1) How much of those pay increases is just keeping up with inflation? What's the income multiple earned by a manufacturing worker with 20 years experience vs. a fresh hire in the same role?

2) It's true that supporting a family requires a higher salary, but younger people can have families, too, and in any case retraining for a job that allows you to barely scrape by is better than nothing. Better to get mostly screwed than to get completely screwed.

1) Good question. In my experience it's generally around a 1-2% gain over inflation, although in reality that dropped a lot for many workers since 2009 as companies raced to cut costs. But compounded over let's say 20 years, you're looking at 22-49% over starting fresh. Manufacturing is an interesting case beyond this since a lot of jobs were unionized and came with tenure benefits in excess of my numbers above.

2) In a purely rational way, yes. However,

a) I'm most interested in discussing average scenarios which in this case is young people = generally mortgageless and childless, older people = generally have children and associated costs

b) It often ends up more complicated than that when you factor in social safety nets. You could very well do better by not taking a job that allows you to barely scrape by and instead take the government assistance.

c) Rationalizing away a massive decrease in standard of living for a significant number of people as, effectively, "at least they're not homeless" is one of the ways you end up with massive inequality and eventually the populism push we're seeing now leading potentially to something akin to the French Revolution.

I think we can find a better solution. This is exactly the kind of discussion that has been missing on a national level until very recently.

>c)

If they don't care then there is no problem. If they are unwilling to take paths toward self improvement maybe it's for the best to not force them to do something they don't want?

On the second point, the successful penetration of family planning into the western world means that most people do not have children until they can support them. So it is actually worse to lose income and go down to income level X than to have only been at income level X (and for a shorter amount of time) because someone in the first situation has likely had kids by now whereas someone in the second situation hasn't.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, it is in society's best interest to support families, because children are literally the next generation and everything will quickly collapse if it becomes economically untenable for most to have children. So society has to set itself up in a way that promotes the ability for most people to have and support families.

>2) Older workers often need higher salaries because they have families to support (along with the many costs associated) which young workers do not. It's a naturally unbalanced situation.

That's completely illogical. What you need doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what type of work is available for you and retraining expands the availability of work. If retraining is unattractive because you see higher paying opportunities elsewhere then you don't even have the problem that retraining is supposed to solve.