stopped looking altogether, whether they’re underemployed, whether they’re being passed over for jobs they’re qualified for, or whether they’ve had to accept worse jobs than they otherwise would have.
That distinction matters alot with age. Someone can technically be employed while still experiencing age-related disadvantages in hiring, promotions, layoffs, compensation, career progression, etc. And someone who gets discouraged and leaves the labor force doesn’t necessarily show up as “unemployed” in the way you’re implying.
Third, saying “it doesn’t mean it affects you personally” is kind of beside the point unless the original argument was specifically claiming that every person in that age group is personally experiencing discrimination. Obviously an aggregate pattern doesn’t mean every individual experiences it. The existence of racial discrimination, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, or any other form of discrimination doesn’t mean every person in the relevant group has personally encountered it either.
And honestly, I’d flip the logic around. If someone says, “I’m seeing evidence that age can be a disadvantage in certain employment situations,” responding with “but your age group has low unemployment” doesn’t really address the claim. You’d need to show that the particular evidence is unrepresentative, that the effect disappears when controlling for relevant factors, or that the broader data contradicts it.
Theirs also a difference between saying “older workers have higher unemployment” and saying “older workers can face age-related barriers in the labor market.” Those are not the same proposition. In fact, older workers can have relatively low unemployment while still facing particular problems with getting hired after a job loss, changing careers, being perceived as overqualified, having higher salary expectations, or dealing with stereotypes about adaptability and technology.
So I’m not saying, “There are a couple examples, therefore everyone is discriminating against older workers.” That would obviously be an overreach. I’m saying that the existence and significance of age bias can’t really be dismissed just because the overall unemployment rate for an age bracket happens to be low.
If were going to talk about whether age bias is actually widespread, the useful question is what the broader evidence says about hiring outcomes, callback rates, longterm unemployment, earnings, layoffs, and labor force participation, not simply whether the headline unemployment rate for that demographic is low.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 4 days ago
Christ, I thought you said you were done? Did we manage to find some spare time in your busy work schedule?
Things you haven’t done?
Things that apply to all age brackets of the unemployed?
Are any of those relevant to my rebuttal of your claim? Do they not apply to any other age bracket?
Your original statement was about you personally experiencing discrimination because of your age.
Another straw man argument. That’s not the inverse of my rebuttal.
That was not your original statement.
No you claimed that you were experiencing unemployment and that it was due to ageism.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Well, this has taken an unexpectedly scenic route through the weeds, but alright, let’s put the kettle on and have another go.
The central issue seems to be that you’re treating my original claim as if I had presented a completed statistical proof of individual causation, when what I actually said was that I was experiencing difficulty finding work and believed age was a contributing factor. Those are two rather different beasts, unless we’ve decided that every statement about one’s own experience must first be peer reviewed by the Royal Statistical Society before being permitted out of the house.
You’re right about one thing: the evidence I gave doesn’t establish that ageism is the sole cause of my unemployment. I never said it did. What it establishes, at least from my perspective, is that I have encountered circumstances where age appeared to be relevant. You can dispute that interpretation, obviously. What you can’t really do is turn “I think age is a factor in my experience” into “I have claimed to have mathematically demonstrated that ageism is responsible for 100% of my unemployment.”
That’s where Karl Popper becomes rather inconvenient for both of us. A hypothesis needs to be falsifiable, not magically transformed into a certainty by either side. If my claim is “age may be contributing to my difficulty finding employment,” then the appropriate response is to identify evidence that makes that explanation less plausible, not simply point at the aggregate unemployment rate and declare the case closed like a detective who has found a fingerprint on the wrong corpse.
And this is where your argument about unemployment rates gets a little slippery. A low unemployment rate for an age bracket does not establish that I personally am not experiencing age discrimination. It establishes that the aggregate unemployment rate for that group is low. Those are different propositions. One is population-level data, the other is an individual claim. You’re using the former to dismiss the latter, which is a bit like using the average temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to determine whether one particular person is currently wet.
Now, could my perception be wrong? Absolutely. I could be mistaken about the role age is playing. There could be other explanations. That’s perfectly reasonable. But “you haven’t proven ageism caused your unemployment” and “ageism isn’t affecting you” are not the same statement. The first is a demand for stronger evidence. The second is a conclusion you haven’t established either.
And yes, the factors I mentioned apply to unemployed people in other age brackets too. That’s rather the point. They’re examples of why the headline unemployment figure is not a complete description of somebody’s experience in the labour market. You asked whether they were relevant to your rebuttal, and strictly speaking, no, not all of them are. I brought them up because your rebuttal relied heavily on a single aggregate statistic as though it answered a question it doesn’t actually measure. In hindsight, that was probably rather like bringing a sundial to a submarine and complaining that nobody had asked what time it was.
As for the “it doesn’t mean it affects you personally” point, you’re correct that my original statement was personal. But that doesn’t make the issue disappear. If I say, “I think X happened to me because of Y,” you can reasonably ask what evidence I have for Y. What you can’t reasonably infer is that because Y doesn’t happen to everyone in my demographic, it therefore didn’t happen to me. That’s not an argument, it’s just changing the subject while wearing the argument’s hat.
And since we’re apparently collecting philosophers now, Bertrand Russell would probably have something unkind to say about that distinction between what follows from the premises and what we’d quite like to follow from them. The fact that something is statistically uncommon doesn’t logically entail that it didn’t happen in a particular case. If one person is struck by lightning, the fact that most people aren’t struck by lightning is not a particularly compelling rebuttal when they’re standing there smoking slightly.
I also think you’re giving “straw man” a rather enthusiastic workout. I wasn’t saying your rebuttal was “older workers have high unemployment, therefore you’re wrong.” I was saying that the unemployment statistic doesn’t by itself answer the question of whether age played a role in my particular experience. If that’s not what you intended the statistic to establish, then fair enough, but in that case I’m not entirely sure what work you think it is doing in the argument.
Ultimately, I think we’re arguing past each other. You’re asking me to demonstrate that ageism caused my unemployment to a standard sufficient to establish the proposition objectively. I’m saying that I have observed things in my own experience that lead me to believe age is a factor. Those are not mutually exclusive positions. I can acknowledge that my evidence is anecdotal and still regard it as evidence. Popper would probably object to me treating it as proof, and Russell would probably object to the entire conversation on grounds of insufficient logic and inadequate tea.
So, yes, if my original wording was “I am unemployed because employers are discriminating against me because of my age,” then I’ll happily concede that that’s a stronger causal claim than the evidence I presented can establish. If what I said was “I’m experiencing difficulty finding employment and I believe age is one of the factors contributing to that,” then your unemployment-rate statistic doesn’t refute it.
It merely tells us that my experience isn’t the median experience of my age bracket.
Which, rather unfortunately for the argument, was never the claim.