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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

This.

The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me.

It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.

I mean. That statement tracks pretty well if you look at our government, where the elderly are represented in elected offices at double or even triple their actual share of the population.

According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1]

[0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf

[1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)

It’s less bad than that. 24% in the 2010 census were under 18 and 9.9% were 18–24.

I don’t put those under “should be in Congress”, and constitutionally they’re not allowed to be until 25. So it is 13 percentage points out of 66 percentage points — about 20% of the population with 34% of the seats in the house.

Senators have to be 30 so the over 65 crowd would be an even greater share there.

Given that experience probably gives you _something_, it’s still out of whack but not crazy.

All of that said, personally I believe it’s far too skewed and we should have an age cap in Congress.

Sure, but the implication that congressional representation should closely track percentage of the population is ludicrous. I mean, according to a quick Google search, nearly 40% of Americans are under age 30, the minimum age for a US Senator. Should we be mad none of them are Senators, or heck, that not one of the nearly a quarter of Americans who are under 18 (aka children) are in Congress?

You are trivializing what is an actual worldwide issue: even in democratic countries the young are completely not represented. Not “underrepresented”, not represented at all. It’s a massive, massive problem that very few countries actually tried to tackle. The young are the future, but governments can (and mostly do) completely ignore their needs, and simply run everything into the metaphorical ground - they’ll be gone by the time the real impact of their choices will be apparent, anyway.

This dovetails nicely with another big problem of most political systems: the cursus honorum for politicians is often very slow, meaning that, by the time a person gets to call the shots, the world has already changed significantly. This could simply be considered folklore when the world moved slowly, but we’ve effectively lost that luxury about 100 years ago. And when we go the other way, and elect mid-life people, we end up with revolving-door issues and poor selection criteria (looks over brains etc).

So yeah, age-representation is a big unsolved problem of democratic government.

I don't think it's taking the point too far to say that this will be one of the horsemen when the end comes for our current form of governance. Communications technology speeds social change, and government digs it's heels in because it's run by people who "know better" because they feel like their experience is more important than actual fact.

And then we laugh at people like AOC, because nothing makes us feel better about our ignorance than demeaning smart people who want to fix it for us.

I'd note that its not like these are recent events in canada. Trudeau (the current Prime minister's dad) introduced the bill that semi-legalized abortion (under restricted circumstances) and introduced some gun control, 52 years ago. (Among other things like legalizing homosexuality and contraceptives). Then 20 years later the remaining restrictions on abortion were ruled unconstitutional.

All these senior citizen lawmakers in the usa were pretty young when all this went down, so i dont think age is an explaining factor for the differences.

Yes, I don't know either.

In Germany we are ruled by old people and conservatives, but they are nothing compared to the US.

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