Why won't people who can afford to do so retire so the young people can have jobs?

We should all be working fewer hours but passing on our skills to the youngsters, our present economic system is nonsense, but how can we put it right. Writing as a recent retiree, would be happy to work for nothing a few hours a week training a youngster up.

Instead of fighting old against young look for a synthesis This is after all a philosophy site .It is true that if an old person is in a job a young person can not be employed so he can not earn money but the reason the old person old person works is not for money therefore why not let both work sharing the job and in some case's the old person could teach the young as far as the money goes they could share the pay It may need the old person taking a smaller half Our economic system does not take into account the human factors I do know of some jobs where women share the one job one works one day the other the next so it can be done and why not who wants to work all the time far better have shorter hours with production still getting done

A lot more complicated than that.

For one thing, there are many reasons people want to work other than money- some like what they do, some don't want to be bored, and so forth.

Also, in a lot of professions, the people who can afford to work are the older ones, who are usually more senior and experienced, so even if they wanted to, it just wouldn't work for them to retire and give their jobs to the younger employees. For instance, if all the senior doctors in a hospital decided to retire, there is simply no way the juniors would be able to just take over their jobs, they just don't have the experience or training. The same is true of many other jobs.

Are young people afraid of the competition from the old ones?

Next you would say why the oldies live so long cramping space for the youth.

Some idiots work for other reasons than just to make money, like self-esteem or to get out among people.

yes exactly, if more and more young people are unemployed ,that can cause severe problems like drug addiction , alcoholism , crime and loss of the human resource.

Why should they? If they can and want to work why should they retire?

Some cannot live without their jobs..feeling useful and valuable, others are simply too greedy

Older people do not want to sit around all day twiddling their thumbs.

You should really address this question with all the immigrants who are daily, flooding this country from South America. :D