Studies with fruit flies and rodents show metabolic changes at around 20 years old and at 40 years and again at 80 years of age.
In today’s world, older people who are able to keep working often continue because they don’t have enough money to fund their unknown future years of living. There are very few defined benefits pension plans any more.
So, I'm actually going to in part tie the issue of gerontocracy to the recent, trendy "Why Nothing Works" and "Abundance" literary arguments: It persists, in part, because it's so more harder to get stuff done.
I just recently, in my late 40's, reached a fairly high position of leadership in my organization. I was talking to a recently retired member of my organization who had occupied my same position in the past for advice. I asked him how it was different to be in that role, say, 20 or 30 years ago vs today. He said that a big difference was there was just far more power invested in leadership roles and leadership hierarchy in the past vs today. In those days, as he put it, if you told someone to do something, they just did it. If you wanted someone gone from the company, you said it, and they were gone. If you wanted someone hired, you made a call and HR made it happen.
Today, by contrast, he said, every leadership decision needs approval by three different committees, needs to have a reviewed and approved business plan, be run by legal and HR, see if marketing is on board, etc, etc, etc. He said what he accomplished in his 3-4 year tenure in my position before he moved up would take over a decade to accomplish today. In his view, there's just point in taking the position unless you're committed to a decade in the role or more, as modern organizations are simply too bureaucratic and sclerotic to accomplish anything more in my particular leadership role than "keeping the lights on" if you're occupying the chair for less time. To make a true organization impact as an individual in a leadership role just takes longer, period.
While it obviously doesn't explain everything, I think there's a lot of truth as to why a certain cohort of people are holding on to senior positions until older ages than they used to. They just want to finally see their plans and their ideas ultimately play out.
As always, Ben Krauss wrote a finely tuned, well researched article, this one on the crowding in of gerontocracy in the work field. There should be equality of recognition given to the skilled younger worker as it is to the older worker. The door should be opened wider so both workers have equal space to work together.
The elephant in the room is that other western democracies don’t have this problem to this extent. There’s a whole world out there that we can test assumptions against but American political types prefer to talk about Andrew Jackson rather than the French or German parliament lack of gerontocracy.
It is clearly about economic power. The journalist mentions these things but also everything else putting everything on an equal footing when economic power seems to me to be 80% of the cause. Politicians need to build up campaign contributors, CEOs build executive networks and board member networks to mutually support their pay justifications.
The gerontocracy indicate a concentrating of political-economic power in the post 80s/90s world. It’s especially bad all of a sudden because it is the crest of a wave of change and the leaders who were most able to take advantage of the new wealth landscape are just that old.
As the great generation and boomers exit the scene, I predict that the gerontocracy will be much reduced. What we have is a situation where the new kings are in power until the end. When their ideological and class heirs take over (the meritocracy mostly defanged) they will be of more diverse ages. Some princes will be rather young, others will be just a few years younger than their predecessors.
AI will hurt the young, but they also have the physical ability to do blue collar jobs whereas the lower and middle class seniors will mostly return to a state of average wealth or even higher poverty as it was pre-social security.
Age in the workforce is a complicated issue, but many countries deal with it be have mandatory retirement. This approach is particularly valuable for non-market jobs (eg university professors or other government workers) where competition cannot force them out. In a related manner, the elimination of pensions has made working past 65 much more remunerative, since you can keep piling on more money. Again, many other countries have stronger private pensions. Personally I think mandatory retirement is a good idea and downshifts the value of working forever, or making your job the whole of your life.
I'd bet academia is in for a huge wave of retirements as academia struggles with Trump's predations. Obviously university administrations will see major personnel reductions as well.
Perhaps if we can reconstruct the CDC and NIH after Bobby J and Trump finish their war against them, we can make more room for more grants to younger scientists - a sort of swing for the fences for 10% or so of all the grants.
Still, is there nothing to say of wisdom, does 'cognitive decline' suggest that no such think exists? Let's find out.
This problem may become less acute as the huge boomer generation passes. (Being one myself, I get to be crass about it.)
But every time I hear technology optimists talk about the possibility of vastly expanding life expectancy in the near future, I think about societal problems like this and wonder at these sorts of problems.
I would add the inherent tension between gerontocracy/longer lifespans and rapid technological change: So many of our societal problems boil down to the difficulty of individual humans adapting to massive change. It's a cliche -- the immigrant parents who never adapt, but their kids do. However, if people are living longer and rapid technological progress brings ever more rapid societal change, we are creating a population that is increasingly quite similar to those immigrants who cannot adjust... only they hold a ton of power as well as a significant chunk of votes.
Also, we need to reimagine white collar work. I like the idea of only letting people work for 5 years then paying their salary for the rest of their lives as a pension. Or reduce FT hours to, say, 10 a week.
I'll just add a top-level comment that no one will read: the obverse problem is that our culture encourages people to dismiss anything from the past. Certainly it makes sense to give people in the 40s and 50s more power and participation in important enterprises (especially in Congress), but one factor of their success will be the extent to which they know how to listen to their elders, and indeed to consult ideas from centuries and millennia ago.
It's impossible to form one's own perspectives on past wisdom without respecting that wisdom in the first place. Otherwise one just remains in a place of constant rebellion.
This is a skill that comes with maturity, because people have to first get over the ideas that they know everything and that recent discovery and understanding across the board, scientific or cultural, automatically supersedes everything that has come before. (As if people never lived or thought until our lifetimes, and that life meant nothing until NOW.)
Yale, as an example, didn’t admit woman until 1969. It wasn’t until 1974 that woman could apply for credit independently of their husbands. The deck was very much stacked against them. But times have changed and in many cases it’s men who are struggling to adapt to the modern economy. But many people struggle to adapt to that changing reality. That’s just one example.
But it’s a fact of life that people often find it nearly impossible to adjust their reality to the present when it conflicts with how the world was when they were young.
As someone apparently not adjusting to changing reality, I wonder why I've given so much thought and research to why men are struggling to adapt to the modern economy. I have a wide range of pretty good ideas, from the disappearance of jobs that provided integrity and the ability to support a family, to the question of whether boys could better be educated by allowing them to use their hands and mess with stuff.
Then there's the need to prove oneself according to external cultural standards and pressure from one's male peers. (Women can be hard on other women, but attacks on masculinity by other men seems to have had enduring power through the ages. We've evolved ourselves to be a warrior species.)
Understanding the opposite sex is exactly one of those things it takes time (i.e. age) to do.
Stereotypes happen. But their best use is to stimulate the curiosity until one's understanding of and interest in other people expands beyond them.
+1. I'm often astonished by how many people, even *here,* ignore/don't know about even recent historical events and make confident statements that imply that they believe that "they know everything." And it's not as if I've never done this myself! Especially in my younger days...I enjoyed reading this thought-provoking post, but I dislike generalizations, including those based on age.
As I'm sure is true of most of us, the people I know (of all ages) possess a huge range of capabilities almost entirely uncorrelated with age. At work, people should be judged on their performance, not their age.
But gerontocracy _isn't_ everywhere if you compare the average ages of Congress and state legislatures with legislative branches in other countries.
From Mexico to the UK to Japan, other countries have legislatures that are significantly younger than the US's.
I think the difference is that in other countries party nominees are chosen centrally, by party leadership, whereas in the US party nominees are chosen independently, by the voters in each district, without any regard for what other districts are doing.
Party leaderships in other countries can strategically seek demographic representativeness in a way that isn't possible in the US due to our decentralized nature of nominee selection.
Young people should also seek out areas specifically lacking in new, younger employees. Some parts of our economy are such a gerontocracy, it’s actually an advantage for any young person who has any desire to enter those fields.
For instance, I am a federal employee. I specifically choose to select an agency that was less popular to apply to than its peers, and an organization within that agency that was less popular than average for young employees. I was, in fact, the first new person to join my organization in over five years. As a result, I have had many opportunities thrown at me. I know other employees at my workplace who took the DRP because they made the opposite choice, and found it difficult to get any real responsibility.
My wife is a lawyer and has had a similar experience. She joined a very un-sexy field of law and works in a firm where she is decades younger than almost all the other attorneys. She has, as a result, found herself essentially the apprentice of one of the three or four seniormost practitioners of that law in our state.
Both of these would be, perhaps, good launching points to move to higher positions in more popular organizations or workplaces. But why? We are far more able to adapt new ideas, work in new ways, and be clearly valued where we are. Work life balance is also easier to come by if you're a unique asset.
tl;dr is – there are a lot of seriously “uncool” fields which seem gerontocratic, but actually are seriously in need of people under the age of 40 or 50 who are interested in staying and making that work their full career, and you can get a lot of opportunities if you seem like that kind of person.
I don’t really buy this, except in institutions where the number of positions are fixed, like the Senate. To the extent this is true in universities, the answer is to have more universities, the fixed number of which has been problematic for other reasons.
Capitalism fixes this kind of thing. Older workers simply means more workers, which ultimately means a bigger economy. If older workers are less productive, then firms that promote fewer of them (based on performance, not age) will do better.
As for AI, nobody really knows where it’s going. But I suspect young people will simply be expected to do more leveraging new tools, just like a mail delivery person is expected to deliver more mail in a car than they were on a horse. My parents used punch cards when they started programming. Nobody thinks that young programmers must understand the fundamentals of punchcard coding before moving on to more sophisticated techniques. The expected baseline level of competence has moved on.
For a while, when millennials were coming of age, it would have made sense to increase the number of universities. But as the number of people of university age decreases, this seems less relevant.
Expecting the market alone to punish gerontocracy seems a bit naive.
First, markets are famously bad at handling externalities. It's plausible that keeping elderly executives is in an individual firm's interest but bad for society overall (e.g., if it stymies the development of the next generation of leaders, or if concentrating wealth in the old causes macroeconomic distortions).
Second, existing laws (against age discrimination, regulating pensions and retirement savings, etc) have an effect, so we're not in some pristine libertarian state right now.
Third, public discussion like we're having here is crucial. Say some plausible but inconclusive study suggests that gerontocratic firms are indeed run worse on average. If an article like this gets in front of some activist investor or in front of whatever people at Vanguard and Blackrock weigh in on proxy fights, that could be the tipping point in effecting real change.
What the piece said is that older executives don’t perform as well. If they don’t perform as well, the company won’t perform as well, and better managed companies will rise. Age isn’t an externality like smog.
I might be misunderstanding, but you sound like you’re advocating for straight-up age discrimination when it comes to senior management. This is extremely problematic, especially for a group that I imagine prides itself on valuing merit.
A lot of the premise of this seems to depend on having a fixed number of positions of power -- true for Congress, not for anything else
Studies with fruit flies and rodents show metabolic changes at around 20 years old and at 40 years and again at 80 years of age.
In today’s world, older people who are able to keep working often continue because they don’t have enough money to fund their unknown future years of living. There are very few defined benefits pension plans any more.
So, I'm actually going to in part tie the issue of gerontocracy to the recent, trendy "Why Nothing Works" and "Abundance" literary arguments: It persists, in part, because it's so more harder to get stuff done.
I just recently, in my late 40's, reached a fairly high position of leadership in my organization. I was talking to a recently retired member of my organization who had occupied my same position in the past for advice. I asked him how it was different to be in that role, say, 20 or 30 years ago vs today. He said that a big difference was there was just far more power invested in leadership roles and leadership hierarchy in the past vs today. In those days, as he put it, if you told someone to do something, they just did it. If you wanted someone gone from the company, you said it, and they were gone. If you wanted someone hired, you made a call and HR made it happen.
Today, by contrast, he said, every leadership decision needs approval by three different committees, needs to have a reviewed and approved business plan, be run by legal and HR, see if marketing is on board, etc, etc, etc. He said what he accomplished in his 3-4 year tenure in my position before he moved up would take over a decade to accomplish today. In his view, there's just point in taking the position unless you're committed to a decade in the role or more, as modern organizations are simply too bureaucratic and sclerotic to accomplish anything more in my particular leadership role than "keeping the lights on" if you're occupying the chair for less time. To make a true organization impact as an individual in a leadership role just takes longer, period.
While it obviously doesn't explain everything, I think there's a lot of truth as to why a certain cohort of people are holding on to senior positions until older ages than they used to. They just want to finally see their plans and their ideas ultimately play out.
As always, Ben Krauss wrote a finely tuned, well researched article, this one on the crowding in of gerontocracy in the work field. There should be equality of recognition given to the skilled younger worker as it is to the older worker. The door should be opened wider so both workers have equal space to work together.
Ben's proud grandparents
The elephant in the room is that other western democracies don’t have this problem to this extent. There’s a whole world out there that we can test assumptions against but American political types prefer to talk about Andrew Jackson rather than the French or German parliament lack of gerontocracy.
It is clearly about economic power. The journalist mentions these things but also everything else putting everything on an equal footing when economic power seems to me to be 80% of the cause. Politicians need to build up campaign contributors, CEOs build executive networks and board member networks to mutually support their pay justifications.
The gerontocracy indicate a concentrating of political-economic power in the post 80s/90s world. It’s especially bad all of a sudden because it is the crest of a wave of change and the leaders who were most able to take advantage of the new wealth landscape are just that old.
As the great generation and boomers exit the scene, I predict that the gerontocracy will be much reduced. What we have is a situation where the new kings are in power until the end. When their ideological and class heirs take over (the meritocracy mostly defanged) they will be of more diverse ages. Some princes will be rather young, others will be just a few years younger than their predecessors.
AI will hurt the young, but they also have the physical ability to do blue collar jobs whereas the lower and middle class seniors will mostly return to a state of average wealth or even higher poverty as it was pre-social security.
Age in the workforce is a complicated issue, but many countries deal with it be have mandatory retirement. This approach is particularly valuable for non-market jobs (eg university professors or other government workers) where competition cannot force them out. In a related manner, the elimination of pensions has made working past 65 much more remunerative, since you can keep piling on more money. Again, many other countries have stronger private pensions. Personally I think mandatory retirement is a good idea and downshifts the value of working forever, or making your job the whole of your life.
I'd bet academia is in for a huge wave of retirements as academia struggles with Trump's predations. Obviously university administrations will see major personnel reductions as well.
Perhaps if we can reconstruct the CDC and NIH after Bobby J and Trump finish their war against them, we can make more room for more grants to younger scientists - a sort of swing for the fences for 10% or so of all the grants.
Still, is there nothing to say of wisdom, does 'cognitive decline' suggest that no such think exists? Let's find out.
This problem may become less acute as the huge boomer generation passes. (Being one myself, I get to be crass about it.)
But every time I hear technology optimists talk about the possibility of vastly expanding life expectancy in the near future, I think about societal problems like this and wonder at these sorts of problems.
I would add the inherent tension between gerontocracy/longer lifespans and rapid technological change: So many of our societal problems boil down to the difficulty of individual humans adapting to massive change. It's a cliche -- the immigrant parents who never adapt, but their kids do. However, if people are living longer and rapid technological progress brings ever more rapid societal change, we are creating a population that is increasingly quite similar to those immigrants who cannot adjust... only they hold a ton of power as well as a significant chunk of votes.
That’s not what GPT stands for.
Also, we need to reimagine white collar work. I like the idea of only letting people work for 5 years then paying their salary for the rest of their lives as a pension. Or reduce FT hours to, say, 10 a week.
I would simply give more people like me (30-something scientists in postdocs) "elite" (tenure-track) jobs.
Enjoy Taiwan! Great piece to go out on.
I'll just add a top-level comment that no one will read: the obverse problem is that our culture encourages people to dismiss anything from the past. Certainly it makes sense to give people in the 40s and 50s more power and participation in important enterprises (especially in Congress), but one factor of their success will be the extent to which they know how to listen to their elders, and indeed to consult ideas from centuries and millennia ago.
It's impossible to form one's own perspectives on past wisdom without respecting that wisdom in the first place. Otherwise one just remains in a place of constant rebellion.
This is a skill that comes with maturity, because people have to first get over the ideas that they know everything and that recent discovery and understanding across the board, scientific or cultural, automatically supersedes everything that has come before. (As if people never lived or thought until our lifetimes, and that life meant nothing until NOW.)
Yale, as an example, didn’t admit woman until 1969. It wasn’t until 1974 that woman could apply for credit independently of their husbands. The deck was very much stacked against them. But times have changed and in many cases it’s men who are struggling to adapt to the modern economy. But many people struggle to adapt to that changing reality. That’s just one example.
But it’s a fact of life that people often find it nearly impossible to adjust their reality to the present when it conflicts with how the world was when they were young.
As someone apparently not adjusting to changing reality, I wonder why I've given so much thought and research to why men are struggling to adapt to the modern economy. I have a wide range of pretty good ideas, from the disappearance of jobs that provided integrity and the ability to support a family, to the question of whether boys could better be educated by allowing them to use their hands and mess with stuff.
Then there's the need to prove oneself according to external cultural standards and pressure from one's male peers. (Women can be hard on other women, but attacks on masculinity by other men seems to have had enduring power through the ages. We've evolved ourselves to be a warrior species.)
Understanding the opposite sex is exactly one of those things it takes time (i.e. age) to do.
Stereotypes happen. But their best use is to stimulate the curiosity until one's understanding of and interest in other people expands beyond them.
+1. I'm often astonished by how many people, even *here,* ignore/don't know about even recent historical events and make confident statements that imply that they believe that "they know everything." And it's not as if I've never done this myself! Especially in my younger days...I enjoyed reading this thought-provoking post, but I dislike generalizations, including those based on age.
As I'm sure is true of most of us, the people I know (of all ages) possess a huge range of capabilities almost entirely uncorrelated with age. At work, people should be judged on their performance, not their age.
Gerontocracy: make full pension at 65 and then decrease for every year after that so by the time they’re mid 70s theyre not eligible anymore.
But gerontocracy _isn't_ everywhere if you compare the average ages of Congress and state legislatures with legislative branches in other countries.
From Mexico to the UK to Japan, other countries have legislatures that are significantly younger than the US's.
I think the difference is that in other countries party nominees are chosen centrally, by party leadership, whereas in the US party nominees are chosen independently, by the voters in each district, without any regard for what other districts are doing.
Party leaderships in other countries can strategically seek demographic representativeness in a way that isn't possible in the US due to our decentralized nature of nominee selection.
Young people should also seek out areas specifically lacking in new, younger employees. Some parts of our economy are such a gerontocracy, it’s actually an advantage for any young person who has any desire to enter those fields.
For instance, I am a federal employee. I specifically choose to select an agency that was less popular to apply to than its peers, and an organization within that agency that was less popular than average for young employees. I was, in fact, the first new person to join my organization in over five years. As a result, I have had many opportunities thrown at me. I know other employees at my workplace who took the DRP because they made the opposite choice, and found it difficult to get any real responsibility.
My wife is a lawyer and has had a similar experience. She joined a very un-sexy field of law and works in a firm where she is decades younger than almost all the other attorneys. She has, as a result, found herself essentially the apprentice of one of the three or four seniormost practitioners of that law in our state.
Both of these would be, perhaps, good launching points to move to higher positions in more popular organizations or workplaces. But why? We are far more able to adapt new ideas, work in new ways, and be clearly valued where we are. Work life balance is also easier to come by if you're a unique asset.
tl;dr is – there are a lot of seriously “uncool” fields which seem gerontocratic, but actually are seriously in need of people under the age of 40 or 50 who are interested in staying and making that work their full career, and you can get a lot of opportunities if you seem like that kind of person.
I don’t really buy this, except in institutions where the number of positions are fixed, like the Senate. To the extent this is true in universities, the answer is to have more universities, the fixed number of which has been problematic for other reasons.
Capitalism fixes this kind of thing. Older workers simply means more workers, which ultimately means a bigger economy. If older workers are less productive, then firms that promote fewer of them (based on performance, not age) will do better.
As for AI, nobody really knows where it’s going. But I suspect young people will simply be expected to do more leveraging new tools, just like a mail delivery person is expected to deliver more mail in a car than they were on a horse. My parents used punch cards when they started programming. Nobody thinks that young programmers must understand the fundamentals of punchcard coding before moving on to more sophisticated techniques. The expected baseline level of competence has moved on.
For a while, when millennials were coming of age, it would have made sense to increase the number of universities. But as the number of people of university age decreases, this seems less relevant.
I feel like I still read pieces on students struggling to get into universities in line with their merit and budget.
Expecting the market alone to punish gerontocracy seems a bit naive.
First, markets are famously bad at handling externalities. It's plausible that keeping elderly executives is in an individual firm's interest but bad for society overall (e.g., if it stymies the development of the next generation of leaders, or if concentrating wealth in the old causes macroeconomic distortions).
Second, existing laws (against age discrimination, regulating pensions and retirement savings, etc) have an effect, so we're not in some pristine libertarian state right now.
Third, public discussion like we're having here is crucial. Say some plausible but inconclusive study suggests that gerontocratic firms are indeed run worse on average. If an article like this gets in front of some activist investor or in front of whatever people at Vanguard and Blackrock weigh in on proxy fights, that could be the tipping point in effecting real change.
What the piece said is that older executives don’t perform as well. If they don’t perform as well, the company won’t perform as well, and better managed companies will rise. Age isn’t an externality like smog.
I might be misunderstanding, but you sound like you’re advocating for straight-up age discrimination when it comes to senior management. This is extremely problematic, especially for a group that I imagine prides itself on valuing merit.