Rogé Karma

And what basically has happened is young people's peak earning years are getting pushed back further and further as a result of this aging.

And while the authors didn't necessarily look just at employment, over the same time period, you are seeing, and especially since 2000, you are seeing a decline in the job finding rate for college graduates in particular, for recent college graduates in particular.

And so I don't think...

it is a far stretch to say you are both seeing this age wage gap increase, workers being unable to advance within their organizations.

And as a result, those entry-level positions aren't actually opening up in the first place.

And so this is more of a longstanding version of the big freeze, but it's happening just because we're living longer.

So I am actually of a few different minds of this.

And I think actually in an interesting way, this ties us back to AI and the future of AI.

Because I totally agree with you on the demographics.

We are moving to a world in which the population is only getting older and older.

And so you would imagine this is only going to be magnified.

You can also imagine a world in which if the predictions of the leaders of a lot of AI companies are true, that technology can accelerate this, right?

We're talking a lot about how we're not seeing labor market impacts right now, but you could very much imagine a world, if you look at what is happening right now, for example, at Anthropic with Cloud Code,

they are frantically hiring software engineers, but they are hiring experienced software engineers, much more senior level software engineers, who are now using a bunch of AI agent assistants.

And so you can actually imagine a world in which AI makes this problem a whole lot worse because it actually makes the returns to experience higher.

All of a sudden, companies might not need entry-level workers as much.

They might actually need more and more senior workers.

And so it actually makes the age wage gap even bigger.

And so at the same time we have an aging population, we also have a return to the premium of age.

Here's the other thing though.