One of the reasons power structures can be so commonly screwed up is that they are usually inherited in some way or another from a time before anybody living was even born.
Young and old, so that's like a century right there, and some things can get out-of-date a lot faster than that.
That's what makes it such a long-term problem.
The equivalent in a corporate culture is a structure inherited from a time before any current employees were there.
Either way you can end up with some misguided systems which are not relevant enough for a modern situation, and it can be very painful to correct.
>Can you imagine: on the one hand post industrial countries are inhabited by a bunch or multi centenarians, on the other hand poor countries are overpopulated by youngsters.
Since World War 2 this has been the trend, not people living that much longer, but average & median ages diverging widely.
American, German, British, Japanese, Russian, Italian WW2 participants are finally almost completely gone. Their descendants of these participants as a group skew older than the general populations which are trending less youthful than developing countries overall.
Remember these entire countries (their population at the time) participated, not just the warfighters, that's one reason they call it a World War.
So these older-populated countries still have a significant cohort whose fathers & grandfathers were the participants in WW2, and the legacy of the devastation was not forgotten by as many generations since then compared to developing countries. Some of whom had much smaller percentages of WW2 participants to begin with, and now it's largely their great-grandfathers & great-great-grandfathers.
Seems to me those are the ones most likely to start WW3. In recent decades some have known more intense fighting than there actually was in their location during WW2 anyway.
>In the post industrial countries their minuscule pool of young people have no chance to dislodge entrenched old people who have the power.
It could be worse, you could have a teenage monarch, then you'd have to wait a really long time before you could expect a royal change.
>they should have the opportunity to shape their society in their time without obstructionist old timers.
This is so important to youthful accomplishment, the sooner people can have a society more suitable for its time, the better off everyone would be. Especially young people with a long future ahead of them, it's amazing what you can accomplish in a few short decades if you start early.
Fortunately not all old timers are obstructionist, but it does tend to be a technique for seeking & holding on to undue legacy power, and they're the ones with the most time for consolidation.