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  1. Adrian Liston said:

    I really dislike the title that ageism is as bad as racism. Just off the top of my head here as a few reasons why racism is worse:

    Racism targets an unchanging characteristic. If you are dealing with racism, you deal with it your entire life. Since opportunity disadvantages are cumulative, this makes racism since childhood much worse than dealing with ageism at the back-end of a career.
    Race is inherited, since means racism has massive inter-generational cumulative effects. This creates longitudinal problems that haunt entire communities, rather than being a problem to individuals.
    Age is only an issue in certain professions. Look at the age structure of most political bodies, for example, and it would be extremely hard to argue that age is a disadvantage.
    Older people have a lot of advantages as well as the identified disadvantage. As above, the political system is largely geared up to help older people (it makes demographic sense). Medical systems are heavily weighted towards diseases of aging. The restructuring of higher education has advantaged older people. The financial system benefits older people – difficulty in obtaining a job at 60 after a long successful career is a very different problem than a 25 year-old struggling to find a job, without the financial resources behind them.

    This is not to say there are not legitimate ageism issues that should be addressed, but the equivalency to racism trivialises an extremely serious issue.

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  2. H Idriss said:

    Imagine being a Moslem of Arab origins who is 50+ and trying to find an academic or research job in London!