elderly

Older Workers Have Not Dropped Out of the Labor Force

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

A recent blog post from the St. Louis Fed claims that:

“Both younger and older workers withdrew from the labor force in large numbers during the pandemic: In fact, their participation rates plummeted. Yet, within two years, the younger workers had bounced back to their pre-pandemic participation rates. But the older workers have not.”

They include a chart which seems to back up that assertion:

However, if you look closely, you will see that the older workers’ age group is open-ended. It includes 55-year-olds, as well as 95-year-olds. Given that the US population is aging, this seems like a poor choice.

While not available currently in the FRED database, there is data from BLS available for older workers that is not open-ended. For example, we can look at workers ages 55-64, who are older but still young enough that they are mostly below traditional retirement age. I use that data and compare with the 25-54 age group (note: because the 55-64 data isn’t available seasonally adjusted, I use the non-adjusted data for both age groups, then use a 12-month average, so my chart doesn’t exactly replicate the chart above):

By using a closed-end age group for older workers, we see that labor force participation has not only recovered from the pandemic, but it exceeds the pre-pandemic peak for both prime-age and older workers, and had done so by the Spring of 2023. In fact, both are now about 1 percentage point above February 2020. If we want to go to the first decimal place, older workers have actually increased their labor force participation slightly more: 1.1 vs 0.9 percentage points. But these are close enough, given that this is survey data, to say the recovery has been roughly equal.

The St. Louis Fed blog concludes by saying that early workforce retirements “will continue to depress the labor force participation rate of workers aged 55 and older for the foreseeable future.” But it’s not true that the LFPR of older workers is depressed! Provided that we exclude those 65 and older.

COVID Deaths and Middle Age

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

We have known for a long time (basically since the start of the pandemic) that COVID primarily affects the elderly. Infection fatality rates are hard to calculate (since not all infections are reported), but most of the data suggest that the elderly are much more likely to die from COVID than other age groups.

For some, this has become one of the most important aspects of the pandemic. For example, Don Boudreaux emphasizes the age distribution of deaths many times in a recent episode of Econtalk, and he uses this point to argue that we addressed the pandemic incorrectly (to say the least). Boudreaux specifies that COVID is only deadly for those 70 and older. And while I won’t rehash the argument here, please also see my exchange with Bryan Caplan, where he argues that elderly lives are worth a lot less than younger lives (I disagree).

At first blush, the data seems to bear that out. The CDC reports that almost 80% of COVID-involved deaths were among those aged 65 and older (I will use the CDC’s definition of COVID-involved deaths throughout this post). In other words, of the currently reported almost 600,000 COVID deaths in the US, about 475,000 were 65 and older. Throw in the 50-64 age group, and you’ve now got 570,000 of the deaths (95% of the total).

But is this the right way to think about it? Remember, the elderly always account for a large share of deaths, around 75% in recent years. So it shouldn’t surprise us that most deaths from just about any disease are concentrated among the elderly.

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Old Lives Matter

Jeremy Horpedahl3 Comments

Bryan Caplan has kindly responded to my latest blog post, which was in turn a response to his blog post on the relative value of human lives by age. Caplan has always been kind in his responses, even when responding to pesky graduate students — kind in both his approach and the time he dedicates to responding thoughtfully. So I appreciate his taking the time to respond to me, and I will offer a few more thoughts on the matter.

To briefly summarize: Caplan believes that young lives (10 year olds) are worth 100-1,000 as much as old lives (80 year olds). I contend that they are closer to roughly equally valued. My disagreement with Caplan can be broken down into two categories:

  • A. Caplan’s three reasons why young lives are worth more (a lot more!) than old lives. I didn’t respond to that directly, but I will do so here. I think Caplan is narrowing the goalposts.
  • B. A disagreement over the shape of the VSL curve over the lifetime, specifically whether an inverted-U-shaped curve makes sense. I’ll say more about this too, but Caplan doesn’t just have a beef with me, but with almost everyone in the VSL literature!

Let’s start with Caplan’s three reasons, which he calls “iron-clad”: young people have more years to live, those years are generally healthier, and young people will be missed more when they are gone. The first in undeniably true on average, the second is probably true almost all the time, and I’m not sure on the third, but I’m willing to admit it’s not a slam dunk either way.

So how can I disagree? These are only three things. There are many other considerations, and we can imagine other reasons that old lives are valued as much or more than younger lives! I’ll call mine 4-6 to go with Caplan’s 1-3:

  1. Old age spending is the largest component of public budgets in developed countries (and this is unlikely mostly due to rent seeking or the self interest of younger generations).
  2. The elderly possess wisdom which is highly valuable and that the young benefit from.
  3. The last years of your life are, on average, worth a lot more — you are usually very wealthy, have no employment obligations, you have grandchildren you love (without the responsibilities of parenting), and are (until the very end) generally healthy too.

Taken as a whole, I think these three reasons present a strong counterargument to Caplan’s three reasons. And I think we could certainly come up with more! My point being that Caplan has picked three areas where clearly young lives have the advantage, but ignored all the good reasons why old lives are more valuable. These is what I mean by we shouldn’t rely on our intuitions. Neither of our lists are exhaustive, but let me elaborate on a few of these.

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