For Younger Workers to Get Ahead, Do Boomers Just Need to Retire?

Is there a war between the generations in the working world? You might think so from looking at recent data. In many high-income countries, the pay gap between the old and the young has widened. The share of younger workers feeling actively engaged at work has fallen. And a new paper titled “Countries for Old Men” argues that “as older workers enjoy more successful careers, younger workers become less likely to hold higher-ranked jobs and fall toward the bottom of the wage distribution.”

But I want to push back on the seemingly obvious conclusion, which is that older workers (OK, I am one) need to step aside and make room.

I’ll start with the problem. In 2019, a USA Today/LinkedIn survey found that 42 percent of Gen Zers and 41 percent of millennials said they’d had difficulty moving up in their careers because boomers were putting off retirement.

More recently, according to Gallup, there has been a realignment of the generations in engagement at work. The engagement of boomers rose slightly from 2020 through 2023, while the engagement of the younger three age cohorts fell, as the table below shows.

Workers over 55 have always earned more on average than those under 35, but the gap in the United States grew by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018, according to Nicola Bianchi of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Matteo Paradisi of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance in Rome, who cowrote the “Countries for Old Men” paper.