“This isn’t how most people think they’re going to finish out their work lives,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist and veteran scholar of the older labor force who worked on the analysis. “For the majority of older Americans, working after 50 is considerably riskier and more turbulent than we previously thought.”

• quoted by Peter Gosselin

• • •

One of the issues that arises out of our capitalist economy that has become of increasing interest to me in this season of my life is the fate of the aging worker. At ProPublica, an author I heard interviewed recently, Peter Gosselin, has a piece called, “If You’re Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won’t be Yours.”

Gosselin was interviewed in response to a case that is heading to court on Wednesday, accusing IBM of age discrimination. Last year, it was reported that the company fired more than 20,000 workers over the age of 40, which amounted to around 60% of the job losses at IBM. His article addresses a pattern that IBM exemplifies.

ProPublica and the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, analyzed data from the Health and Retirement Study, or HRS, the premier source of quantitative information about aging in America. Since 1992, the study has followed a nationally representative sample of about 20,000 people from the time they turn 50 through the rest of their lives.

Through 2016, our analysis found that between the time older workers enter the study and when they leave paid employment, 56 percent are laid off at least once or leave jobs under such financially damaging circumstances that it’s likely they were pushed out rather than choosing to go voluntarily.

Only one in 10 of these workers ever again earns as much as they did before their employment setbacks, our analysis showed. Even years afterward, the household incomes of over half of those who experience such work disruptions remain substantially below those of workers who don’t.

In the article, Gosselin quotes Gary Burtless, a labor economist, who says, “We’ve known that some workers get a nudge from their employers to exit the work force and some get a great big kick. What these results suggest is that a whole lot more are getting the great big kick.”

A numerical analysis of the study suggests that, of the 40 million American workers over age 50, 22 million will suffer a layoff, forced retirement or other involuntary job separation, with only about 2 million recovering from the loss.

When you add in those forced to leave their jobs for personal reasons such as poor health or family trouble, the share of Americans pushed out of regular work late in their careers rises to almost two-thirds. That’s a far cry from the voluntary glide path to retirement that most economists assume, and many Americans expect.

There is such a thing as age discrimination, and it’s illegal. However, in recent years, enforcement of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) has been much more relaxed, leaving many without its protections. Furthermore, most companies are no longer offering pensions, which may have given older workers incentive to retire early without undue worry. Laid-off workers in their 50s and beyond are more apt than those in their 30s or 40s to be unemployed for long periods and land poorer subsequent jobs, which can dramatically impact their quality of life in its final seasons.

“The expectation that American workers decide when they want to retire is no longer realistic for a significant number of older workers who are pushed out before they are ready to retire,” said Rutgers’ [Carl] Van Horn. This, despite the fact that, since 1986, mandatory retirement at any age has been outlawed by Congress. They subsequently added a requirement that people’s retirement decisions must be “knowing and voluntary.”

It’s not happening for many, perhaps a majority, of older workers.

Yesterday, when we talked generally about capitalism and its relationship with the teachings of Christ and the eschatological faith of the church, most of the discussion focused on how this economic system emphasizes private wealth and acquisition that have often left the poor damaged and on the margins. Peter Gosselin puts his finger on another aspect in capitalism’s development that affects people at a variety of income levels and status.

But unjust treatment is unjust treatment, and Peter Gosselin’s analysis helps us understand that few are immune from the grinding wheels turned by the bottom line.

David Bentley Hart on Capitalism

Whatever else capitalism may be, it is first and foremost a system for producing as much private wealth as possible by squandering as much as possible of humanity’s common inheritance of the goods of creation. But Christ condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such.

• What Lies Beyond Capitalism?

• • •

At Plough, David Bentley Hart writes as direct and scathing article as you’ll read about his conviction that capitalism is thoroughly incompatible with the way of Christ. I’m not saying I agree with everything he says, but I think we should take his strong words seriously and have a conversation.

Here, in sum, are the points he makes:

• Definition: “Capitalism, as many historians define it, is the set of financial conventions that took shape in the age of industrialization and that gradually supplanted the mercantilism of the previous era. As Proudhon defined it in 1861, it is a system in which as a general rule those whose work creates profits neither own the means of production nor enjoy the fruits of their labor.“

• Development:
  • “This form of commerce largely destroyed the contractual power of free skilled labor, killed off the artisanal guilds, and introduced instead a mass wage system that reduced labor to a negotiable commodity.“
  • “All of this, moreover, necessarily entailed a shift in economic eminence from the merchant class  – purveyors of goods contracted from and produced by independent labor, subsidiary estates, or small local markets – to capitalist investors who both produce and sell their goods.”
  • “And this, in the fullness of time, evolved into a fully realized corporate system…a purely financial market where wealth is created for and enjoyed by those who toil not, neither do they spin, but who instead engage in an incessant circulation of investment and divestment, as a kind of game of chance.”
  • “…capitalism might be said to have achieved its most perfect expression in the rise of the commercial corporation with limited liability, an institution that allows the game to be played in abstraction even from whether the businesses invested in ultimately succeed or fail. (One can profit just as much from the destruction of livelihoods as from their creation.)“

• Description:
  • “The corporation is thus morally bound to amorality.”
  • “And this whole system, obviously, not only allows for, but positively depends upon, immense concentrations of private capital and dispositive discretion over its use as unencumbered by regulations as possible.”
  • “It also allows for the exploitation of material and human resources on an unprecedentedly massive scale.”
  • And, inevitably, it eventuates in a culture of consumerism, because it must cultivate a social habit of consumption extravagantly in excess of mere natural need or even (arguably) natural want. It is not enough to satisfy natural desires; a capitalist culture must ceaselessly seek to fabricate new desires, through appeals to what 1 John calls “the lust of the eyes.”“

David Bentley Hart believes that capitalism in this form is unsustainable in the long run. Why? “My conviction is based, rather, on a very simple calculus of the disproportion between infinite appetite and finite resources,” he writes. Its material advantages come at the expense of its own material basis. The only answer to its unfeasible appetites must come from beyond, and Bentley Hart finds it in the eschatological Christian hope brought by Christ. This hope is not only a beacon pointing to a new creation, but also a radical judgment on present world-systems.

Christians are…obliged to affirm that this eschatological judgment has indeed already appeared within history, and in a very particular material, social, and political form.

DBH finds confirmation for a radically different perspective on economics and social matters related to material possessions all throughout the Gospels, and I will not list the representative passages he cites. They are numerous and clear. In short, he finds that the early Christians, taking this seriously, were “communists” (not, of course, in the modern sense of state-mandated egalitarianism), but in the sense spoken of in Acts 4:32 — “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”

The history of the Christian Church with regard to these matters shows, at best, a spotty grasp of Jesus’ teachings, seeking to practice a different way of life primarily in isolated, monastic, or “purist” movements. DBH says this is all good and fine as far as it goes, but the critique such movements offer to the world around them is easily brushed off. These good people are seen as having a special vocation, a prophetic role, but they do not provide any kind of a template for “ordinary” people or societies to follow.

Therein lies the gravest danger, because the full koinonia of the Body of Christ is not an option to be set alongside other equally plausible alternatives. It is not a private ethos or an elective affinity. It is a call not to withdrawal, but to revolution. It truly enters history as a final judgment that has nevertheless already been passed; it is inseparable from the extra-ordinary claim that Jesus is Lord over all things, that in the form of life he bequeathed to his followers the light of the kingdom has truly broken in upon this world, not as something that emerges over the course of a long historical development, but as an invasion. The verdict has already been handed down. The final word has already been spoken. In Christ, the judgment has come. Christians are those, then, who are no longer at liberty to imagine or desire any social or political or economic order other than the koinonia of the early church, no other communal morality than the anarchy of Christian love.

That, of course, raises a host of pragmatic questions about how Christians are to actually live in the world and how they are to plant seeds that will bring about organic, systematic change in world systems that are by nature amoral and focused fully on the bottom line.

Before all else, we must pursue a vision of the common good (by whatever charitable means we can) that presumes that the basis of law and justice is not the inviolable right to private property, but rather the more original truth taught by men such as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, and John Chrysostom: that the goods of creation belong equally to all, and that immense private wealth is theft – bread stolen from the hungry, clothing stolen from the naked, money stolen from the destitute.

With this as the Christian, the eschatological bottom line, perhaps we can begin to develop more Jesus-shaped economic and material lives and communities.