Judging by her piece in the BBC News Magazine Lucy Kellaway seems to think that if everyone over 50 resigned their jobs it would do some good to younger people who are looking for work.
Rhubarb!
Pardon my outrage - we all love Lucy's sideways comments on the world of work but this one takes the biscuit.
Funnily enough I noticed that she said something similar some months ago in her Financial Times piece, which provoked modest demurring from a number of contributors to the letters page. It seems this did not chasten her one little bit.
So OK Lucy, resign if you must and the FT will appoint a recent university leaver to fill your shoes - I don't think! But do you really, really imagine that economies work in this way? That takes some believing.
Get rid of older workers and there would be a land of plenty for the young!? Really?
It is just about as barmy as the racist garbage that shipping off all migrant workers back to whence they came would provide jobs for 'indigenous white workers'.
Rubbish again, of course!
(As a confused and bigoted fellow I know amusingly put it - "They come over here, taking all the jobs that we don't want...." Quite so!)
So please don't let's pretend that the economy provides some kind of Aladdin's lamp service - new jobs for old - substituting younger workers for every older person who resigns.
But there is a laboratory experiment of Lucy's idea in case she is interested. It was the Job Release Scheme in the 1970s, in which the Government provided payments to employers who encouraged older workers to retire and filled their places with younger workers - it didn't work of course.
I was union official at the time dealing with manufacturing employers in the South London and Kent area. Quite a number took the money from the Government to help them ease workers out with larger severance packages.
However, I never saw any younger workers taking the jobs of the hundreds of well skilled older employees who were encouraged to quit before their time. They couldn't have done them if they had. And surprise, surprise, before long the same employers were bleating about skills shortages.
Talk about self-defeating!
Moreover, the Government's own research showed how wrong-headed the whole idea had been subsequently.
So Lucy's ideas are not only barmy but dangerous. By extension you could ship all older workers off to some never-never land where they might idle away their days in the sunshine.
I imagine Lucy has heard of the "lump of labour fallacy".
It refers to the idea that economies provide a fixed quantum (or lump) of employment which we can be spread around more fairly by encouraging older people to quit. Note however, the word "fallacy." This represents the consensus of informed economic opinion.
Indeed, the Lucy idea was rubbished by the OECD's international study of policy and practice in response to demographic change - titled Live Longer, Work Longer - published some years ago.
In this major international survey, countries which adopted policies encouraging older workers to retire and quit the workforce early were the ones with the highest rates of unemployment amongst younger people. Clearly something went wrong.
Lucy's philanthropy is Alice in Wonderland economics. Take spending power out of the economy by getting a whole lot of people to retire, resign, become unemployed etc and what do you get? Less spending, lower demand, fewer jobs - of course.
Actually, Alice caught Lucy's mood rather well in her comment, "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't."
Which more or less captures it - get all the experienced older and most competent people to resign in the hope that inexperienced tyros will move in take over and what would you get? Chaos probably.
Even the mad hatter would have demurred - I think.