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5 min readOlder workers aren’t retiring. Should they be forced to?
Ryan Hendrickson, a 37-year-old NASA engineer who had been promoted three times in ten years, was passed over for a supervisor position. The job went to someone who had held that exact role 20 or 30 years earlier and had been at NASA for roughly 45 years. “Frustrations kind of boiled up,” Ryan says. He went to Reddit to ask: has anyone else noticed senior colleagues refusing to retire and making it much harder to move up? The post exploded. BJ Swami, an engineer in tech, had written a similar post titled “Boomers won’t retire and it’s screwing the rest of us.” His boss was 71 and kept saying he’d retire next year but never did. BJ’s frustration was layered: he felt stuck in his position, unable to get promoted or save enough for retirement, and he could see the irony that he might one day be the older worker some younger colleague complains about. “It’s just a cycle and it sucks,” he says. “I don’t know what the solution is.”
The case for mandatory retirement
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:30) **Opening Anecdote: Ryan's Stalled Career** - Ryan Hendrickson, a 37-year-old NASA engineer, loses a promotion to a colleague in his late 60s who had held the same role decades earlier, sparking frustration about blocked upward mobility.
- 2 (04:13) **The Reddit Outcry: "Boomers Won't Retire"** - Ryan’s post and similar ones from workers like BJ Swami show a widespread sentiment that older, well-off colleagues are blocking career advancement for younger generations.
- 3 (06:58) **Introducing the Core Debate** - Host Sarah Gonzalez frames the issue: 11 million Americans over 65 are working, and later retirement is a major labor market trend, raising questions of fairness and forcing a debate over a controversial solution.
- 4 (08:51) **The Case for Mandatory Retirement: Samuel Moyn** - Yale professor Samuel Moyn argues that older workers, especially in powerful, high-paying jobs, are "hoarding" positions and creating a "gerontocracy" that is unfair to younger people.
- 5 (13:05) **Moyn's Solution: Mandatory Retirement** - Moyn proposes bringing back mandatory retirement for specific, high-level white-collar roles, arguing it would create space for younger workers and restore a fair career progression.
- 6 (14:26) **The History of Mandatory Retirement** - The episode traces the history from standard practice (e.g., Albert Einstein retiring at 65) to its abolition in 1986, with a notable temporary exemption for universities.
- 7 (17:37) **The Counterpoint: Olivia Mitchell** - Economist Olivia Mitchell fundamentally rejects the "lump of labor fallacy" that older workers take jobs from younger ones, arguing that more workers create more jobs and economic growth.
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Show Notes
It used to be legal to force people to retire when they hit a certain age. The trend used to be earlier and earlier retirement. Now it’s later and later retirement. And younger workers say it’s impacting their career advancement and their ability to save for their own retirement.
At the same time, older workers are living longer, Social Security and Medicare funding are less secure than ever … and many people want to keep working.
Age in the workplace is a tricky thing to talk about. But today on the show, we’re talking about it. On the latest Planet Money, a law professor who says retirement should be mandatory at age 70. And an economist who says, actually … people should delay retirement even longer.
Show notes:
- More of Planet Money’s coverage of the lump of labor fallacy
- Samuel Moyn: Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth? And What to Do About It.
- Gerhard Casper and Saunders Mac Lane: “Older Doesn’t Mean Wiser”
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This episode was reported by Sarah Gonzalez. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Eric Misitzis Mennel, and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive
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