“Denial of employment opportunity to older persons is a personal tragedy…It is also a national extravagance, wasteful of human resources. No economy can reach its maximum productivity while failing to use the skills, talents, and experience of willing workers.” – JFK, 1963

You’ve probably heard of the demographic crisis: baby boomers are getting older, people are having fewer children, and pretty soon the pension pot will be all used up on the generation that also brought you global warming. If you’re a young person, you may find the whole thing somewhat depressing: it seems like most public policies are designed to transfer money from (low-income) young people to (high-income) old, whether it’s increasing house prices, fuel subsidies for the elderly, pensions, or healthcare. If you’re the Economist, you’ve also faced a huge flood of complaints when you suggested reducing pensions for wealthy seniors in the UK, and since seniors vote and young people don’t, no one was going to listen to the suggestion anyway.

Coleman presents an alternate, possibly more valuable, perspective. Older workers are often forced out of work before they would actually want to leave, whether because of pension plan design, insufficient training, or blatant discrimination. These older workers would often have preferred to stay, particularly part-time, deriving meaning and value from their employment as they have done for decades. Letting them stay makes them better off, and also helps reduce our demographic challenge.

Unfinished Work looks at this problem from the perspective of elderly workers around the world, from Japan to Sweden, France, and the U.S. Some countries are doing well (Sweden and Japan) and others are doing poorly (France), but all have room to improve. The book’s emphasis on stories makes it more readable, but also reduces the content: the book is better at raising issues than solving them. The book also sometimes seems to lack concrete data: Coleman criticizes discrimination on the part of employers against the elderly, particularly a reluctance to train them, but there is also evidence that elderly people make less good employees. He may well be right this isn’t a large concern, but I would have appreciated some data on how big an issue it might be. Nevertheless, the book advances an important perspective on an increasingly large challenge for many Western societies. This is a problem we don’t think about often enough, and certainly haven’t solved. Unfinished Work presents an alternate framing to the divisive, young vs. old narrative, one well worth reflecting on.

You can see other reviews of Unfinished Work here.