March 29, 2024

Economix Blog: Casey B. Mulligan: Varieties of Not Working

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Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Employment can be a better indicator of labor market activity than unemployment, because unemployment is not the only way that a person can be without work.

The blue series in the chart below shows the reduction in unemployment since March 2012, expressed as a percentage of the population (e.g., in a population of 100 million, 0.1 percentage points means 100,000 people and 0.5 percentage points means 500,000.) In order to correct for the movement of baby boomers into retirement, I used Bureau of Labor Statistics data only for people 25 to 54 years old (this group is about 124 million and has been falling a little). Over the subsequent year, and especially since mid-2012, unemployment was reduced significantly.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

But reduced unemployment is not the same as more employment, because the third labor force classification is “out of the labor force.” Neither the unemployed nor those out of the labor force have a job, but only the unemployed are actively looking for one.

The red series in the chart shows that the “out of the labor force” ranks have increased roughly as much as unemployment has been reduced, and the difference between the blue and the red series indicates the change in the fraction of the population that is employed. For the months when the blue series is above the red series, employment per capita has increased since March 2012.

Because the blue series hardly exceeds the red series, if at all, the large majority of the reduction in unemployment has been associated with offsetting increases in people out of the labor force.

While the reduction in unemployment and the growth in the out of the labor force more or less cancel each other out, jobs are at least being created fast enough to absorb the growth in the working-age population. That additional population increases demand, which contributes to the jobs being created.

Retirements and going to school could increase the number of people out of the labor force, but the data I’ve shown are for an age group in which retirement and schooling are rare. For the 25-to-54 age group, “out of the labor force” typically represents people who are finding ways to get by without working.

Some people moving out of the labor force devote their time to caring for their young children while their spouses obtain cash income for the family. That some of the growth in those out of the labor force has occurred among married people suggests that such specialization in the family could be part of the story. But the fact that this group is growing especially among unmarried people suggests that family specialization explains at best a minority of the aggregate changes.

Unemployment insurance benefits are paid only to people who report that they are actively looking for work. Some unemployed have long been skeptical that they can find a good job and are just going through the motions of job search to satisfy the unemployment program’s requirements (see this testimony to a House subcommittee by Stacey G. Reece, co-owner of a recruitment firm in Gainesville, Fla., who said he witnessed people “applying for jobs only to protect their status for unemployment insurance”).

When such a person’s unemployment benefits run out, he may look less actively for work, which changes his classification from unemployed to out of the labor force.

The termination of unemployment benefits can, and sometimes does, have the opposite effect, because the loss of income can make out-of-work people more seriously consider accepting a low-paying job. But unemployment insurance is by no means the only safety-net program. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) is a major and newly expanded safety-net program and does not require its beneficiaries to work or be looking for work. Curiously, SNAP has been expanding while the unemployment rate falls.

People without jobs increasingly take part in the disability insurance program, which does not require people to look for work because “disability” means that the person is unable to work. Medicaid is another major safety program that does not require its participants to work.

A significant part of the recent reductions in the unemployment rate may reflect movements of people between safety net programs rather than any significant change in their job-finding prospects.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/varieties-of-not-working/?partner=rss&emc=rss

It’s the Economy: Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?

These habits, judging by both anecdote and literature, were generational. My grandmother was born in 1917 and entered the work force during the Great Depression. I’ve been thinking of her generation — the one that saved rather than spent, preserved rather than squandered — a lot lately. In the past year or so, data have come in regarding how my own generation, often called Generation Y, or the millennials, has adapted to our once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis — the one that battered career prospects, drove hundreds of thousands into the shelter of schools or parents’ basements and left hundreds of thousands of others in continual underemployment. And some of that early research suggests that we, too, have developed our own Depression-era fixation with money.

The millennials have developed a reputation for a certain materialism. In a Pew Research Center survey in which different generations were asked what made them unique, baby boomers responded with qualities like “work ethic”; millennials offered “clothes.” But, according to new data, even though the recession is over, this generation is not looking to gorge; instead, they are the kind of hungry that cannot stop thinking about food. “Call it materialism if you want,” said Neil Howe, an author of the 1991 book “Generations.” It seems more like financial melancholy. “They look at the house their parents live in and say, ‘I could work for 100 years and I couldn’t afford this place,’ ” Howe said. “If that doesn’t make you focus on money, what would? Millennials have a very conventional notion of the American dream — a spouse, a house, a kid — but it is not going to be easy for them to get those things.”

This condition is becoming particularly severe for the group that economists call younger millennials: the young adults who entered the job market in the wake of the recession, a period in which the unemployment rate among 20- to 24-year-olds reached 17 percent, when graduate school competition grew more fierce and credit standards tightened. Many also saw their parents struggle through a pay cut, a job loss or another economic disruption during the recession.

These troubles, many economists fear, left serious scars, and not just psychic ones. Now that the economy has entered a steady but slow recovery, younger millennials wonder if they can make up that gap. Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at the Yale School of Management, studied the earnings of men who left college and joined the work force during the deep recession of the early 1980s. Unsurprisingly, she found that the higher the unemployment rate upon graduation, the less graduates earned right out of school. But those workers never really caught up. “The effects were still present 15 or 20 years later,” she said. “They never made that money back.”

Kahn worries that the same pattern is repeating itself. And new research from the Urban Institute augurs that this emerging income gap is compounding into a wealth gap. The institute’s research shows that even as the country has grown richer, Generations X and Y, meaning people up to about age 40, have amassed less wealth than their parents had when they were young. The average net worth of someone 29 to 37 has fallen 21 percent since 1983; the average net worth of someone 56 to 64 has more than doubled. Thirty or 40 years from now, young millennials might face shakier retirements than their parents. For the first time in modern memory, a whole generation might not prove wealthier than the one that preceded it.

Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times. Adam Davidson is off this week.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/do-millennials-stand-a-chance-in-the-real-world.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economic Scene: Medicare Needs Fixing, but Not Right Now

It might not be a good idea to try to resolve these questions quite so urgently. Partisan bickering under the threat of automatic budget cuts is unlikely to produce a calm, thoughtful deal.

“We don’t have to solve this tomorrow; not even next year,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on the design of President Obama’s health care reform.

More significantly perhaps, some economists point out that the problem may already be on the way toward largely fixing itself. The budget-busting rise in health care costs, it seems, is finally losing speed. While it would be foolhardy to assume that this alone will stabilize government’s finances, the slowdown offers hope that the challenge may not be as daunting as the frenzied declarations from Washington make it seem.

The growth of the nation’s spending slowed sharply over the last four years. This year, it is expected to increase only 3.8 percent, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the slowest pace in four decades and slower than the rate of nominal economic growth.

Medicare spending is growing faster — stretched by baby boomers stepping out of the work force and into retirement. But its pace has slowed markedly, too. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office said that by 2020 Medicare spending would be $126 billion less than it predicted three years ago. Spending over the coming decade, it added, would be $143 billion less than it forecast just last August.

While economists acknowledge that the recession accounts for part of the decline, depressing incomes and consumption, something else also seems to be going on: insurers, doctors, hospitals and other providers are experimenting with new, cheaper and more efficient ways to deliver care.

Prodded by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which offers providers a share of savings reaped by Medicare from any efficiency gains, many doctors are dropping the costly practice of charging a fee for each service regardless of its contribution to patients’ health. Doctors are joining hundreds of so-called Accountable Care Organizations, which are paid to maintain patients in good health and are thus encouraged to seek the most effective treatments at the lowest possible cost.

This has kindled hope among some scholars that Medicare could achieve the needed savings just by cleaning out the health care system’s waste.

Elliott Fisher, who directs Dartmouth’s Atlas of Health Care, which tracks disparities in medical practices and outcomes across the country, pointed out that Medicare spending per person varies widely regardless of quality — from $7,734 a year in Minneapolis to $11,646 in Chicago — even after correcting for the different age, sex and race profiles of their populations.

He noted that if hospital stays by Medicare enrollees across the country fell to the length prevailing in Oregon and Washington, hospital use — one of the biggest drivers of costs — would fall by almost a third.

“Twenty to 30 percent of Medicare spending is pure waste,” Dr. Fisher argues. “The challenge of getting those savings is nontrivial. But those kinds of savings are not out of the question.”

We could be disappointed, of course. Similar breakthroughs before have quickly fizzled. Just think back to that brief spell in the mid-1990s when health maintenance organizations seemed to beat health care inflation — until patients rebelled against being denied services and doctors dropped out of their networks rather than accept lower fees.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services already expects spending to rebound in coming years. Without tougher cost control devices, be it vouchers to limit government spending or direct government rationing, counting on savings of the scale needed to overcome the expected increase in Medicare rolls may be hoping for pie in the sky.

“It makes no sense,” said Eugene Steuerle, an economist at the Urban Institute, to expect the government will reap vast Medicare savings without having an impact on the quality of care.

The Affordable Care Act already contemplates fairly big cuts to Medicare. In its latest long-term projections published last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that under current law, growth in spending per beneficiary over the coming decade would be about half a percentage point slower than the rate of economic growth per person.

To understand how ambitious this is, consider that Medicare spending per beneficiary since 1985 has exceeded the growth of gross domestic product per person by about 1.5 percentage points per year. Slowing down that spending would require deep cuts in doctor reimbursements that, though written into law, Congress has never allowed to happen — repeatedly voting to cancel or postpone them.

Under a more realistic situation, the Budget Office projected that the growth of Medicare spending per capita over the next 10 years would be in fact 0.6 percentage points higher than under current law and accelerate further after that.

Yet despite the ambition of these targets, they would not be enough to stabilize future Medicare spending as a share of the economy. A report by three health care policy experts, Michael Chernew and Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School, together with Stephen Parente of the University of Minnesota, concluded that to do that would require limiting the growth of spending per beneficiary at 1.25 percentage points less than the growth of our gross domestic product per person.

“The Affordable Care Act places Medicare spending on a trajectory that is historically low,” Mr. Chernew said, noting his opinion was not an official statement as vice chairman of Medicare’s Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare. “Could we do better? Of course. Will we? That requires a little more skepticism.”

Yet even if it is unrealistic to expect that newfound efficiencies will stabilize Medicare’s finances, the slowdown in health care spending suggests that politicians in Washington calm down. It offers, at the very least, more breathing room to carefully consider reforms to the system to raise revenue or trim benefits in the least damaging way.

There are many ideas out there — from changing Medicare’s premiums, deductibles and coinsurance to introducing a tax on carbon emissions to raise revenue. Some of them are not as good as others. Until recently, President Obama favored increasing the eligibility age for Medicare. Then research by the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded that raising the age would increase insurance premiums and cost businesses, beneficiaries and states more than the federal government would save. The nation would lose money in the deal.

“As we do this, there are smarter and dumber ways to do it,” Mr. Gruber said. “It would be a problem if we were to do things in a panic mode that set us backward.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/business/medicare-needs-fixing-but-not-right-now.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Off the Charts: Recovery Has Brought More Jobs for Men Than Women

From December 2009 through last month, the economy added 5.3 million jobs, according to the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households. Only 30 percent of them went to women. To some extent, that is simply a reflection of the fact that the recession hit men much harder than women, but the result has been at least a temporary reversal of the long trend of women holding an ever-increasing share of jobs.

The proportion of jobs held by women, which was around 28 percent when the household survey began in 1948, rose to a peak of 47.5 percent in January 2010, just after the economy hit bottom. During that period, there was only one substantial setback to the trend, in 1952 and 1953, when the end of the Korean War brought soldiers back to the civilian economy.

But in the first months of this recovery, that number fell as low as 46.6 percent, and it was at just 46.8 percent in January.

The household survey is separate from the establishment survey, which asks employers how many people are on their payrolls. That survey hit bottom in February 2010, and showed 5.5 million jobs had been added. But it does not collect information on gender, as the household survey does.

The accompanying charts show the changing employment patterns since the end of 2009 for men and women in various age groups, from 20 to 24 years to over 55. Because demographic shifts have been abrupt for some groups, like the baby boomers — there are a lot more people over 55 now, and fewer people aged 35 to 54 — the charts look at changes in the employment-to-population ratio.

That ratio differs from the more widely noted unemployment rate in that it compares the number of people who have jobs with the total population, not just with the total number of people who say they were working or looking for jobs during the month.

In January, 54.6 percent of women over the age of 20 had jobs. That was the lowest proportion since 1993, and 0.8 percentage points lower than the figure in December 2009. By contrast, 67.6 percent of men over 20 had jobs, a rate that is 1.3 percentage points higher than it was at the end of 2009, although still below prerecession levels.

The sharpest declines in employment for women were in the 20-to-24 and 45-to-54 age groups. The decline in the younger group may reflect the difficulties young people face in trying to start a career, but the decline in the middle-aged group is not so easily explained.

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomic Advisors, said it might be a result of who has, and has not, been hiring. He pointed to the Institute for Supply Management’s survey of manufacturers, which has indicated that companies are hiring, and to the survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, which indicates that its members are not. “Women are more likely to be employed by small service-sector companies than by large manufacturers,” he said.

The largest increase in the proportion of women with jobs has come among those over 55, which is also the group that is growing the fastest. It seems likely that more men and women are delaying retirement. The proportion of women aged 55 to 59 with jobs does not appear to be increasing, but the proportion of women aged 60 to 64 with jobs has been rising.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/economy/recovery-has-brought-more-jobs-for-men-than-women.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

You’re the Boss Blog: A Photo-Scanning Service Learns How to Get Exposure

On Social Media

Generating revenue along with the buzz.

Founded in 2007, FotoBridge, a West Berlin, N.J., photo-scanning service,  began experimenting with social media in 2009. For its co-founders, Edward O’Boyle and Julie Morris, the goal was to connect with parents, baby boomers, and what they call “family memory keepers” to promote awareness of digital archiving. After their initial experiments, Mr. O’Boyle and Ms. Morris concluded that their target market was best represented on Facebook and with a secondary focus on Twitter to connect with younger customers and follow market influencers.

Over the past two years, FotoBridge has built a strong following among people interested in preserving photos, including educators and archivists, and its corporate clients include NBC Universal, the Smithsonian, the Indianapolis Colts and USA Hockey. The company shares photos, photography news and tips, and discount offers with its 14,000 likes on Facebook and 18,000 followers on Twitter. It also uses social media to answer questions and share blog posts, testimonials, and behind-the-scenes details of selected high-profile digitizing projects. “We answer questions and support customers primarily in real-time via Facebook,” said Ms. Morris. “For us, it’s a quick, effective and efficient way to communicate with those customers adept at using Facebook, which is becoming a larger part of our customer base.”

The company uses a mix of pay-per-click and Facebook ads to build followers and drive traffic to the Web site. On a typical campaign, it spends more than $10,000 a month on Google ads that Ms. Morris believes end up more than paying for themselves. “For every dollar we spend on Google AdWords,” she said, “we earn six dollars back.”

They have found that it helps to change keywords frequently. “We review our keywords every six to eight weeks,” she said. “We look for ones that are relevant to our service and that are not highly competitive yet but have a decent amount of monthly traffic and have proven to convert well in the past.” So far, the company’s search audience has been largely baby boomers, but FotoBridge has been finding different keywords to attract younger customers. “Our younger audience use words like ‘photo scanning’ verses our older customers who will type in ‘slide conversion,’” she said.

In addition, Ms. Morris uses Twitter to focus on sharing content and hashtags that promote their crucial terms in search results. Social media, she said, is “our primary means of building our brand and engaging a broader audience in a conversation.”

Fotobridge uses Google Analytics mapping data to track sales conversions by location. The mapping data allows the company to track clusters of new customers in the same community — a retirement community in Florida, for example. Following the clusters gives them insights that help them place ads in local publications or online. “During our first full year in 2008, we found our search engine marketing efforts were being amplified by offline word-of-mouth referrals,” said Mr. O’Boyle. “We could determine this by analyzing Web site traffic and conversions by geography.”

FotoBridge receives 200 to 300 questions a week through social media. It has more than 1,200 blog subscribers who read posts about saving memories and digitizing old photos, slides, negatives, and home movies. “Often, visits from social media sources can account for up to 15 percent or more of our daily Web site traffic,” Mr. O’Boyle said.

Although FotoBridge has not fully quantified the impact of using social media on its sales growth, the company’s revenue has tripled over the last three years.

Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development firm. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/a-photo-scanning-service-learns-to-capture-exposure/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Bucks Blog: Thursday Reading: Housing Options for Aging Boomers

November 24

Thursday Reading: Housing Options for Aging Boomers

An app to help win Black Friday, retailers push the Fed for yet lower debit fees, housing options for baby boomers and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f418dd2835b6a6e5cab5884b069b8d79

Week in Review: A Generation of Slackers? Not So Much

The reaction from many older Americans? This generation had it coming.

Generation Y — or Millennials, the Facebook Generation or whatever you want to call today’s cohort of young people — has been accused of being the laziest generation ever. They feel entitled and are coddled, disrespectful, narcissistic and impatient, say authors of books like “The Dumbest Generation” and “Generation Me.”

And three in four Americans believe that today’s youth are less virtuous and industrious than their elders, a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found.

In a sign of humility or docility, young people agree. In that 2009 Pew survey, two-thirds of millennials said older adults were superior to the younger generation when it came to moral values and work ethic.

After all, if there’s a young person today who’s walked 10 miles barefoot through the snow to school, it was probably on an iPhone app.

So is this the Laziest Generation? There are signs that its members benefit from lower standards. Technology has certainly made life easier. But there may also be a generation gap; the way young adults work is simply different.

It’s worth remembering that to some extent, these accusations of laziness and narcissism in “kids these days” are nothing new — they’ve been levied against Generation X, Baby Boomers and many generations before them. Even Aristotle and Plato were said to have expressed similar feelings about the slacker youth of their times.

But this generation has had it easy in some ways.

They can access just about any resource, product or service anywhere from a mere tap on a touch screen. And as many critics have noted, it’s also easier to get A’s. The typical grade-point average in college rose to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade, from 2.52 in the 1950s, according to a recent study by Stuart Rojstaczer, professor emeritus at Duke, and Christopher Healy of Furman University.

College students also spend fewer hours studying each week than did their counterparts in 1961, according to a new working paper by Philip S. Babcock of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks of the University of California, Riverside. That doesn’t mean all this leftover time is spent on PlayStation 3’s.

There is ample evidence that young people today are hard-working and productive. The share of college students working full time generally grew from 1985 onward — until the Great Recession knocked many millennials out of the labor force, according to the Labor Department.

And while many college students today — like those of yesterday — get financial help from their parents, 44 percent of students today say that work or personal savings helped finance their higher educations, according to a survey of recent graduates by Rutgers University.

“I don’t think this is a generation of slackers,” said Carl Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers. “This image of the kid who goes off and skis in Colorado, I don’t think that’s the correct image. Today’s young people are very focused on trying to work hard and to get ahead.”

Defying the narcissism stereotype, community service among young people has exploded.

Between 1989 and 2006, the share of teenagers who were volunteering doubled, to 26.4 percent from 13.4 percent, according to a report by the Corporation for National and Community Service. And the share of incoming college freshmen who say they plan to volunteer is at a record high of 32.1 percent, too, U.C.L.A.’s annual incoming freshman survey found.

Perhaps most important, many of the behaviors that older generations interpret as laziness may actually enhance young people’s productivity, say researchers who study Generation Y.

Members of Gen Y, for example, are significantly more likely than Gen X’ers and boomers to say they are more productive working in teams than on their own, according to Don Tapscott, author of “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World,” a book based on interviews with 11,000 millennials.

To older workers, wanting help looks like laziness; to younger workers, the gains that come from teamwork have been learned from the collaborative nature of their childhood activities, which included social networks, crowd-sourcing and even video games like World of Warcraft that “emphasize cooperative rather than individual competition,” Mr. Tapscott says.

Employers also complain about millennials checking Facebook and Twitter on the job, or working with their ear buds in.

Older workers have a strong sense of separate spheres for work and play: the cubicle is for work, and home is for fun. But to millennials, the boundaries between work and play are fuzzier, said Michael D. Hais, co-author of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics.”

Think of the corporate cultures at prototypical Gen Y employers like Facebook and Google, he says, where foosball, volleyball courts and subsidized massages are office fixtures.

The prevailing millennial attitude is that taking breaks for fun at work makes people more, not less, productive. Likewise, they accept that their work will bleed into evenings and weekends.

Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. (The jury is still out on that one.)

Of course, these explanations may be unconvincing to older bosses, co-workers and teachers on the other side of this culture clash. But at least they can take comfort in one fact: someday, millennials will have their own new generation of know-it-all ne’er-do-wells to deal with.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=37a8b5208c34384624eecb3e0f6000e4

In Shift, Ads Try to Entice Over-55 Set

Marketers like Kellogg’s, Skechers and 5-Hour Energy drink are broadening their focus to those 55 and up, who were largely ignored in most of their media plans until recently. During next week’s upfront announcements, the annual preview of the fall television season, network executives are planning to introduce shows created to have broad appeal, including to older viewers, and the ad dollars they represent.

This amounts to a reversal in thinking that took hold during the 1960s, when advertisers first started aiming for baby boomers, the largest segment of the United States population. But the reasons for the shift are not just demographic, they are economic.

As a result of the recent recession, unemployment rates for younger age groups have been far higher than those for older Americans. The most recent unemployment rate for those 20 to 24 years old is 14.2 percent; for those 25 to 34, it is 9.4 percent. The rate for people aged 55 to 64 is only 6.2 percent.

Financially, the disparity is similar. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those people aged 45 to 54 and 55 to 64 had the highest median weekly earnings of any age segment in the United States: $844 and $860, respectively. Meanwhile, those 20 to 24 had weekly earnings of only $454. Those who are 25 to 34 earned $682.

Stephanie Pappas, a senior planner for BBDO NY, said there was now good reason for ad clients to seek the mature audience.

“In some ways, they are the ideal consumer. They have money, they consume loads of media, and they remain optimistic,” she said.

The bimonthly magazine for AARP has been pushing to attract new advertisers, according to Patricia Lippe Davis, the vice president for marketing for AARP media. Recently, products previously thought of as youthful — brands like Jeep and Shape-ups by Skechers — have advertised in AARP.

“The grandkids say I’m ‘really cool now’ but what they don’t know is I always was,” reads the text of the Jeep ad.

“We’ve seen an increase in advertisers targeting this booming demographic, many of whom are not the types of advertisers you’d expect to see in our media properties,” Ms. Davis wrote in an e-mail.

For decades, television has been the most determined proselytizer on behalf of the premium value of reaching consumers aged 18 to 49. In the 1960s, ABC found itself hopelessly uncompetitive with CBS and NBC in what was then the standard ratings measurement, total households. So the network adopted a strategy to appeal to younger viewers with programs like “Batman,” “Shindig,” and “Mod Squad.”

The idea caught on, and even as the boomer generation grew older, advertisers continued to court younger viewers — first on the theory that they had not yet established brand loyalty, then because they were harder to reach than mature viewers who watched far more television.

Since then, all advertising sales have been based on two main groups, those people aged 18 to 49, and those 25 to 54. Once viewers reached 55, they were considered all but valueless.

In the last decade, NBC has been a central force in pushing that view, as the home of youth-oriented hits like “Friends” and “The Office.” But Alan Wurtzel, the president of research for NBC Universal, initiated a study last year into a group he labeled “alpha boomers,” the leading edge of the baby boom generation, which is now turning 65.

For companies to avoid shifting advertising and marketing attention toward older Americans is “a big mistake,” he said. “You risk not only growth, but at some point you risk your brand.”

Mr. Wurtzel said that as NBC put together its lineup of potential new series for fall, he made the programmers in the company aware of the attractiveness of the 55-plus audience. He described it as “one of the things we look at when we look at pilots.”

The network has already ordered a new series, “Playboy,” set in the 1960s, and this week renewed the drama “Harry’s Law,” which stars Kathy Bates, who is 62.

Mature consumers also seem to be spending on categories not traditionally associated with older people. NBC’s study of those people 55 to 64 showed that they spent more than the average consumer on categories like home improvement, large appliances, casual dining and cosmetics.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3cfebf814d3de45c13db35f71e156484