The recession of 2008-09 was remarkable in rich countries for its intensity, the subsequent recovery for its weakness.
The labor market also has broken the rules, as new research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a think tank of 34 mainly rich countries, shows in its annual Employment Outlook report.
Young people always suffer in recessions. Employers stop hiring them; and they often get rid of new recruits because they are easier to sack. But in previous episodes, such as the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, older workers also were booted out.
This time is different. During the financial crisis in 2008, and since, older workers have done better than other age groups.
The researchers focus on movements in "non-employment" as a share of the total population in three age groups between the final quarters of 2007 and 2012. This measure has the advantage of including not just unemployment, where people are looking for work, but also inactivity, where people are not seeking jobs.
Whereas the average non-employment rate in the OECD has risen by four percentage points among young people and by one-and-a-half points among 25- to 54-year-olds, it has fallen by two points among the 55-64 age group.
Why have older employees done so well? In some southern European countries they benefit from job protection not afforded to younger workers, but that did not really help them in past recessions.
What has changed, says Stefano Scarpetta, head of the OECD's employment directorate, is that firms now bear the full costs of getting rid of older staff. In the past, early retirement schemes provided by governments (in the mistaken belief that these would help young people) made it cheaper to push gray-haired workers out the door. These have largely stopped.
Job losses among older workers also have been more than offset by falls in inactivity, reflecting forces that were already apparent before the crisis. Older workers are healthier than they used to be and work is less physically demanding.
They also are more attractive to employers than prior generations. Today's 55- to 64-year-olds are the advance squad of the postwar baby boomers who benefited from better education than their predecessors.
Older workers now have a sharper incentive to keep working because of the impact of the crisis on wealth. In Britain, for example, workers who rely on private pensions have been adversely affected by lower returns on their investments and by poor annuity rates when they convert their savings into regular income.
Many will argue that older workers have done better at the expense of the young. That view is wrongheaded. First, it is a fallacy that a job gained for one person is a job lost for another; there is no fixed "lump of labor." And second, as the report shows, young and old people are, by and large, not substitutes in the workplace. They do different types of work in different types of occupations: younger people gravitate to IT firms, for example, whereas older folk tend to be employed in more traditional industries.
