Why Do Such Ancient People Run America?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
...yet they judge older people with disdain simply because of their age.
It's a hypocritical and hubris ridden perspective.
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.
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
That's a bit sad. I do it for love. I absolutely love designing and implementing software.
It's nice to be able to make a living, but all I need to do is keep the lights on, while I do what I love.
That's a rare privilege, in today's world.
It probably doesn't do to think too hard about things like this. You'll just hurt yourself and upset your friends.
> 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]
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[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-u...
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.
If you had simply googled it, you could have obtained your ballot in less than 5 minutes.
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?
The problem isn't that older people don't care, it's that the older people in charge don't care.
Some of them would like to be and want to be treated as dictators and royalty.
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.
> 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.
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[0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-h...
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.
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.
That's reality. Ignore it at your peril.
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.)
Wisdom is something different, and arguably no wise person would run for office.
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.
What you need to run is people who will vote for you, and that's a real problem for young candidates.
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...
Obama: 47 (age at inauguration)
George W. Bush: 54
Bill Clinton: 46
The author of this article has a very short memory.
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
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?
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
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.
Edit: Typo 2024, not 2026
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
Serves me right for not taking enough time to check what I write before posting. Lesson learned.
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[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/06/median-age-do...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
the answer is : Money.
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.
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?
> 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
How do you propose we filter out people unfit for office?