Raising the retirement age does not lock the young out of work. The real threat to Europe’s NEETs is the software devouring the bottom rung.
Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen, Denmark’s employment minister, watched parliament vote by 81 to 21 in May 2025 to lift the state pension age to 70, the highest in Europe, for anyone born after 1970. Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister, had already distanced herself from the policy she was signing, telling Danes that “you can’t just keep saying that people have to work a year longer”. Jan V. Hansen of F&P, the country’s pensions association, reckoned 80,000 Danes were already working past pension age. Denmark also has one of the smallest pools of idle young people anywhere in Europe.
Élisabeth Borne forced France’s pension age up from 62 to 64 in March 2023, using a constitutional shortcut to skip a parliamentary vote and sending protesters onto the streets of Paris. Mel Stride, then Britain’s work and pensions secretary, postponed a decision on raising the British age to 68 that same spring. The arithmetic behind such moves seldom varies: as people live longer, finance ministries stretch working lives to hold down pension bills. Many of the French marchers carried a second complaint, that every older worker kept on the payroll meant one job fewer for the young. Economists have a name for that idea.
Crowding out
Jonathan Gruber and David Wise spent years testing it. In a study published in 2010, the pair examined a dozen rich countries and found no sign that pushing older workers into retirement freed posts for younger ones; more often the two groups rose and fell together. Nicola Bianchi reached a more qualified verdict. Studying Italy’s 2011 Fornero reform, which abruptly kept older staff at their desks, he and his co-authors found that a one-year delay in a boss’s retirement trimmed a younger colleague’s wage growth by 2.5 per cent a year, but only inside firms with few rungs to climb. Across a whole national workforce, the effect disappeared.
So where are Europe’s idle young? Not in Denmark, which works its people almost to 70 and keeps one of the slimmest ranks of NEETs (young people not in employment or education) on the continent, nor in the Netherlands or Sweden, the other strongholds of late retirement. They are in Romania, where nearly a fifth are adrift, and in the corners of Europe that pensioned their workers off early and waited for the jobs to trickle down to the young. They are still waiting.
The European Commission keeps trying to conjure those jobs into being. Its Youth Guarantee, going since 2013, promises every young NEET an offer of work or training within four months; auditors who checked in 2017 found the pledge honoured almost nowhere, with some governments rebadging the unemployed as trainees. Roxana Mînzatu, the latest commissioner handed the file, unveiled a ‘Union of Skills’ in March 2025. It will not be the last relaunch.
What actually works is older and duller: the apprenticeship. Italy, long Europe’s cautionary tale, has borrowed Germany’s ‘dual’ model, under which the young split the week between classroom and shop floor. Marina Calderone, its labour minister, wants to quadruple the places. It seems to be paying off. Italy’s share of NEETs has fallen further since 2015 than any other country’s in the union, though its apprentices still see far less of a real workplace than a German’s would.
The real threat to Europe’s young is not the pensioner clinging to his desk. It is the machine quietly absorbing the entry-level work that once taught them their trade. Aneesh Raman of LinkedIn called it, in the New York Times last May, the breaking of “the bottom rung of the career ladder”. Dario Amodei, whose own firm builds the software doing the breaking, reckons it could swallow half of all entry-level office jobs within five years.
In Britain the proof is already in. Employers advertised 46 per cent fewer graduate technology jobs in 2024 than the year before, and last summer’s leavers reached for a first rung that was no longer there.
Photo: Dreamstime.