OK – Old displace young on income ladder

When I was a kid old people weren’t very well off. The words poor and pensioner often went together. I remember a poster (presumably by one of the age charities) which I used to pass on the way to my swimming lesson. It said something like, “Poverty and loneliness, the punishment for old age.”

That would have been sometime around 1972 when, as the FT explained earlier this week, the average pensioner’s income was in the bottom 20 percent.

It’s not like that now though. Forty years on, older people aren’t doing too badly. These days, you’re more likely to hear people talking about rich pensioners than poor ones.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  The rise and fall of the rich pensioner | Flip Chart Fairy Tales.