Employers cherry-pick from life’s prime time because our market economy has dropped the old and the young, relegating them to the status of mothers and fathers and homemakers.

Imagine the curve of a moon, half-hidden below the horizon. On the left we rise as newborns, climbing the moon's rim, finding our gifts, the ones we are meant to leave behind. Presently the lucky will join the economy, feeding their families and keeping a roof over their heads.

But the luckiest among them are tempted to stop time. Sacrificing their connection to society and their honour, they cling to the moon's apex, cheating death. There is nothing new under the sun. In the eighth century B.C. Homer writes of Agamemnon that “. . . surely in ruinous heart he makes sacrifice and has not wit enough to look behind and before him . . .” Iliad 1. 342-3.

Because the moon is in the West. Their honour gone, the greedy sit astride a setting economy. True - the old, the young, and the less fortunate sink first, but as is increasingly evident today worldwide, the luckiest, the craftiest, and those operating on the edge of legality will not be spared. All will drown in the Pacific, off the coast of California.

“And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – ”

Gerard Manley Hopkins: God's Grandeur

How can we make our economy rise as the sun in the East?

Imagine the curve once again. Imagine a curve that includes us all. The economy is not about the money, stupid. Money is a means of exchange, not a system. And an economy that shuts out the majority of its citizens cannot survive. The economy, our collective welfare, depends on the inclusion of our honourable work. All of our honourable work.

Imagine the weak among us, the old and the young, clinging to the curves of the heavenly orb as they near the horizon. The young have much to learn and no one to teach them. The old have come to expect a secure retirement and employers are balking. The solution is in front of us, but we are not looking.

Rather than expel these outliers from the economy because the numbers don't add up, include them. True, the old cannot work fourteen-hour days, and the young must spend more time learning than earning. But neither has to feed a family. They have to live, but in the Navajo creed it is dishonourable to desire more than you need. It is, as their elders would say, the spoiling of holy things.

Teachers and learners are vital to society, to our economy.

So let us include them, and everyone, recognizing that the strength of an economy, of a society, is in the collective gift of its peoples. We can work, now, to seventy-five and beyond in many cases, our health improved by the engagement. Older people have a perspective potentially invaluable to the young, and can do much in helping the latter realize their gifts. All we need, as outliers on both ends of the curve of life, is self-respect and a living wage. The return on investment will be beyond the wildest dreams of venture capitalists.

Let us stop dishonouring ourselves by cherry-picking. Instead let us honour ourselves and each other, fitting together as the ancients, the poets, and the native elders have taught.