That’s the subtitle of a Newsweek article by contributing editor Eliot Cose, which cites bleak employment statistics for workers over 55, a jump in age-discrimination complaints, and a recent Supreme Court ruling that weakens the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.
Marci Alboher, an expert on workplace trends and writer of the excellent Working the New Economy blog, interviewed me last week for a piece called Will you work when you're eighty?
Here’s a really big number: $2 trillion. According to the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post, that’s how much disappeared from Americans’ retirement savings in the last 15 months. The upshot: Americans are going to have to work longer.
I'm an author whose books include Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well (HarperCollins,1997). I'm on the board of the Council on Contemporary Families, and a staff writer at the American Museum of Natural History. While researching this project I've received fellowships from the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, the New York Times, and the Yale Law School's Information Society Project.
-- Ashton Applewhite
