I think that people believe they’ll become wiser up to a certain point. There is no doubt that there is a large cognitive decline that is happening at very old age.
Some things simply won't matter as you age. Climate change will have zero impact if you are going to die in a decade, which wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate among the current presidential candidates. If you aren't personally impacted, no matter how wise you may be, you can't have the same level of empathy for the problem.
They're not dictators or petty royalty -- they didn't get into that role without having people elect them. They don't care because their electorate doesn't care; old white people in the US vote in large numbers.
You can care about other people, but there's nothing like experiencing a problem first-hand. It's a level of selflessness that most people don't ever realize, because it goes against human nature. If a flight loses cabin pressure, you need to put on your own oxygen mask before someone else's. Not that you don't care for other people, but if you don't care for yourself first, you will literally be unable to help others.
It's true that with age, one realizes that one won't be around much longer. And one realizes even more clearly just how little effect one person can have on the world.
But alternatively, sometimes people who are detached from a problem can do a far better job on it. And people who have seen a lot are better equipped to put things in context than those who haven't.
Except young people don’t vote in nearly the same numbers as older people:
> In 2018, among those age 65 and older, voter turnout was 65 percent for women and 68 percent for men. In contrast, 38 percent of women 18-29 years old voted and 33 percent of men of the same age group voted. [0]
A lot of voter registration laws are designed to make it hard for young people to vote. They move more frequently or are at college away from their permanent address.
I've missed one major election since I turned 18, and it's because I was on internship 5 hours from where I could vote.
I’ve moved 10+ times in the past 25 years and voted in every presidential election and most midterm elections. The ones I skipped were because I was younger and didn’t realize the importance of them. It’s not that hard.
And that's great. Voting is important to me too, and it was when I was younger also. It happened that specific year that requesting an absentee ballot was not a high enough priority and I missed it. It wasn't even a presidential election year.
I'm 37 and own a house and stuff now, and move less, and change my drivers license when I do move. It's much easier for me to vote. I don't think about it in advance.
Why is it so hard to acknowledge that while it's not "hard" for young people to vote, it is slightly harder than it is for established middle age people?
Yes, I didn't say it was impossible to vote. My point was that it is more inconvenient in general for young people to vote than older people, and there are things we could do to increase their participation if we wanted to. We could also hold elections on weekends.
You also have to factor in that not only are older generations further into their lives than us (I'm generalizing) younger people, with possible wisdom gained, but they are also of a different generation, raised in a different environment and with different values. That's a bigger issue to me than the fact that they're older. Of course the older generation will always be more conservative in some respects (or at least has been in recent history). Part of that is the effects of becoming older ("wisdom"), part of it is survivorship bias, and part is just that society changes, and young people now are more liberal/left-wing/"woke"/etc on average than somebody who became an adult in the 70s or 80s.
I was born and raised overseas, and have spent my entire life embedded in many very different cultures.
I come from an ivy-league family (I'm the redneck engineer) that has been almost entirely dedicated to some fairly intense public service. Most of them could have become quite wealthy, but chose to do Service, instead.
I have written open-source software, for decades, dedicated to helping some of the most downtrodden folks on Earth recover from devastating personal circumstances. It has not made me one single dime. In fact, it has cost me many thousands.
And we're all pretty darn liberal. Being mixed up with dozens of different cultures all your life tends to do that.
My experience is that many of the younger folks in my industry are incredibly materialistic. I suspect that's par for the course. It didn't start with this generation.
Once we get a bit older, we may come to reflect, and discover that so many things that were of great importance when we were younger, don't mean diddly anymore.
As for my relationship with technology; I learned to write software that lasts decades. Almost every project I've ever done has been designed as a legacy.
> My experience is that many of the younger folks in my industry are incredibly materialistic. I suspect that's par for the course. It didn't start with this generation.
I suspect that is selection bias. IT and programming have been reliable ways to make north-of-median-income for decades now, since the .com boom in the 90s. This ties in with the rise of the Bro Programmer meme for the same reason -- it's where you to to make money.
Hell, you're posting this on HN, which is the news site for a startup incubator -- which is ultimately about making founders and investors tons of freakin money. Obviously you're going to see a bias to getting that $$$ here
I think this is the key sentence, and everyone seems to be glossing over it:
> Americans 55 and older account for less than one-third of the population, but they own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth—the highest level of wealth concentration on record.
Running a national political campaign is a more than full time job for a period of several months. The median American worker can’t just take a few months off work to run for office.
There are millions of Americans below age 55 with means to support themselves for several months running the campaign. Suggesting that younger people do not run for office because they risk starvation and eviction is just absurd.
The median net worth of people 45-54 is $124k. For ages 35-44, it's $59k. [0] Keep in mind that includes things like home equity. It gets worse when you look at younger age brackets. Not so absurd now, is it?
You wrote that the median American worker can’t take time off to campaign. That’s correct, they can’t.
The point is that lots of people, of all ages, both young and old, who’s net worth is significantly above the median, can afford to take time off to campaign.
So, yes, people with a higher net worth are at an advantage when running for president, but this doesn’t really explain a bias against younger presidents, since there are plenty of wealthy younger people, in terms of sheer numbers, just not in terms of percentage of the population.
Also, you wrote that people over 55 represent 1/3 of the American population but own 2/3 of the wealth. This can at least partly be explained by the fact that most people’s net worth increases with age and not just linearly. Plus older people often inherit some wealth from parents who die, increasing again their net worth.
If the same pattern stays in place for future generations, if they also get wealthier with age, I don’t personally see that as a big problem. Do you?
If on the other hand the pattern doesn’t continue, and younger people don’t get wealthier with age, then, yes, I agree that’s a problem.
Because generally, older people have more experience than the young, which translates into knowledge about the things that really matter.
When your life is falling apart or you have to make a life-altering decision, you ask your parents or your grandparents, not some teenager. If have something that absolutely, positively must be done, you give it to a senior, not a green newbie.
Age often (but not always) translates into knowledge, and sometimes translates into wisdom.
Look at those running for president this year. Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Trump are all old. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone will say that at least one of those candidates does not display wisdom. (Which one may vary, but nobody thinks that they all are wise.)
So does Don Knuth. So does Don Hopkins, the former director of health programs for the Carter Center and spent years leading the effort to eradicate Guinea worm. So devoted to his task, he didn't even give his kids his cell phone number when he traveled to Africa.
I can't speak for the current US President, but there are a lot of people who are perfectly capable of reading email, but for whom the task would distract them from more important uses of their time.
If I had the resources the president or a CEO had I would have my assistants print out my emails too and I'm 29 years old, knowing what I know about screen time and mental health. Its healthy to have some separations from technology.
At that level, this makes perfect sense. The last thing we need is a President screwing around for an hour each day with the latest software update, etc.
You don't need wealth to run for the office. Bernie Sanders, while certainly wealthier than average American, doesn't have any more liquid wealth than typical 30-something software engineer, and doesn't seem to be spending any of it on his campaign.
What you need to run is people who will vote for you, and that's a real problem for young candidates.
> But old age runs deep in modern presidential politics.
Does it really though? Not according to Wikipedia, which puts the median age of a president at 55 years and 3 months, and which describes the distribution of ages as conforming to a bell curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
No, there’s no doubt in my mind that the median age of a president is greater than the median age of the general population, but that in no way implies that old age “runs deep” among presidents, which I take to mean that it’s a common thing.
About half are less than 55 and half are more than 55. Most are somewhere near 55 (since the distribution conforms to a bell curve). 55, in my opinion, is not “old age”, but your mileage may vary.
Extra context: a 55-year-old who gets elected for president twice would finish at 63, about 3-4 years short of retirement age (66-67 depending on birth year).
The population of the U.S. has grown considerably since 1985. The median age of the entire population does not seem like a good metric. What's the median age of people qualified to run for president today? It appears to be 50-60.
As the minimum age to become president is 35, you should exclude people under 35 from the statistics. I can believe that 55 is close to the median age of people 35 and older.
If we start with Johnson, the average of the ages of Johnson and Nixon, so somewhere between 55 and 56:
Clinton 46 years 154 days
Obama 47 years 169 days
Carter 52 years 111 days
Bush Jr 54 years 198 days
Johnson 55 years 87 days
Nixon 56 years 11 days
Ford 61 years 26 days
Bush Sr 64 years 222 days
Reagan 69 years 349 days
Trump 70 years 220 days
For the non-Americans or those just not up on Presidential history: Ford was the one who never got elected.
Nixon's VP -- who ran with Nixon and got elected in '72 -- was Sprio Agnew, who later resigned due to corruption allegations. Ford replaced Agnew, and then replaced Nixon when he got nailed by Watergate.
Brilliant maneuvering? Or falling bass-ackwards into the Oval Office?
Yes, so using that method and excluding Gerald Ford it would be the age of George W. Bush when he was re-elected, so about 59 years old.
Clinton 46 years 154 days
Clinton second term
Obama 47 years 169 days
Obama second term
Carter 52 years 111 days
Bush Jr 54 years 198 days
Bush Jr second term
Johnson 55 years 87 days
Johnson second term
Nixon 56 years 11 days
Nixon second term
Bush Sr 64 years 222 days
Reagan 69 years 349 days
Reagan second term
Trump 70 years 220 days
Nevertheless, I wouldn't use the term "old age" regarding any of these presidents, with the exceptions of Reagan and Trump.
Here's my point. The author of the article wrote: "One possibility is that it’s mere randomness. It’s only one election that’s been roiled by Trump, you might think, and younger blood is waiting in the wings."
I believe this is the mostly the correct answer. No, it has nothing to do with Trump, but, yes, it is just randomness. Younger blood will come again the future, as it has in the past. I'm not convinced by any of the proposed arguments to try to prove the opposite.
Just one example, "Older politicians have had longer to build up donor networks, and older rich people may be more likely to take the risk of self-funding. If Jeff Bezos had quit Amazon to run for president this year, he would have given up years of peak earning and peak productivity in the private sector."
Sure, that's true, but that didn't stop, for example, Clinton or Obama from getting elected long before they were old, because there are many other factors at play other than those mentioned above by the writer.
Briefly, there's no way to know now who will be the candidates in the 2024 American election and how old they'll be.
I messed up in the above message when calculating the median:
Clinton 46 years 154 days
Obama 47 years 169 days
Clinton second term
Obama second term
Carter 52 years 111 days
Bush Jr 54 years 198 days
Johnson 55 years 87 days
Nixon 56 years 11 days
Bush Jr 58 years 198 days
Johnson second term
Nixon second term
Bush Sr 64 years 222 days
Reagan 69 years 349 days
Trump 70 years 220 days
Reagan second term
The median is the age of Johnson, 1st term, 55 years 87 days
I don't have any real problem with older people, even 75+, being in positions of power and responsibility, especially in elected government. However, there is decent evidence that the degree to which late silent generation and early baby boomers have dominated positions of power starting in the late 1980s is a historical quirk. I didn't use to think so, but there was great article a month back on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22204966) that compiled some good data on how power seemed to consistently land on individuals in the late silent generation or early baby boom.
I don't think there is any conspiracy, although there may be some degree of self reinforcing bias toward people born around 1947 in society now. There are other precedents though- in the small scale, the US Military Academy (West Point) class of 1915 was known as the "class the stars fell on" because so many members became generals (due to WWII), and post WWII those that were able to serve in the military retained some advantages over those that weren't, either by age or other status.
Because young people are silly most of the time. They are clueless of their ignorance and how fast and radically their own beliefs will change over time.
Every 10 years, you look at your own self and you realize how little you knew, how silly and naive you were, and it keeps going.
Wisdom is when that cycle stops, either because you settled on a set of beliefs or because you understand that it's all fleeting anyway, either way, nobody should lead before reaching that stage imo.
If you are 18-25, there is a HORRIBLE principal-agent problem here. Total misalignment of interests.
Owing to the fact that, on average, young people will have more years of exposure to a set of policies, they should have voting power to shape them. One person, one vote leads to this misalignment.
Democracy with an inter-generational focus should allocate votes based on duration of policy exposure. I.e. max(1, (Avg US Life Expectancy - age)) votes.
I admit the principle-agent problem. But let's give those with the least experience and knowledge the most voting power? That seems like a very unwise solution.
You used to be able to count on your parents to have your best interests in mind. There seems to be a big generation gap between the pre and post internet generations, which is where I think some of this political turmoil is coming from.
Parent here: You still can--it's my highest priority. That said, I'm more concerned about what you'd really want in the long term than what you think you want right now.
I was skeptical of the article until the very end:
> It’s unlikely that young people will notch many policy wins in a government whose median age is over 70.
Older people have different concerns, expenses, spend their time differently, and have different problems than younger people. To ignore that younger people are under-represented in the federal government is just as bad as ignoring the under-representation of other groups.
Fascinating topic, but in terms of real meat the explanation offered for the phenomenon described is distressingly shallow. Common sense tells us as much and more about why this is happening.
I think across the board, Boomers generally haven’t handled the passing of the reins well. This will be a big problem when there are emergency appointments to leadership who haven’t been groomed. At a time when they should be retiring making room for GenXers and Millennials taking up leadership positions, they’re still working. It could be partly due to improved healthcare over the generations. It could also be the work hard, “greed is good” mentality still driving them forward. Either way, there is a disruption to the traditional course of making way for the following generations by taking on roles of mentoring rather than leading, ie emeritus positions.
I'm not convinced about the underlying premise that age is an important factor here. If people think Biden or Trump or McConnell or Pelosi are effective leaders, why should it matter what age they are? I suspect that only the most politically engaged people even consider the question.
Because when you are 70 years or older your cognitive abilities are not what they used to be.
Would you want a 70 year old person to be trained as a fighter pilot? Would you want him or her as a fireman, trying to carry people out of a fire?
A lot of great people are sharp and intelligent far into their old age, and a lot more people are not. But their brain doesnt learn as fast, doesnt adapt as well.
I want the person sitting on the nuclear button, who decides our climate policy, that decides about health care, about using our military, to be in their prime.
There are reasons for mandatory limits in certain professions, having one for becoming president is a good idea.
A lot of decision making is made by staffers. They rely on staffers to due the heavy lifting, and then the elected public official goes through the motion of reading statements written by staffers, introducing legislation, etc. Parliamentarians are quite important to Congress' day-to-day functioning. Also, as a public official, your party's platform already outlines what sides of issues you are on.
"Would you want a 70 year old person to be trained as a fighter pilot? Would you want him or her as a fireman, trying to carry people out of a fire?"
No, but those aren't the jobs under consideration here. The President can usually check with advisors and take five minutes or a couple of weeks to work out a response. "Nuclear button" is the only one of the items listed that would be a five-minute response; policies can easily wait a week or more to work out. How long did it take to put the ACA together?
Life expectancy and health (mental & physical) matters. Especially in the case of a President. Plus you want them to be able to serve 2 terms, so you need to consider current age + 8 years.
So many things factually wrong in this article....
> In January 2021, the three people most likely to be the next president—Biden, Sanders, and the incumbent, Donald Trump—would each be the oldest president to ever give an inaugural address in American history.
And until recently, we also had a serious candidate under the age of 40.
> If you extrapolate this trend, it might sound like America’s next breakthrough presidential candidate will be some 35-year-old YouTube influencer who just recently learned about the filibuster.
I thought the entire point of this article was that if you extrapolate the trend, the candidates would all be in their 90's? Also, some of what goes on in the private industry is transferrable to politics, and many of the names mentioned had substantial careers (some will argue effective careers, some won't) before they entered politics.
> In the past 40 years, the average age of Nobel Prize laureates has increased in almost every discipline,
My understanding is that the average age for starting a tenure track position has also increased as a result of increased specialization and competition. Wouldn't an increase in age for major career awards follow a similar trajectory?
> Power concentrated in the hands of old people who are also rich will predictably lead to policies that benefit the old and the rich, at the expense of the less privileged.
How does this follow? Does the author mean to imply that government officials are incapable of separating their own station from that of their constituents? Why would these old rich people favor the "rich" (usually defined as those with a high income) instead of the "old"?
> The federal government already guarantees universal health insurance and a universal basic income to seniors, even as Republicans cry socialism when young people request versions of the same policies
Maybe this is a useful fiction, but at least on paper we give these benefits to seniors because they paid into social security and medicare during their working years. Young people have not. Whether or not each one is wise, these are two clearly different things. The author just shows his own lack of understanding.
> At the end of the Cold War, a common criticism of the U.S.S.R. was that the country was crumbling in part because the Soviet politburo was too old and out of touch to keep up with a changing world.
Also, because it was a communist country that centrally planned everything, so couldn't reallocate resources efficiently.
> Without encouraging voters or employers to be ageist...
Even though this is pretty much entirely what this article is doing
> My theory is that people realize that older candidates are more likely to have sensibilities that have not been contaminated by critical theory.
No one running for political office is old enough not to have been influenced in their youth (whether positively or negatively) by critical theory in either the strict narrow sense or the broad sense in whichthe Right tends to abuse the term, unless they were living under a rock.
Critical theory’s widespread exposure is not a new thing.
Are you talking about the philosophical idea of critical theory? Because I find the internet rotten with it, but probably in a way contrary to your ideological viewpoint (which also makes my critique a critical one, and so round we go). For example, your comment critiques a whole ideological category of people and offers no concrete solution towards action to remedy or alter this viewpoint. You fit into critical theory very well, as do I. Unintentionally or not.
It's probably at best an unproductive line of thought or at worst virtue signalling, so probably not a valuable discussion to have, really.
I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male. Everyone should just be treated as an individual. Is that so controversial or retrograde?
Let me guess... the "younger people" whose "insanity" you're referring to all happen to share a specific political and social alignment, which you yourself do not?
It used to be that the right to freedom of speech, something essential for liberty, was a baseline everyone could agree on.
A growing vocal minority has been "deconstructing" that to say that your freedom of speech should depend not on the fact that you are a human, but instead into which ideological, racial, biological, economic, or social groups you can put yourself.
When presented with the argument that this damages the protection of freedom of speech, and hence endangers basic liberty, the counterargument is either that a) you are identifying yourself as a member of an out-of-fashion group and therefore should be silenced, or b) that the whole concept of freedom of speech came from one of these out-of-fashion groups and is therefore inherently bad.
Neither one of these responses is reasonable. They're both ad hominem arguments, and usually arrive peppered with red herring arguments to bolster the "you are bad" perspective.
Western culture, which, to varying degrees, has protected freedom of speech as a core value, is one of the most tolerant cultures on the planet today. It is that same freedom of speech that has been a key enabler for this tolerance. It most certainly is not perfect, and can most certainly be improved, but not by removing the mechanism most responsible for improving it in these dimensions.
It often feels as though one is confronting a screaming person who is accusing one of stealing his or her glasses, while said screaming person is wearing those very same glasses during the outburst.
I can understand how that would feel like the screaming party is "insane".
Granted, that may not be at all what the other poster meant.
Absolutely, because critical theory is a phenomenon of the Left. The right has its wackos too, but both the sane Left and the sane Right are quick to distance themselves from them. Critical theory lunacy seems IMHO to get a pass from otherwise sane persons on the Left even if they don't embrace it themselves.
> I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male.
That's nice, but in what way is that not a non-sequitur.
Yeah, it is kind of a non-sequitur. On the other hand you have to admit that I was responding to a rather amorphous comment. My intent was to merely given an example of where I draw the line between sane and insane.
> I've never thought that a black or a Hispanic should be treated or thought of badly because of his or her race. Nor do I think that my thoughts and experiences should be discounted because I am a white male. Everyone should just be treated as an individual. Is that so controversial or retrograde?
I'm with you on this. I don't think it is controversial.
On the other hand, your sweeping comment on "young people" being "insane", seems to do a categorical kind of "discounting" based on their age (as opposed to race). As if they haven't "grown up enough" to shed bad ideas. Which is by definition an shifting of the goalpoasts because by the fact of life, the cohort of "younger people than you" will always keep growing in size and there's no mobility: there's nothing a younger person can do to be older than you. A fair comment to call "younger folks" "insane" then? I found it unfair, even if our political ideologies align.
This is an example of a lack of self-awareness that I meant to capture by saying "critical theory rotting out the internet". I'm not claiming you're a part of this group, by the way, for all I know you may change your mind or reinforce the deliberate nature of your comment. I appreciate you giving me a concrete example, though. From my point of view, people are too free to be critical of the ideas they want at any time, courtesy of the internet, without actually having an in-person, stimulating, and productive discussion with real human beings that share a different view, and therefore do not learn how to adapt themselves to new ideas, and therefore have a stunted/warped/non-existent way to introspect, and therefore are free to shout out products of criticality theory (which can be for any ideology, conservative or liberal[0]) without the feedback and nurturing of personal growth through genuine intellectual humility (it is performative intellectual humility[1]). So here I am, challenging you, hopefully in a positive way, as you've challenged me (perhaps less explicitly and more gracefully).
In my personal experience it happens in "all sides"'s internet communities based on politics or political philosophy. Which is expected since the largest participants are not there to have their minds changed, and this hard-headedness then becomes this mirror which is what people model themselves to become. And cannot recognize this cycle for what it is. Huge net negative all around.
[0] Note I don't use "criticality theory" as a politicized term like Jordan Peterson and other right-leaning folks like to use it, for reasons I don't care to discuss here.
[1] This blur between genuine and performative can get into some weird postmodern ideas, but again, even exploring ideas like that has become politicized by the Peterson camp, so I don't care to discuss here.
Well, I did say "a lot" of young people, not all. I have three adult children and I wouldn't say any of them are in the thrall of critical theory, despite having graduated from public universities in California.
By the way, what is an example of critical theory being used by partisans of the Right?
The "deep state" and "tech giant bias" ideological movements of the Right sit firmly within the broader definition of critical theory. Whenever the Right appeals to freedom from corruption or freedom of speech for those specific issues, they are appealing to the narrow definition of critical theory (emancipation/liberation from being subject to another's dominant position of certain liberties).
You obviously know the ins and outs of critical theory much better than I do. You've also cited two ideological movements of which I am completely unaware. Thanks for your time.
Personally I believe there should be an age cap for important positions. 70 years old and you are out. Alzheimer's is becoming an issue with elected officials and will only worsen. We have age minimums. Why not a maximum?
...yet they judge older people with disdain simply because of their age.
It's a hypocritical and hubris ridden perspective.