Now before you object that I’m being harsh, Ms. Kellaway and I agree on this point. Of course, we differ vastly in our reasoning. Ms. Kellaway insists that she should lose her job (or more accurately quit it) to make way for younger people wanting to enter the journalism profession.

I think she should quit because her article displayed shockingly poor reasoning, fundamental ignorance of the labor economy, and a total blindness to radical new trends in labor and workplace dynamics.

You see, Ms. Kellaway’s thesis is that, what with unemployment being so high, folks over 50 should quit their jobs to make way for younger folks. To wit:

“The young can’t advance because everywhere they find my complacent generation is in situ. Thus the only way of solving the problem is to make everyone of a certain age, say over 50, walk the plank.”

This is absolute idiocy for a few reasons. First of all, in the sort of white-collar jobs that Ms. Kellaway is suggesting get the Logan’s Run treatment, employees are not interchangeable and experience matters. Contrary to the brush-off she gives the suggestion, there are real benefits to having done a job or been in an industry for forty or more years. The senior and principal engineers in my workplace are incredible sources of information, guidance, and leadership, in large part because they’ve been perfecting their crafts for a majority of their lives.

This seems blindingly obvious to me, but Ms. Kellaway brushes this aside by asserting that “15 or 20 years’ experience, … is surely just as good as 30 or even 40.”

No. It’s not. This is so wrong that I can’t believe a grown woman who ostensibly thinks Very Seriously about things even thought it, much less wrote it.

Want to know how much better 30 years experience is, rather than 15? I can tell you. It’s twice as good. You know, being in that 30 years of learning about the industry and the job and developing skills necessary to do the work effectively is twice as many as 15.

This is not some subtle argument from ideology or my own personal suspicions about the vagaries of the labor economy. It’s math. And not even very hard math at that.

But even if her anti-experience argument weren’t crashingly, obviously wrong, it would still be a bad argument. Even if we assume that white collar workers top out magically after 15 years of experience, why would you fire half of your most productive workers? The people best able to do the jobs would be the ones with 15+ years experience and, even if they’re all doing the same level of work, it’s the highest level of work available. Why fire the best?

Kellaway has a number of other stupifyingly bad arguments for her stupendously bad idea. Take, for instance, her assertion that:

“Shifting from old to young would bring down wages and would also solve the executive pay problem in one shot. Almost all the people earning grotesque amounts are over 50 – getting rid of them would mean CEO pay would come thumping down.”

This so clearly displays not only a fundamental ignorance of labor and economics, but also such terribly sloppy thinking, that I’m starting to question that Ms. Kellaway is arguing in good faith. I mean, she clearly has a passable command of written English, and shows no signs of disordered thinking other than poor logic, so it doesn’t seem that she’s psychotic or obviously mentally impaired.

And yet here she is trumpeting that a benefit of her scheme is that it would drive down wages. This means that she sees lower wages as a desirable outcome. She also implies that high pay for executives is a serious problem. Ms. Kellaway is, in the above-quoted passage, basically saying that everyone should be paid less and, to the end of that noble goal, we should hobble our economy by firing off the best and most productive workers.

From that passage, I’m left with the conclusion that Ms. Kellaway has intense personal hatred for either logic or economic prosperity. The only other option that I can see at this point is that she suffered a traumatic head injury at an earlier age and that I’m in the uncomfortable position of mocking the disabled.

(If that is indeed the case, and Ms. Kellaway got kicked in the head by a horse during her youth, then I would like to apologize profusely and commend the BBC on their extremely ambitious work-study program for the disabled.)

More seriously, though, Ms. Kellaway is writing about a topic that she clearly hasn’t thought through. The labor economy is an interesting and important part of modern society, and there are a few fundamental facts about it that Ms. Kellaway seems to have missed.

First, the labor pool is not of fixed sized. Ms. Kellaway was, by her own admission, presented with this argument before writing this article. She either dismisses it out of hand or failed to understand the argument. I can’t tell which because immediately after she mentions it, she tries to refute it by talking about experience. It’s one of the most quickly executed non sequitors I’ve ever seen.

The other thing she misses is that supply and demand work in labor as well. Skilled workers are in shorter supply and higher demand than lower skilled ones. Ditto with experienced workers. That is why they get paid more. If less-experienced, lower-paid workers could do the jobs currently done by older, better-trained workers, then they could be competing for those same jobs and getting paid similar wages.

The reason older workers tend to have better jobs, is because they tend to have more valuable skills and experience than younger workers. This is such a fundamental part of the traditional labor economy that the fact that Ms. Kellaway is clearly unaware of it, is the single best piece of evidence that she’s unqualified for her current position.

(Speaking of which: if anyone from the BBC News is reading this, drop me a line. I’m pretty obviously much more qualified than Lucy Kellaway to write about the job market. And on the off-chance you’ve adopted her policy, I’m only 28, so you’ll get another 22 good years out of me.)

The final thing that Ms. Kellaway misses, is that the salaried-position-driven labor economy that she axiomatically assumes, is changing pretty dramatically. We live in a world where huge numbers of people are working for themselves as free-lancers, selling their skilled labor directly to consumers. Similarly, the cost of starting a new business is dropping dramatically and many young people starting their own companies, rather than working for an established firm. There is absolutely no mention in her article of contract work, free-lancing, self-employment, or entrepreneurship and yet these are increasingly how a huge number of young people are making their living.

That Ms. Kellaway ignores these trends and simply assumes a world of large, pre-existing organizations doling out a fixed number of salared positions is probably the best evidence that it’s not just her arguments about wages and labor that are flawed, its her very understanding of the labor economy.

So go on, Lucy. Have the courage of your convictions. You’ve admitted that you feel you should quit, so follow your conscience and do it. You’ll make way for a young, aspiring “commentator on office and workplace life”.

As a side benefit, you’ll spare the rest of us your hack commentary. (And seriously, BBC News. Call me.)