A brilliant scientist sends me an exciting and lucid letter asking for support to continue working at his public university, which retires him, velis nolis, at the age of 65. Why do we humiliate our best professionals like this when Japan, the US, Korea and the most innovative countries encourage them to continue in their laboratories, cloisters and companies, making them more diverse in age and, therefore, prolific?
In the interviews I perceive that the best American brains (there are 80 Nobel Prize winners and even some 90 in cloisters and laboratories, but also as assistants) feel more compensated and happy than Europeans and, therefore, are more fruitful, at any rate. age; because no one in their universities and companies, public or private, forces them to leave. Young people form a team with them, with better results than ours. The old excuse here – that has become old – in the eighties and nineties for this waste of talent was that it was essential to give the youngest, who were the majority, an opportunity, because Spain suffered, along with Greece, the highest youth unemployment in Europe.
Our demography, today, advises just the opposite. Another thing is that it continues to be cheaper to replace senior salaries with junior ones, but it is also at the cost of our productivity. Because the most efficient organizations are not those that have more than one gender or others; nor more young or minorities, but the most diverse in everything and, therefore, more capable in their versatility of adapting to changes and thus never running out of cheese.
This diversity – also in age – is essential not only for the system to be flexible, ergo sustainable, but also freer. No one should be forced to work longer than the cost of their benefits requires; but neither should anyone be forced to stop working with compensation for as many years as they wish to continue giving back with effort and talent to all of us what we have all invested in their career and training.
Freedom consists in giving each of us – not just our leaders – more ability to choose. And the great choice of our life is to work or not. At any age.
