I would not oppose an amendment codifying an upper limit at, eg, 70 on day of first inauguration. Even though it would end my own personal ambition to be president.
You want 75? Okay, argue about it. Only don’t cite Reagan as a reason to go older— he was a wreck by the end.
I like 75 because it means you have 40 years, 10 cycles exactly, to be elected president. I wouldn’t give a pass for reelection though; if you vote a 73-year-old into the White House they’re a lame duck from day one.
My suggestion is 80 on the day of the end of the current term, applied across the board to all fixed-term positions (elected or appointed), and that people holding positions with no fixed-term (lifetime, or at the pleasure of the President) by appointment and confirmation would require annual renewals after their 80th birthday (including both judicial and executive branch positions).
That would mean that Presidents would need to be under 76, or under 72 at the start of their first term if they don't want to be a lame-duck from day one, and that Senators would have to be under 74 when elected, House members under 78.
There certainly are people over 80 who could do these jobs capably, but they can't be relied upon to still be able to do them next year, as rapid decline is much more likely to set in after 80. For an appointive office, you can reasonably have the appointer reassess their continuing ability; for an elected one, the only reassessment that is democratically proper is by the voters, so you need to just apply a rule.
I thought of something very similar but because I thought an age maximum was arbitrary, I went with half of your time served must be below an age, either 77 or 78 as a stand-in for when I think mental and physical decline becomes a concern for their duties. I like the annual confirmation idea also tied to that same age for offices that don't conform to a term.
I would give the amendment a 100-year re-ratification cycle. If medical tech (especially RE age related brain diseases) and population dynamics haven’t changed enough in 100 years to make 70 a too-obviously-low age, then it mostly goes under the radar as a “Secret Congress” renewal (or Secret State Legs in this case).
Maybe you could set the limit at the average life expectancy minus 10 years. This way it would (hopefully!) slowly creep up over time without requiring explicit re-authorization.
I also don't support the Presidential age minimum. But I just would rather not deny voters a candidate that they would like to continue to serve in office just because of age. I'd rather solve the problem with more competitive elections to reduce the insane incumbency advantage is this country.
Maybe it's bad that we haven't had more turnover/competitiveness for, well, forever, but that is less because of gerontocracy and more from the calcification of partisanship. We used to get really wide swings in party turnover in both houses. Now people just vote the party line.
In part because the older people who do remain sharp have the advantage of wisdom and experience. Pelosi was outstanding at her job of managing the Dem caucus until the end. The calls to remove her were based on pure ageism, not performance.
I would not be surprised to learn that women are more likely to remain cognitively sharp at a later age. Cognitive health is correlated with vascular health, and there are sex-related differentials in heart attack, stroke, etc.. There must be studies about this.
This is why you were never going to be President, DT. It's a job that requires boldly and bravely telling the American people your hot takes without checking if they're right first.
Interesting question! Based on some verrry rudimentary research, it looks like women tend to have later onset (around 83 versus 79) but decline more quickly from that point. There are also some interesting sex differences in the nature of the decline, with men holding onto executive function and women holding onto memory longer.
Right. As I understand it, homo sapiens begins to suffer cognitive decline after the age of forty. There's no getting around it (though obviously this proceeds at different rates, depending on different factors, and some of us are more fortunate than others).
But we can still enjoy a net increase in job performance because of increased wisdom, experience, knowledge and so forth. Pelosi is a good example of this. Bernie Sanders doesn't seem to have missed a beat, either.
Homo sapiens beings to suffer cognitive decline after 20 years of age. We undoubtedly suffer other variants of cognitive decline at various other breakpoints which almost certainly vary by individual. The blanket, "begins to suffer cognitive decline after the age of forty," is at least arbitrary (and probably questionable) enough to make it a poor leadoff to any good argument.
"...to suffer cognitive decline after 20 years of age...."
But this is where *experience* makes such a difference. I have over 50 years of *experience* with cognitive decline, whereas you whippersnappers have only been at it for a decade or so.
Yeah, I'm not sure REF actually...read my comment? There's no denying that brain function reaches a peak at some point...and then declines. My points was that, on net, many humans (I'd be the vast majority, especially if they're proactive wrt healthy lifestyle) can become MORE productive and effective DESPITE the aforementioned decline, because of accumulated experience, wisdom, judgment and so on.
I guess this is as good a spot as any to consider what one means by "experience". If I have been doing something (teaching, researching, politicking, whatever) from, say, 1995 - 2025, one might say I have 30 years of "experience". But that kind of depends: have I grown in my profession, kept up with advances in my subject and field? OK, then I probably have 30 years of "experience". But if I haven't done those things, then I have really had 1 year of "experience" 30 times.
Yeah, experience is usually a positive thing increasing your productivity as cognitive decline lessens it.
Experience unfortunately has diminishing marginal returns, and cognitive decline accelerates at least a bit, so after about 40 the combined trend lines are starting to go down again.
The best case I've seen for a broader age limit for elected politicians is that you're electing people for a term of years and the risk of a rapid cognitive decline increases significantly past 80.
So even if they're sharp on election day, there's a real risk they will be gaga by the next one.
Voters may not understand the nuances of policy and the candidates may not be completely candid about their positions but one thing that voters know *really* well is how people age. All of them have parents and older relatives. They surely can make an informed guess.
No. I'm proposing the system we have right now: let voters elect their preferred candidate.
We actually do have a mechanism for removing an incapacitated President (the 25th amendment) though I confess it's hard to see it being used outside the most exigent circumstances. And as for Congress, well, one more incapable Representative or Senator won't bring our democracy down.
This is true... there's also a real risk you'll stroke out at 50. I generally would support some kind of age limit, but I think it's a band-aid solution to a larger problem. Maybe the best band-aid we can think of, but a band-aid.
The US already has mechanisms for both death and (the 25th) rapid and complete loss of faculties for the President and for death in Congress (if someone in Congress were to have a stroke or something and then end up in a coma then I’d expect 2/3 of their house to expel them). It’s the people who have declined but can still produce an hour or two of full coherence when they really need to that are going to be hard to remove.
Hakeem Jeffries gets criticised constantly for his limited ability to set the agenda of public discourse. Pelosi also wasn't great at that. Criticism seems consistent and not age (/gender) specific.
I’m talking about the chorus of demand that she resign - they were all framed around letting a new generation take charge, not any specific weakness in her leadership.
Pelosi definitely wasn’t perfect. She was not an effective public face of the party, and she knew it. But she was exceptional at managing that fractious caucus. (McConnell was also a formidable manager for many years…both of them left their contemporaries in the dust.)
Right. We don't let 85 year olds pilot jumbo jets, or nuclear submarines. Seems eminently reasonable to implement age limits for Congress and the Presidency.
It's crazy that we trust the control of the country to people we probably wouldn't trust to borrow our car or babysit our kids (I don't have kids but my understanding is they're similar to cars)
Expensive, four appendages, typically insured, they get their own room if you're relatively well-off, they're constantly thirsty but unable to satiate themselves, in some jurisdictions you get in trouble if they break and you don't get them fixed...
Doctors, I think the man's parenthetical logic checks out.
I would split the difference and stipulate age limits for the Presidency and not Congress. The impact of a single Congressperson persisting beyond the point where they can be effective is rather small and may be outweighed by the benefits of retaining the wisdom and experience of those who remain capable (e.g., Pelosi, Sanders). However, the risks of a President who is no longer able to think clearly or make good, rapid decisions are potentially catastrophic.
Or perhaps it would be good to just make any age limit for Congress quite high (90?) while having a much lower age limit (70?) for the President.
Without a doubt the need for a presidential age limit is more stark than with regard to Congress. Still, partly for the reasons Ben cites, and partly to prevent outlierishly bad situations (eg, D. Feinstein), I still think it would be a good idea to implement congressional age limits. Ideally I'd probably go with something like: 75 (POTUS) and 85 (Congress).
I don’t think age limits make as much sense for Congress, but I kind of think the Gingrich era GOP was right about term limits. Congress is such a seniority-bound organization that it pretty naturally becomes a gerontocracy without term limits; another effect would be that if a reasonably large fraction of reps/Senators can’t run for reelection at any given time they’d feel less pressure to vote against their conscience in order to fall in with the party line.
>I don’t think age limits make as much sense for Congress, but I kind of think the Gingrich era GOP was right about term limits.<
Funny. I think it's the exact opposite: term limits are a terrible idea—you want as much accumulated wisdom in the legislative branch as possible—but age limits are a necessary evil
An age limit for members of Congress strikes a balance, by not ignoring nature (humans decline with age) but at the same time giving voters maximum freedom to elect (brain healthy) lawmakers to as many terms as they like.
I don't think taking effective decision-making power out of the hands of voters and shifting it in the direction of K Street is a good trade on balance.
I can see the argument that the seniority system (which, btw, the Republicans don't have) gives district/state voters an incentive to keep doddering old politicians in office as they can reap some of those benefits of seniority.
But instead of an age limit on *election* of officeholders (which I think is unfair to voters), why not just put in rules on limiting holding senior positions within Congress? That way, if the voters want to vote in an 80 year old backbencher, well, good for them.
Is there any way of fixing Congress to not be seniority based?
Someone who has been there for 30 years has the ability to bend the system to their will, getting more benefits for their constituents, but that's a zero-sum game.
The Republican caucus has term limits for holding committee chairmanships. The differences aren't as stark as they were like 2018-2022 but especially at that time it was instructive to compare the ages of Democratic committee chairs and Republican ranking members. Not to mention that was the era where the top three house Dems were all over 80, while the R leadership was early-mid 50s
Do we limit this based on age? I confess I assumed that testing was the limiting factor for pilots and such. Similarly, we don't limit who can compete in the olympics based on max age. It just naturally shakes out that way for all sports.
To that end, we don't have a testing scheme to know if someone can legislate well. (Well, cynically, if they are a republican, we have ample evidence that they can't...)
Just on this point, my (perhaps unwanted, but meant sincerely) advice to Ben as a writer is that it's best to avoid words like 'wrong-headed' which don't mean anything, especially if you're already writing a perfectly defensible word like 'anti-democratic' alongside it.
And I agree on that point. I oppose all age restrictions for office and for the franchise, and oppose all term limits, on basic democratic principle. Now I know very few people agree with me, and I don't think politicians should burn much capital on making my pipe-dreams reality. But age limits are bad. Voters should take their jobs more seriously, and be willing to vote for the 'other side' (or if you can't face that, vote 3rd party or abstain) if 'your side' is standing by a nominee who is transparently unfit for office.
Ultimately, if someone has won a democratic election, that's not really 'a problem for the country', at worst it's a poor choice. My issue is with people who vote for a candidate and then spend time complaining they're too old, information which was surely available to them at the time of the election.
I don't say 'by definition, those are not problems', I say a) 'what I perceive as problems are not perceived as such by Republican primary voters and vice versa'; and b) 'this is what impeachment and the law are for'.
But "anti-democratic" and "wrongheaded" mean two different things! Setting an upper age-limit IS anti-democratic, undeniably so. Just like setting a lower age limit is anti-democratic. But it may or may not be "wrong-headed" to do so—that part's disputable. So Ben as a writer is correct to err on the side of clarity when it comes to giving us his opinion.
(His opinion on this particular point is wrong in my view, but he's on firm ground as a writer to remove ambiguity.)
EDIT: I wish to clarify, that, the "particular point" of Ben's I view as wrong here is that it "seems" wrong to set an age limit for elected office. (I'm not disagreeing with the general thrust of his essay). In my view, it doesn't "seem" wrong to put an age cap on jobs related to the public good, and public safety. Rather, it seems reasonable.
I know they're different in meaning, but my point is 'anti-democratic' means something worthwhile that we can debate, while 'wrong-headed' just means 'wrong' and as such is impossible to debate, as anyone who has tried to discuss something that isn't a matter of fact with a person who repeats 'you're wrong!' can attest. It has no propositional validity. *Why* is it wrong?
tbh *I* wouldn't, because my views are far from the median amongst the electorate. But for most people, a politician of the party they don't normally vote for wouldn't deliver anything all that different in practice. But yes, partisans won't and that's fine.
I believe the constitution’s age minimums for the house, senate, and presidency were intended by the founders as an anti-nepotism measure. In small European republics and institutions like the Catholic Church, people who were much younger than the normal age for officeholding sometimes got into important offices thanks to their family connections. You essentially never had super-young officeholders get in on the basis of talent, only nepotism.
I think the founders were basically right about this. Nobody is realistically going to be qualified for the presidency before age 40 at the earliest.
I’ve come around to supporting term limits of 18-20 years per position, and an age cap of 80 +-5, as a circuit breaker. Over these thresholds and the people who are running are predominantly doing it for their egos rather than for the good of their community or party.
For a long time I was in Henry Waxman's district in California. He served for 34 years. The nation would have been a far worse place had he been forced out roughly halfway through his tenure.
I confess I don't get it. Many great artists (Tolstoy, Picasso, etc.) created great work well into their later years. Should they have been prevented from doing so? Obviously not. But had they done crap work, it simply would have been ignored by the public. Similarly, why not let the voters decide if they like the job their representatives are doing?
I hate term limits. But as a California YIMBY, I have to admit term limits are the reason California has been enacting YIMBY legislation. Old NIMBY legislators can't just stick around decade after decade, voting against the YIMBY legislation I favor. They get replaced by younger legislators, and younger people are YIMBYer people.
I don't have a strong opinion here but picking an age seems problematic. There are people whose brains are Swiss cheese at 55 and people who are sharp as a tack at 65. Age, although relevant, is not a great metric.
I would personally supporting making the maximum age for presidents 75, but the argument that it’s anti-democratic is that if voters want to elect an elderly president despite the risks of cognitive decline or poor health they should be allowed to. Maybe voters think that a particular candidate’s experience or policy proposals outweigh concerns about age.
maybe we just need to add more physical events to the primary calendar! be sure the voters get a chance to see what kind of specimen they are supporting...
Such a double standard we have. People are very comfortable putting age minimums on things despite the fact there are 32 year olds who would make a fine president, 17 year olds who could cast an informed vote, etc. But we cry ageism if those sorts of rules are applied at old age.
One of the things I've been musing about based on the latest conspiracy news: if there really is an "Epstein client list", that list is now in the hands of Donald Trump and his goons. Which means that you can't really trust any politician who might be vulnerable to blackmail, regardless of which side they're on. A good defense on this is just to have lots of turnover in politicians. The probability you're vulnerable to extortion is presumably at least somewhat correlated with the age of your political career.
What's the argument for denying the voters their choice? I'd prefer not to vote for an 80 year old candidate for President but why can't I have that choice? There's a good argument for requiring an independent physical and mental assessment of the candidates in order to provide full transparency to guide voters' choices but given that, why insist upon a nanny state intervention to deny them their pick?
I feel the same way about term limits. Why not let voters return their favorite officeholder to office? I also feel that way about the age minimum -- if the voters want to elect a 21 year old President why should they be denied that? (Granted, that one would require a constitutional amendment.)
I get the age cap for airline pilots -- we don't get to vote on who flies the plane (and I don't think we should). But for political offices? I'm not seeing it.
I support age limits for the same reason professional sports owners often vote for a salary cap -- sometimes we need to put in rules to save us from ourselves.
Not buying it. Salary caps maintain competitive balance so big market teams or those with super deep pocket owners can't monopolize talent, and so destroy fan interest in the leagues.
If some district wants to elect some doddering ineffective old fool that doesn't harm the power of the rest of the voters.
Retirement is a lot like being a housewife: If you're rich enough to pursue architectural whims or aesthetic projects, it can be glamorous. But if you're scraping to pay the power bill and piecing together frugal meals, it's just drudgery.
I'm nowhere near a workaholic. But without the money to travel, it’s hard to fill day after day without some work. Most hobbies don’t take up that much time, and if you’re seventy, you probably shouldn’t be exercising more than fifteen hours a week anyway.
I understand not wanting to work 40+ hours a week. But I don’t understand the appeal of doing no work and pinching pennies until you die. Retiring into boredom and barebones budgeting doesn’t sound like freedom—it sounds like a slow slide into irrelevance.
My grandfather, who didn’t go to college but was a numbers wizard, worked as an accountant for Texaco for many years, and was able to retire early with a generous pension. Since he was still pretty young, he went to work for a real estate firm (edit: still as an accountant) until at least 70 or 72, including through a bout of (detected early) cancer.
He didn’t have many hobbies - work was effectively his hobby. I think it’d be bad if we barred older people who want to work in meaningful roles simply because of a desire for undefined dynamism.
Many men wither after retirement. Both of my grandfathers worked til 70 but could have retired earlier. One of my grandfathers and my step grandfather worked part time til 80. I plan to work part time til I no longer can. I have not worked consecutive 40+ hour weeks in 18 years and will only do so if heavily incentivized.
There need to be more jobs that are accommodating to snowbirds, because I sure af don’t plan to spend my later years experiencing Northern winters OR Southern summers! I would love to find work for 6 months of the year in Seattle, the other 6 months in Florida.
My first 16 years in Georgia I dreaded the summers, partly because frugal 26 year old David had the brilliant idea of buying an air conditioner that couldn’t quite keep up. Then, we got a house with an in ground pool. Completely different experience. You can go for a jog and not mind the heat when you can just fling off your shirt and shoes and jump in. I no longer dread the summers. Indeed, like proper Georgians, we now heat our pool because anything under 84 is a bit nippy. Never thought Id hear my pool, and we don’t hear it much in July, but we definitely do in early June and late August and we wouldn’t swim in May or September without it
There was absolutely no problem with him working. The problem would be if he as a 70 year old was bossing around all the 45 to 55 year olds at the company. It's important to look at the real "problem" here. Older workers are fine, if that's what they want to do. It's about who is occupying leadership positions.
What's interesting is that he switched fields. If people "semi-retired" and/or pursued "hobby work" it would create a different situation than what Ben described.
I am convinced that the best job for 65 year old men is what my dad did for a time, which was part-time ticket taker at an arena. He got to see tons of sports games, plenty of extremely famous musicians he absolutely did not care about, plus it's a little physical in that it required standing.
A part time physical job can also stave off the decline of aging. My grandpa worked as a farmer and mechanic until he died in his eighties. He remained very strong and mobile compared to many. In college I worked on the grounds crew at a prestigious country club. There were a few retired engineers in their 70’s and 80’s who did that job so that they could play the course twice a week. If work gets you moving then it’s a major benefit.
Amateur radio is one. I'm only 40, but I would estimate that the median age of an active amateur radio operator is about 70. Radio can be very time consuming, especially in terms of projects like building antennas. It can also be very cognitively demanding.
I have summer break in my life as a teacher , at 43, and the idea of retirement at 65 feels completely insane. After a month I’m stir crazy. Maybe I’m just not expecting how bad my body will break down but my father’s still working in his late 60s and doesn’t seem to want to leave.
Two months without a job to do feels like an incredible hole in my life. The idea of a decades long summer break seems like a batshit thing to expect someone who loves work to want to do.
I totally can see how someone with a much more physical job would want to retire. But expecting it at 65 seems ludicrous.
I've felt the same when a company I've worked for has closed and I haven't found a new job yet. Had two two month gaps that way, and while I was ok financially for those I did start to get stir crazy in the second month.
One difference between that and retirement though is that with retirement you can make longer term plans for part time jobs, etc, or personal projects.
This sounds a bit depressing to me, not seeing meaning outside of work. But then again I retired at 38 and hated every hour I spent in various office jobs. Now I would like to return to work part time but it’s difficult as most interesting jobs demand full time commitment.
I don't think enjoying your work is the same as not seeing meaning outside of work. In other words, I think it's quite reasonable that two different things that you think have equal amounts of meaning for you require different amounts of time investment for you to extract that meaning.
I'm retired. My morning coffee and reading the news (and substacks!) can stretch to a couple of hours. It's so nice. Maybe I'll have another cup of coffee. Then I'll get some stuff done, go to yoga class, etc.
Not having to hurry is the biggest luxury in the world.
And I'll admit that I get tired faster than I did 25 years ago.
About a year ago, my DIL had a commitment that took her out of town, and my son's job is insane and high-pressure. So my husband and I went out to help my son with the adorable granddaughters, who were around 18 months and 4 years old. In the mornings we'd get to their house with bright shining faces and my son went off to work. At 5 (he was coming home early for us) he found us *literally* lying on the floor in exhaustion while the girls played happily nearby. We bailed and made him deal with dinners and bedtimes, which he was not pleased about.
He made it to adulthood so supposedly we kept him alive and fed and got him to bed every night decades ago? It's all a blur. And I *could* do it now if I had to, but damn.
My retirement is decades in the future, but I expect to spend it reading, playing video games, spending time with family, and maybe doing some traveling if I can afford it.
I sometimes wonder what it will be like in a couple of decades when people who spent most of their life playing video games as a hobby retire in large numbers. How will it affect the state of gaming?
people say this all the time but i just struggle to understand it. don't get me wrong, i believe you, but it's so foreign to my own experience it's incomprehensible.
when i quit being a teacher, the only thing i really missed after a year was the long breaks.
I know good teachers who feel this way so I don’t begrudge this. I think sincerely I have always liked work even when I worked at a Boston Market making corn bread I was cheerful to go to work.
Teaching and foster parenting really does fill the kid shaped hole left by infertility. But then it’s gone and I’m left just with hobbies without it and it’s notable.
I'm the same as Andrew. If I retire at 65, I'll just find another job to do in retirement. Or near full time volunteer work or something. I'm bad at self-motivating but find accomplishment extremely fulfilling so, like, I need structure. I've been this way since I was a kid.
The idea of retiring at 65 feels completely insane to me, but for the opposite reason. If I'm still working at 65, something has gone horribly wrong with my financial plan. I'm pretty sure my job is reducing my life expectancy each year I do it.
My dad seemed fine working into his 60s, but one or two health incidents and then looking at how much your pension will pay out compared to showing up for work each day changes the calculations.
He’s some sort of senior but not c-level executive in business insurance, mainly trucking. He also travels a lot with part time work from home with my step mom who’s a tenured professor.
Admittedly even less physical than my job which isn’t that physical as long as you retain basic mobility.
I'll retire in a few years when I'm 60 and *I can't wait*. I will gladly hand things over to the youngsters. I'll ride my bike, master that second language I've been working on, play my drums, and start a Substack as a repository for my intellectual projects. (I'll have money, but none of those activities require a lot of money, they just require *time*). If you dread retirement because you're not sure how you'll fill your days without work, I frankly feel sorry for you.
My in laws and husband are like this. For me, I’ve learned the hard way more than once that while there’s an infinite number of exciting things I *want* to do, I won’t without some amount external structure. If I want to exercise or do a hobby, I have to take a class for instance. So, I’ll either need a very structured retirement with volunteer commitments and clubs etc. or part time work.
That's a legit challenge. Some things I'm confident I'm just going to *do* and enjoy doing (they are not projects as such, but just enjoyable time spent), but for some things (intellectual projects, second language) progress depends on discipline and consistency, so I might need a course, or some other accountability device.
Over on Astral Codex Ten there was a recent review of "school" (i.e. the general overall concept of modern mass schooling that every nation practices) and one thing it talked about is the "5% problem" which is that (it seems) about 5% of people are "no structure learners", a huge middle is "low structure learners", and then there's a decent sized tail of "high structure learners". And I think the same applies to people's work/retirement relationship too.
Some people need the little bit of structure that some kind of part-time work would give. Some people need the awful lot of structure that full time military service provides. And a pretty small number are just fine without any structure.
You see some retirees build up that work-like structure on their own again via some combination of binding commitments to volunteer work, clubs, etc. But it is definitely more effort than just accepting a job offer and will almost always be lower commitment than "I need money to live" that a job has.
I retired early years ago and I'm a no structure kind of person. My wife works because when she's tried the no structure life she mainly just sits on the couch on her phone for 16 hours a day.
Different people are different and I'd be hesitant to call one kind of person "sad" anymore than I'd call an introvert "sad" given homo sapiens very clearly evolved to be hypersocial.
The bicycle hobby can get expensive really quickly if, like friends of mine, you start doing Backroads tours over the Pyrenees and adventures like that. It's a fun way to go broke, though (so they tell me).
I don’t understand why a lot of old people hoard so much wealth. Some people worth eight figures don’t even pay for their kids’ school because they didn’t want to spoil their kids, literally preventing them from having grandkids. Meanwhile they will lobby for estate tax repeal so their kids can get millions of dollars when they’re too old to really even need or enjoy it.
There is a good book called “Die With Zero” which explains that people lose the capacity to actually enjoy their wealth much when they’re older because they’re set in their ways but don’t appreciate how quickly compound interest snowballs, causing people to oversave. The average net worth of a 75 year old is more than $1.6 million: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#range:1989,2022;series:Net_Worth;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:mean. It would be better for people as well as society for them to spend down their wealth earlier, and to beef up the safety net to discourage excess precautionary saving, like maybe providing an option for people to buy an annuity to top off their social security so that they have guaranteed income in old age without hoarding wealth.
The median age of the *first time* homebuyer is 38. Once you own a home, you’re much more likely to resell and purchase a new one, so of course the median age of ALL homebuyers is higher. Some of these buyers are downsizing, which is perfectly appropriate for an older person. I don’t know that 54 is a meaningful figure.
Average new worth is wildly skewed by a few ultrarich. (That same chart says under-35s have a net worth of $180k, which is laughable to the vast majority.) The median net worth of a 75yo is around $330k, which seems like a reasonable amount to cover end of life expenses.
I'll go further than that and say this median-age factoid may be my new go-to example of how easy it is to mislead with statistics (not ascribing motive to the top-level poster--you can also use them to mislead yourself).
The median net worth for those over 75, though, is only $335K. A few outliers can skew the average pretty significantly (Warren Buffett, for example).
Still, your points are well made. Another item of note: the entire financial planning industry is designed to accumulate assets and avoid spending. It will be hard to push change into that fee structure.
The savings (not hoarded wealth) a 75 year old has may have to last another 25 years. You don’t know if you will be the outlier living into your late nineties, and that is probably going to require caretakers. Most of my family lives into their late eighties, but we have a few who lived to be nearly 100.
Thinking about this just makes me hope my relatives put me out to pasture if I live past 90...I'd hate to be a financial drain for that long personally! But maybe I'm a bit callous.
Yes to medians, and also this "net worth" they are holding - at those corrected lower median numbers - is mostly the home they live in.
There is a weird generational warfare lie going on that claims old people are sitting on fat stacks of riches, when it's more like they have paid off their home and have enough money for food & clothes.
Yes, it’s become fashionable for younger people to blame boomers for their economic situation. The reason they’re not succeeding is because someone, somewhere, is stealing the money that’s rightfully theirs.
In my state, New York, the poverty rate among people over 65 has grown over the past couple of decades, even while the overall poverty rate decreased. I don't know if that is an anomaly of our state - maybe because we have a high number of foreign born residents? - but it does give pause. It is a growing concern for our state government.
I think that is a very difficult nut to crack and we want to be careful with incentives. The one thing that may be worse than a bunch of wealthy retirees hoarding resources may be a bunch of destitute retirees who become wards of the state or their already overburdened children.
That said I do think it may be time to repeal or significantly amend the ADEA, and consider ways to incentivize behavioral changes later in life. The next stop from the nursing home is the graveyard, so for people and so for countries.
Edit: I now see you mentioned the ADEA in another comment. Great minds.
I am thinking about it. I’m generally trying to figure out what you mean because if we pick 5 people and one has hundreds of billions of dollars he doesn’t exert pressure on rank 3. He’s cancelled out by the poorest candidate. It doesn’t matter if the richest position is richer by 10 dollars or 10 billion dollars they’re just rank 5.
Maybe I’m missing something I’m not a statistician but this is literally the textbook case for why we use median instead of mean to avoid outlier skew. Is there some advanced statistical reason why it would skew the median?
The age is up because of the interest rate increase. A big chunk of those buying are older people downsizing and paying with the equity of their previous home.
Old people “hoard wealth” BECAUSE THEY STILL NEED TO EAT AFTER THEY RETIRE, and that saved money is it for them.
Yes, a person who retires at 65 might need to support themselves for another 30 years, including expensive medical and hospice care. Medicare, contrary to some younger people’s assumptions, is not free.
Many people aim to save a lot of money by the time they’re old,, not because they’re greedy and don’t want to share, but because they’re understandably scared of needing to go to an old-age home that costs absolutely eye-watering amounts of money. And you have no way of knowing, a priori, how long you’ll have to live in one of those places.
“Just move in with your kids!” Not always feasible if, say, you have advanced dementia or another condition that requires around the clock care.
Exactly - one of my motivations to build a good retirement nest-egg was so I wouldn't be a burden on the younger generation. They'll get whatever is left when I'm gone.
I am in an online group for people caring for their elderly parents. The discussion definitely encourages me to "hoard wealth" because medical care, senior living communities, devices like walkers, etc. cost a lot of money, and offspring are stressed out about what to do when the money runs out.
My parents are doing fine with their SS and pensions [1], but if you fade and need live-in long-term care that's very very expensive. $1 million can be gone rather fast.
Older people 'hoard' wealth because nursing care is incredibly expensive and Medicare won't pay for it and LTC insurance sucks. If you don't want to end up in a home featured on 60 Minutes, you should probably budget for $100k per year per adult to be prudent. If we had a better system for elder care, it wouldn't put all the onus on the individual to pay for care and some of these distortions would go away. Shocked that we still have this cobbled together system, given the political power of older voters.
As others have noted, it’s not that astonishing. If you buy one home when you’re about to have kids at age 30, and then downsize into another home a few years after your kids turn 20, then all it takes for the median to be in the 50s is a few people moving to a new city when they retire.
> people lose the capacity to actually enjoy their wealth much when they’re older because they’re set in their ways
Do they? My grandparents spent their wealth traveling the world until very recently. They spent around 1/3 of their time on some trip or another. They also did things like buy a large house specifically so they could host the whole family for visits and stayed engaged in rotary clubs and the like. It seemed like their activity levels didn't drop from when they were still employed.
Every well-off but not rich senior I know is afraid of the cost of care if they get sick or need assisted living. You don’t know if you’ll go instantly or be in a home for a decade spending easily 100 or even 200K a year.
Having people stay in the labor force longer provided they remain productive is a very good thing. Part of the problem is adjusting what aging workers DO. Maybe we could find ways to shift aging, highly paid workers to tasks (including mentoring younger employees) that better suit them and their companies. Maybe the standard career trajectory it not up up up until out but up, over , over, ... out.
Let me use a recent personal experience as an example. For a post I needed to follow a citation to a paper based on a mathematical model I could not possibly reproduce or find technical fault with if it had any. But I immediately saw that it did not do what the person citing it claimed. When I was younger I could have engaged the model at a technical level, but would I have seen the significance for the point at hand?
Maybe the standard career trajectory should not be up up up until out but up, over , over, ... out.
Also, the 40 hour work week is not great for the kind of career flexibility you're talking about. What I expect from a senior employee is a kind of consultant role - come into meetings, immediately recognize the good and bad ideas, give your feedback, and peace out. You could easily pull that off working 20 hours a week at a high end-of-career hourly rate and then go golfing at 3 PM. And then the company doesn't feel a need to force out their senior employees because their total compensation is low even if their hourly rate is high.
I feel this can be solved by regular outcome-based appraisals. If you can marshal your accumulated skills and experience to continue to provide competitive outcomes, then by all means, stay in your role. If the outcomes that you produce are no longer competitive compared to those of younger workers, there should be less of a taboo to you being replaced.
Ideally yes, but outcome-based assessments are hard in a lot of elite white-collar fields. I've been working on the same project since I started my job three years ago and it's still not done. I've taken it a long way but in a very real sense I have produced nothing of use. Is that because it's just a very hard project and work of its type takes time or because I'm not good at my job? I'm not always sure myself.
Ben was talking about the workforce more broadly, where social and institutional forces mean that Academics and Politicians aren't so easily replaced. It may be similar wrt partners at law firms, some CEOs or tenured high school teachers.
Sure, and now I realize I should correct my last statement. Ben is less talking about the workforce then about the very upper rungs of the workforce - it's clearly in the title and subtitle: "Gerontocracy" "Elite Workforce.
So yes, we can both agree that the typical worker can expect to be replaced.
But it's among the elite of the workforce and institutional leaders and decision makers where replacement is not happening nearly as fast as once did. That's what the author talking about.
"I feel this can be solved by regular outcome-based appraisals"
In some roles, sure. But take politics for example, where "regular outcome-based appraisals" are elections, and 80 year olds with fast-fading abilities are regularly re-elected.
There are probably other situations where boards and co-workers may have a tough time ousting elite 80 year olds, in part because outcomes are very hard to measure. For example, CEO's or Film Directors or Law Partners. And then there are tenured academics.
The real pillar of gerontocracy is inheritance. In most families, the accumulated surplus of past generations ends up in the hands of the oldest living members. That means the eldest often control not just their own lifetime earnings, but the surplus from four, five, even six generations—plus compound returns.
Someone in their late 40s or early 50s, by contrast, typically controls only what they’ve accumulated so far. That alone gives the old enormous power.
Post–World War II was a historical anomaly. As Piketty noted, high inflation and strong wage growth in the 1940s and 50s meant that recent income could outweigh inherited wealth. But when inflation and wage growth fall, the balance flips. The deeper past starts to dominate the present, and the oldest generation reclaims the economic high ground.
This generation holds so much power, people are often reluctant to point out how heavily it hinges on the achievements of the dead.
The annual flow of inheritances in the US is now over 10% of GDP and in some countries like Italy it’s approaching 20%: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/how-to-invest-your-enormous-inheritance. This is only going to grow as people who benefitted from the post-1980 stock and housing markets start to die. We’re headed towards a society where work doesn’t mean very much and your living standards are going to be primarily based on inheritance (which people especially those working more “fun” jobs like journalism already see when coworkers with the same income nonetheless have vastly different lifestyles). It plus AI are going to be the big economic conflicts of the future (and AI will reinforce it by further transferring economic power from labor to primarily inherited capital).
Compounded by concentration via progressively smaller families to inherit said wealth. Estate tax reform is such an obvious Democratic initiative that has not gotten much traction.
Estates should be taxed as personal income to heirs (with some kind of standard deduction), not on the total value of the estate. Encourage the Eliot Rosewaters of the world to divide their fortunes
Absolutely the key point. I'd love to see a political program of future-targeted investments (various subsidies to child-rearing, infrastructure and R&D investments). Paid for by increased and broadened estate taxes (i.e., not only on the largest estates).
That sort of future vs. past agenda doesn't appear to have any constituency in our current politics though. We're still mostly about rich vs. poor class conflict when we even talk about economics at all. Otherwise it's all culture wars all the time.
Maybe the abundance faction could get there eventually?
In your list of consequences to upper rungs of society being increasingly dominated by older people, you can add NIMBY taking off or at least becoming more powerful. I’ve noted before that the reason the YIMBY vs NIMBY debate is often cross partisan is it’s often more a debate about young vs old.
The median home buyer used to be under 40 years old as recently as 2000. Now it’s close to 50. Given there is a tie between age and resistance to change it shouldn’t be surprising that NIMBY has gotten so strong over time. And has Matt has noted, NIMBY is much worse in the UK and sure enough the median age in the UK is higher than here.
A coworker had a condo in a 3-unit building. One elderly woman insisted that absolutely no money, at all, be spent on any kind of long-term maintenance. Her plan was to die and she didn't care what happened after that. (Also hoping that the other 2 units would pick up the slack out of their own self-interest to not have the building fall down around them.)
Yeah, we’re looking at moving my MIL up here and we’re worried about that. She’d have to sell her nice house that she owns outright to get at most a 1 bedroom condo, and even if we pay the association dues for her as we intend to, a “special assessment” could wipe her out.
But now her entire family is up here in Seattle since my BIL moved in with us, so there’s not much reason for her to stay in Memphis besides the house.
Eh, Germany is also older than here and doesn't have the saafter all. of nimby issues. The advancing age of buyers is more likely a symptom of NIMBY-dom and the resulting higher prices than a cause. NIMBY-ism began taking off in the much younger 1970's afterall.
Germany homeownership is much much lower than most other countries in the western world. You're pool of homeowners who can gum at the works is just a much lower percentage of the population than in other advanced countries.
Should also note that it's not a mistake that NIMBY power is most pronounced in countries like US, UK, Australia and Canada. There's probably a cultural element involved, but the other is that legal systems based on common law make it much much easier for individuals or a handful of individuals to block or at least seriously delay the building of housing developments.
The Vogons were inspired by British bureaucrats, after all! “Getting [a legal document] signed in triplicate, burying it in peat moss, then submitting it to public inquiry” sounds an awful lot like getting a 5 over 1 permitted
One thing that undercuts the significance of several of these statistics: the years 1930-1940 had fewer births than any of the other years of the 20th century, earlier or later, and the earlier years had a lot of people die in the war (or not enter the workforce, because they were women). Thus, 2010 is really the first year there were a significant number of 65-year-olds available to fill positions. Of course the number of 65-year-olds in jobs was going to start rising quickly right then, even if every individual keeps the same likelihood of working at any age!
Re: old Congesspeople: feels like an easy first step would be not giving out things like leadership assignments and nice offices by seniority. That pretty directly incentivizes hanging on as long as possible, no?
But Democrats are attached to seniority for all sorts of reasons, from the coalitional to a misguided notion that ushering people out is invidious discrimination.
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.)
+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.
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.
The dependency ratio in the US, assuming an age 65 cut off, is set to rise by 33% in the next 25 years. This would eat up 1/2 to 3/4 of our expected productivity gains over that time.
Raising the retirement age to 69 just about reverses this. The workforce is going get older, or we're going make the younger generation pay more to support free riding former DINK olds. How we shorten the training time for productive professions and provide mobility for both 2nd careers for older workers that's not volunteering at the animal shelter and upcoming workers is more complicated than what Ben has explored here.
re: free-riding DINK olds --- I kind of feel like we should either make childless people pay into social security at a higher rate or else give them reduced benefits when they retire. They really are free-riding on everyone else's kids.
Reminder that parents can claim their children as dependents and receive credits that DINKs never will. There's already a mechanism in place, but apparently no political will for expanding it. And there's definitely not some large DINK contingent blocking that.
And Social Security's issue is that it it's going to the older people (whether they had kids or not) who don't need it. Making the formula more redistributive should achieve this without targeting anyone if we assume DINKs paid more over their career.
Eh that cuts both ways. DINKs pay taxes for schools, don't get family tax benefits, etc. You would certainly not countenance the argument that everyone else's kids are free-riding on them while the DINKs are working
So that's true, and I suppose you could be an economist and try to make a transfer system that accounts for all the costs and benefits and tries to make it perfectly fair.
The reason why I enjoy the idea of social security benefits/costs related to children is that I think that having social security and the entire idea of saving _money_ for retirement obscures the underlying reality that if you want to retire, you need people to work for you. The money doesn't grow the food or repair your house or change your bedpan, it's _people_, and specifically people who are younger than you are. If everyone saved all their money and had no kids, nobody would be able to retire. Social security really is young people paying for old people to retire, and if you haven't contributed much to making new young people you should perhaps not be entitled to draw as much from the young people's labor when you get old.
(Of course, as you notice, even DINKs contribute to the raising of young people through taxes and supporting schools and such, but I think we all agree that they do not contribute as much as actual parents.)
DINKlife for the win, you miserable haters! :) My my wife and I are both paying in max SS contributions and will do so until we retire, unless something goes horribly wrong. I don't anticipate needing SS benefits, but it is nice to be able to count on it just in case. But we don't get child tax credits, and last time I checked our property taxes fund schooling. It will all be for naught anyway... can't wait for the AI-UBI fights in like 5 years.
Haha, well nobody said being a free-rider wasn't enjoyable! ;)
But more seriously you make a good point, which is that we are all in this together and even people without children contribute to society and indirectly help to raise the new generation. However, if nobody had kids, nobody would be able to retire. It wouldn't matter how much money you saved or how many tax credits you didn't take, if there were no young people coming after you then you would have to work until you died.
I expect this will sorta happen on its own organically. If the dependency ratio gets worse, you either raise taxes or cut benefits. Cutting benefits is politically difficult, so I guess we’ll see tax hikes.
The more you raise taxes, the better the tradeoff is to earning less market income but having more kids who care about you and will help you out in ways that don’t show up on anyone’s 1040.
From about 2003-2022, interest payments on USG debt as a fraction of gdp were low and stable. In that environment, I think it’s particularly difficult to raise taxes, since there’s no immediate benefit. Since we’re now back in the 90s, in terms of interest payments, I’m hopeful that we’ll have a political economy more like the 90s, in terms of possible openness to tax increases.
> To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.”
I think this suggests that many companies *believe* that AI will reduce their need for lower-level jobs and are placing bets on this reality. I do not believe that we yet have evidence that it is true. Right now, many companies are trying to stay innovative by shoving AI into their processes as rapidly as they can, often without due consideration of their use cases. I think we will need to wait a few years to see how much of the hype pans out. Many decisions like this may be rolled back as expected gains are not realized.
Legal, sure. I imagine AI can do the work of a verbose 50th percentile paralegal fine. Medical, no, except on the insurance side, and that’s mostly been replaced by software already. Also radiology may go by the wayside, lots of folks are developing AIs to read films, I think that’s low hanging fruit tbh and one where AIs will eventually do better than people.
But medical is mostly a caring profession, and it’s thankfully shot through with state occupational licensing. You think Boston Dynamics is ready to have its robots wipe every ass in America? Ai isn’t replacing most doctors, nurses, physical therapists, etc anytime soon.
I'm 78 and still working. Whose fault is it that people want the services of us elders? I'm proud that many of the young folks to whom I gave their first jobs with significant responsibilities went on to great careers, and hope to continue launching great careers.
> Age limits for politicians seem wrong-headed and anti-democratic
Why do you think they are wrong-headed? Are they any more anti-democratic than the Presidential age minimum?
I would not oppose an amendment codifying an upper limit at, eg, 70 on day of first inauguration. Even though it would end my own personal ambition to be president.
You want 75? Okay, argue about it. Only don’t cite Reagan as a reason to go older— he was a wreck by the end.
I like 75 because it means you have 40 years, 10 cycles exactly, to be elected president. I wouldn’t give a pass for reelection though; if you vote a 73-year-old into the White House they’re a lame duck from day one.
My suggestion is 80 on the day of the end of the current term, applied across the board to all fixed-term positions (elected or appointed), and that people holding positions with no fixed-term (lifetime, or at the pleasure of the President) by appointment and confirmation would require annual renewals after their 80th birthday (including both judicial and executive branch positions).
That would mean that Presidents would need to be under 76, or under 72 at the start of their first term if they don't want to be a lame-duck from day one, and that Senators would have to be under 74 when elected, House members under 78.
There certainly are people over 80 who could do these jobs capably, but they can't be relied upon to still be able to do them next year, as rapid decline is much more likely to set in after 80. For an appointive office, you can reasonably have the appointer reassess their continuing ability; for an elected one, the only reassessment that is democratically proper is by the voters, so you need to just apply a rule.
I thought of something very similar but because I thought an age maximum was arbitrary, I went with half of your time served must be below an age, either 77 or 78 as a stand-in for when I think mental and physical decline becomes a concern for their duties. I like the annual confirmation idea also tied to that same age for offices that don't conform to a term.
I would give the amendment a 100-year re-ratification cycle. If medical tech (especially RE age related brain diseases) and population dynamics haven’t changed enough in 100 years to make 70 a too-obviously-low age, then it mostly goes under the radar as a “Secret Congress” renewal (or Secret State Legs in this case).
I think it will change a lot faster than that.
Probably 20 years or so to see real age reversal
I’d want the extra 80 for good measure to establish a strong cultural norm against future gerontocracy.
Maybe you could set the limit at the average life expectancy minus 10 years. This way it would (hopefully!) slowly creep up over time without requiring explicit re-authorization.
70 seems like a pretty good limit.
Being president is super demanding.
75 or 80 is probably fine for congress
I also don't support the Presidential age minimum. But I just would rather not deny voters a candidate that they would like to continue to serve in office just because of age. I'd rather solve the problem with more competitive elections to reduce the insane incumbency advantage is this country.
The length of tenure and turnover rate in Congress has barely changed over almost a century. (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41545)
Maybe it's bad that we haven't had more turnover/competitiveness for, well, forever, but that is less because of gerontocracy and more from the calcification of partisanship. We used to get really wide swings in party turnover in both houses. Now people just vote the party line.
In part because the older people who do remain sharp have the advantage of wisdom and experience. Pelosi was outstanding at her job of managing the Dem caucus until the end. The calls to remove her were based on pure ageism, not performance.
"...Pelosi was outstanding at her job ...."
I would not be surprised to learn that women are more likely to remain cognitively sharp at a later age. Cognitive health is correlated with vascular health, and there are sex-related differentials in heart attack, stroke, etc.. There must be studies about this.
Can there be any doubt? Women live longer. Which suggests they age more slowly. I'd be surprised if their brains were an exception to this pattern.
"...Can there be any doubt?..."
I can always doubt my strong intuitions in the absence of multiple studies.
This is why you were never going to be President, DT. It's a job that requires boldly and bravely telling the American people your hot takes without checking if they're right first.
“… without checking if they're right first.…”
This and this alone kept me from the White House.
I was elected to LEAD, not READ.
Ish? Women are also flat out smaller. And smaller things tend to live longer.
That is, I don't know that this implies they age more slowly. Size tends to make a big difference.
Men do eat more hamburgers
If you make me choose between hamburgers and graceful, delayed cognitive aging, I'm picking the hamburgers.
“… I'm picking the hamburgers….”
You would not have chosen that way had the cognitive decline not already set in.
People experiencing maleness?
Send the man a meat-za!
Interesting question! Based on some verrry rudimentary research, it looks like women tend to have later onset (around 83 versus 79) but decline more quickly from that point. There are also some interesting sex differences in the nature of the decline, with men holding onto executive function and women holding onto memory longer.
Right. As I understand it, homo sapiens begins to suffer cognitive decline after the age of forty. There's no getting around it (though obviously this proceeds at different rates, depending on different factors, and some of us are more fortunate than others).
But we can still enjoy a net increase in job performance because of increased wisdom, experience, knowledge and so forth. Pelosi is a good example of this. Bernie Sanders doesn't seem to have missed a beat, either.
Homo sapiens beings to suffer cognitive decline after 20 years of age. We undoubtedly suffer other variants of cognitive decline at various other breakpoints which almost certainly vary by individual. The blanket, "begins to suffer cognitive decline after the age of forty," is at least arbitrary (and probably questionable) enough to make it a poor leadoff to any good argument.
"...to suffer cognitive decline after 20 years of age...."
But this is where *experience* makes such a difference. I have over 50 years of *experience* with cognitive decline, whereas you whippersnappers have only been at it for a decade or so.
Yeah, I'm not sure REF actually...read my comment? There's no denying that brain function reaches a peak at some point...and then declines. My points was that, on net, many humans (I'd be the vast majority, especially if they're proactive wrt healthy lifestyle) can become MORE productive and effective DESPITE the aforementioned decline, because of accumulated experience, wisdom, judgment and so on.
I guess this is as good a spot as any to consider what one means by "experience". If I have been doing something (teaching, researching, politicking, whatever) from, say, 1995 - 2025, one might say I have 30 years of "experience". But that kind of depends: have I grown in my profession, kept up with advances in my subject and field? OK, then I probably have 30 years of "experience". But if I haven't done those things, then I have really had 1 year of "experience" 30 times.
Yeah, experience is usually a positive thing increasing your productivity as cognitive decline lessens it.
Experience unfortunately has diminishing marginal returns, and cognitive decline accelerates at least a bit, so after about 40 the combined trend lines are starting to go down again.
The best case I've seen for a broader age limit for elected politicians is that you're electing people for a term of years and the risk of a rapid cognitive decline increases significantly past 80.
So even if they're sharp on election day, there's a real risk they will be gaga by the next one.
Why not let the voters decide that question?
The main reason would be that this is something the voters would be likely to undercount, because it’s in the future.
Voters may not understand the nuances of policy and the candidates may not be completely candid about their positions but one thing that voters know *really* well is how people age. All of them have parents and older relatives. They surely can make an informed guess.
Are you proposing some sort of recall mechanism?
No. I'm proposing the system we have right now: let voters elect their preferred candidate.
We actually do have a mechanism for removing an incapacitated President (the 25th amendment) though I confess it's hard to see it being used outside the most exigent circumstances. And as for Congress, well, one more incapable Representative or Senator won't bring our democracy down.
This is true... there's also a real risk you'll stroke out at 50. I generally would support some kind of age limit, but I think it's a band-aid solution to a larger problem. Maybe the best band-aid we can think of, but a band-aid.
The US already has mechanisms for both death and (the 25th) rapid and complete loss of faculties for the President and for death in Congress (if someone in Congress were to have a stroke or something and then end up in a coma then I’d expect 2/3 of their house to expel them). It’s the people who have declined but can still produce an hour or two of full coherence when they really need to that are going to be hard to remove.
Hakeem Jeffries gets criticised constantly for his limited ability to set the agenda of public discourse. Pelosi also wasn't great at that. Criticism seems consistent and not age (/gender) specific.
I’m talking about the chorus of demand that she resign - they were all framed around letting a new generation take charge, not any specific weakness in her leadership.
Pelosi definitely wasn’t perfect. She was not an effective public face of the party, and she knew it. But she was exceptional at managing that fractious caucus. (McConnell was also a formidable manager for many years…both of them left their contemporaries in the dust.)
And misogyny.
Right. We don't let 85 year olds pilot jumbo jets, or nuclear submarines. Seems eminently reasonable to implement age limits for Congress and the Presidency.
It's crazy that we trust the control of the country to people we probably wouldn't trust to borrow our car or babysit our kids (I don't have kids but my understanding is they're similar to cars)
Expensive, four appendages, typically insured, they get their own room if you're relatively well-off, they're constantly thirsty but unable to satiate themselves, in some jurisdictions you get in trouble if they break and you don't get them fixed...
Doctors, I think the man's parenthetical logic checks out.
I would split the difference and stipulate age limits for the Presidency and not Congress. The impact of a single Congressperson persisting beyond the point where they can be effective is rather small and may be outweighed by the benefits of retaining the wisdom and experience of those who remain capable (e.g., Pelosi, Sanders). However, the risks of a President who is no longer able to think clearly or make good, rapid decisions are potentially catastrophic.
Or perhaps it would be good to just make any age limit for Congress quite high (90?) while having a much lower age limit (70?) for the President.
Without a doubt the need for a presidential age limit is more stark than with regard to Congress. Still, partly for the reasons Ben cites, and partly to prevent outlierishly bad situations (eg, D. Feinstein), I still think it would be a good idea to implement congressional age limits. Ideally I'd probably go with something like: 75 (POTUS) and 85 (Congress).
I don’t think age limits make as much sense for Congress, but I kind of think the Gingrich era GOP was right about term limits. Congress is such a seniority-bound organization that it pretty naturally becomes a gerontocracy without term limits; another effect would be that if a reasonably large fraction of reps/Senators can’t run for reelection at any given time they’d feel less pressure to vote against their conscience in order to fall in with the party line.
>I don’t think age limits make as much sense for Congress, but I kind of think the Gingrich era GOP was right about term limits.<
Funny. I think it's the exact opposite: term limits are a terrible idea—you want as much accumulated wisdom in the legislative branch as possible—but age limits are a necessary evil
An age limit for members of Congress strikes a balance, by not ignoring nature (humans decline with age) but at the same time giving voters maximum freedom to elect (brain healthy) lawmakers to as many terms as they like.
We give voters maximum freedom by eliminating candidates that they would otherwise vote for?
Maximum freedom within the context of limitations imposed by nature, yes. For similar reasons we don't let 16 year olds run for President.
I don't think taking effective decision-making power out of the hands of voters and shifting it in the direction of K Street is a good trade on balance.
I can see the argument that the seniority system (which, btw, the Republicans don't have) gives district/state voters an incentive to keep doddering old politicians in office as they can reap some of those benefits of seniority.
But instead of an age limit on *election* of officeholders (which I think is unfair to voters), why not just put in rules on limiting holding senior positions within Congress? That way, if the voters want to vote in an 80 year old backbencher, well, good for them.
Is there any way of fixing Congress to not be seniority based?
Someone who has been there for 30 years has the ability to bend the system to their will, getting more benefits for their constituents, but that's a zero-sum game.
The Republican caucus has term limits for holding committee chairmanships. The differences aren't as stark as they were like 2018-2022 but especially at that time it was instructive to compare the ages of Democratic committee chairs and Republican ranking members. Not to mention that was the era where the top three house Dems were all over 80, while the R leadership was early-mid 50s
Do we limit this based on age? I confess I assumed that testing was the limiting factor for pilots and such. Similarly, we don't limit who can compete in the olympics based on max age. It just naturally shakes out that way for all sports.
To that end, we don't have a testing scheme to know if someone can legislate well. (Well, cynically, if they are a republican, we have ample evidence that they can't...)
Would LOVE to see required driving re-tests that increase in frequency the older you get.
https://www.faa.gov/faq/what-maximum-age-pilot-can-fly-airplane
The military is even tougher, with strict age limits for combat pilots.
Just on this point, my (perhaps unwanted, but meant sincerely) advice to Ben as a writer is that it's best to avoid words like 'wrong-headed' which don't mean anything, especially if you're already writing a perfectly defensible word like 'anti-democratic' alongside it.
And I agree on that point. I oppose all age restrictions for office and for the franchise, and oppose all term limits, on basic democratic principle. Now I know very few people agree with me, and I don't think politicians should burn much capital on making my pipe-dreams reality. But age limits are bad. Voters should take their jobs more seriously, and be willing to vote for the 'other side' (or if you can't face that, vote 3rd party or abstain) if 'your side' is standing by a nominee who is transparently unfit for office.
"...Voters should take their jobs more seriously, and...."
You can fix a lot of problems with our country if you assume a can-opener.
Ultimately, if someone has won a democratic election, that's not really 'a problem for the country', at worst it's a poor choice. My issue is with people who vote for a candidate and then spend time complaining they're too old, information which was surely available to them at the time of the election.
> Ultimately, if someone has won a democratic election, that's not really 'a problem for the country',
It is if that person causes problems. If you say, by definition, then those are not problems—ok, but I’ll suggest we have a limit in True Scotsmen
I don't say 'by definition, those are not problems', I say a) 'what I perceive as problems are not perceived as such by Republican primary voters and vice versa'; and b) 'this is what impeachment and the law are for'.
But "anti-democratic" and "wrongheaded" mean two different things! Setting an upper age-limit IS anti-democratic, undeniably so. Just like setting a lower age limit is anti-democratic. But it may or may not be "wrong-headed" to do so—that part's disputable. So Ben as a writer is correct to err on the side of clarity when it comes to giving us his opinion.
(His opinion on this particular point is wrong in my view, but he's on firm ground as a writer to remove ambiguity.)
EDIT: I wish to clarify, that, the "particular point" of Ben's I view as wrong here is that it "seems" wrong to set an age limit for elected office. (I'm not disagreeing with the general thrust of his essay). In my view, it doesn't "seem" wrong to put an age cap on jobs related to the public good, and public safety. Rather, it seems reasonable.
I know they're different in meaning, but my point is 'anti-democratic' means something worthwhile that we can debate, while 'wrong-headed' just means 'wrong' and as such is impossible to debate, as anyone who has tried to discuss something that isn't a matter of fact with a person who repeats 'you're wrong!' can attest. It has no propositional validity. *Why* is it wrong?
Impossible to debate? Seems like there's plenty of interesting debate going on at present.
Why should you vote for the enemy ever?
tbh *I* wouldn't, because my views are far from the median amongst the electorate. But for most people, a politician of the party they don't normally vote for wouldn't deliver anything all that different in practice. But yes, partisans won't and that's fine.
I believe the constitution’s age minimums for the house, senate, and presidency were intended by the founders as an anti-nepotism measure. In small European republics and institutions like the Catholic Church, people who were much younger than the normal age for officeholding sometimes got into important offices thanks to their family connections. You essentially never had super-young officeholders get in on the basis of talent, only nepotism.
I think the founders were basically right about this. Nobody is realistically going to be qualified for the presidency before age 40 at the earliest.
I’ve come around to supporting term limits of 18-20 years per position, and an age cap of 80 +-5, as a circuit breaker. Over these thresholds and the people who are running are predominantly doing it for their egos rather than for the good of their community or party.
"...term limits of 18-20 years per position, and an age cap of 80 +-5, as a circuit breaker...."
Co-sign, though I'd probably make that 75±5.
"...people who are running are predominantly doing it for their egos...."
Or to stay out of jail, as is the case in the US and Israel.
For a long time I was in Henry Waxman's district in California. He served for 34 years. The nation would have been a far worse place had he been forced out roughly halfway through his tenure.
I confess I don't get it. Many great artists (Tolstoy, Picasso, etc.) created great work well into their later years. Should they have been prevented from doing so? Obviously not. But had they done crap work, it simply would have been ignored by the public. Similarly, why not let the voters decide if they like the job their representatives are doing?
whenever young people complain about old politicians, I like to ask them "why do you hate Bernie Sanders so much?"
I hate term limits. But as a California YIMBY, I have to admit term limits are the reason California has been enacting YIMBY legislation. Old NIMBY legislators can't just stick around decade after decade, voting against the YIMBY legislation I favor. They get replaced by younger legislators, and younger people are YIMBYer people.
Yes, because all children are idiots, but there is no definitive point where you are sure to be incompetent as an elderly person.
You can dispute whether the age minimums are too high, but there is no doubt they should exist.
Look what happened when Ben Wyatt became mayor of his town at 18? Ice Town? And that guy was a genius!!!
I don't have a strong opinion here but picking an age seems problematic. There are people whose brains are Swiss cheese at 55 and people who are sharp as a tack at 65. Age, although relevant, is not a great metric.
"...There are people whose brains are Swiss cheese at 55...."
All true, and the same applies for those aged 20, 25, and 30. And yet, few people seriously consider lowering the minimum age for president.
Age is a crude proxy, but a useful one.
I would personally supporting making the maximum age for presidents 75, but the argument that it’s anti-democratic is that if voters want to elect an elderly president despite the risks of cognitive decline or poor health they should be allowed to. Maybe voters think that a particular candidate’s experience or policy proposals outweigh concerns about age.
maybe we just need to add more physical events to the primary calendar! be sure the voters get a chance to see what kind of specimen they are supporting...
I wonder to what extent geontocratic politicians are a symptom of structural issues we would be better off fixing instead.
Such a double standard we have. People are very comfortable putting age minimums on things despite the fact there are 32 year olds who would make a fine president, 17 year olds who could cast an informed vote, etc. But we cry ageism if those sorts of rules are applied at old age.
One of the things I've been musing about based on the latest conspiracy news: if there really is an "Epstein client list", that list is now in the hands of Donald Trump and his goons. Which means that you can't really trust any politician who might be vulnerable to blackmail, regardless of which side they're on. A good defense on this is just to have lots of turnover in politicians. The probability you're vulnerable to extortion is presumably at least somewhat correlated with the age of your political career.
What's the argument for denying the voters their choice? I'd prefer not to vote for an 80 year old candidate for President but why can't I have that choice? There's a good argument for requiring an independent physical and mental assessment of the candidates in order to provide full transparency to guide voters' choices but given that, why insist upon a nanny state intervention to deny them their pick?
I feel the same way about term limits. Why not let voters return their favorite officeholder to office? I also feel that way about the age minimum -- if the voters want to elect a 21 year old President why should they be denied that? (Granted, that one would require a constitutional amendment.)
I get the age cap for airline pilots -- we don't get to vote on who flies the plane (and I don't think we should). But for political offices? I'm not seeing it.
I support age limits for the same reason professional sports owners often vote for a salary cap -- sometimes we need to put in rules to save us from ourselves.
Not buying it. Salary caps maintain competitive balance so big market teams or those with super deep pocket owners can't monopolize talent, and so destroy fan interest in the leagues.
If some district wants to elect some doddering ineffective old fool that doesn't harm the power of the rest of the voters.
It would be good if the parties enforced age limits as a norm rather than a hard and fast rule, but I don’t think we could expect them to.
Retirement is a lot like being a housewife: If you're rich enough to pursue architectural whims or aesthetic projects, it can be glamorous. But if you're scraping to pay the power bill and piecing together frugal meals, it's just drudgery.
I'm nowhere near a workaholic. But without the money to travel, it’s hard to fill day after day without some work. Most hobbies don’t take up that much time, and if you’re seventy, you probably shouldn’t be exercising more than fifteen hours a week anyway.
I understand not wanting to work 40+ hours a week. But I don’t understand the appeal of doing no work and pinching pennies until you die. Retiring into boredom and barebones budgeting doesn’t sound like freedom—it sounds like a slow slide into irrelevance.
My grandfather, who didn’t go to college but was a numbers wizard, worked as an accountant for Texaco for many years, and was able to retire early with a generous pension. Since he was still pretty young, he went to work for a real estate firm (edit: still as an accountant) until at least 70 or 72, including through a bout of (detected early) cancer.
He didn’t have many hobbies - work was effectively his hobby. I think it’d be bad if we barred older people who want to work in meaningful roles simply because of a desire for undefined dynamism.
Many men wither after retirement. Both of my grandfathers worked til 70 but could have retired earlier. One of my grandfathers and my step grandfather worked part time til 80. I plan to work part time til I no longer can. I have not worked consecutive 40+ hour weeks in 18 years and will only do so if heavily incentivized.
There need to be more jobs that are accommodating to snowbirds, because I sure af don’t plan to spend my later years experiencing Northern winters OR Southern summers! I would love to find work for 6 months of the year in Seattle, the other 6 months in Florida.
Have you tried the Carolina highlands?
Yeah, my mom’s best friend has a condo in Lake Toxaway. It’s a lovely place, though I haven’t experienced all 4 seasons there.
My first 16 years in Georgia I dreaded the summers, partly because frugal 26 year old David had the brilliant idea of buying an air conditioner that couldn’t quite keep up. Then, we got a house with an in ground pool. Completely different experience. You can go for a jog and not mind the heat when you can just fling off your shirt and shoes and jump in. I no longer dread the summers. Indeed, like proper Georgians, we now heat our pool because anything under 84 is a bit nippy. Never thought Id hear my pool, and we don’t hear it much in July, but we definitely do in early June and late August and we wouldn’t swim in May or September without it
There was absolutely no problem with him working. The problem would be if he as a 70 year old was bossing around all the 45 to 55 year olds at the company. It's important to look at the real "problem" here. Older workers are fine, if that's what they want to do. It's about who is occupying leadership positions.
What's interesting is that he switched fields. If people "semi-retired" and/or pursued "hobby work" it would create a different situation than what Ben described.
I am convinced that the best job for 65 year old men is what my dad did for a time, which was part-time ticket taker at an arena. He got to see tons of sports games, plenty of extremely famous musicians he absolutely did not care about, plus it's a little physical in that it required standing.
Edit: Oh! And he got to interact with people.
Actually, he didn’t - sorry, I should have mentioned that he continued being an accountant for a real estate firm.
A part time physical job can also stave off the decline of aging. My grandpa worked as a farmer and mechanic until he died in his eighties. He remained very strong and mobile compared to many. In college I worked on the grounds crew at a prestigious country club. There were a few retired engineers in their 70’s and 80’s who did that job so that they could play the course twice a week. If work gets you moving then it’s a major benefit.
You need hobbies that can be complete time sink….
Amateur radio is one. I'm only 40, but I would estimate that the median age of an active amateur radio operator is about 70. Radio can be very time consuming, especially in terms of projects like building antennas. It can also be very cognitively demanding.
I have summer break in my life as a teacher , at 43, and the idea of retirement at 65 feels completely insane. After a month I’m stir crazy. Maybe I’m just not expecting how bad my body will break down but my father’s still working in his late 60s and doesn’t seem to want to leave.
Two months without a job to do feels like an incredible hole in my life. The idea of a decades long summer break seems like a batshit thing to expect someone who loves work to want to do.
I totally can see how someone with a much more physical job would want to retire. But expecting it at 65 seems ludicrous.
I don’t say in the piece that I expect retirement at 65! I also am pretty careful to focus just on certain careers.
I've felt the same when a company I've worked for has closed and I haven't found a new job yet. Had two two month gaps that way, and while I was ok financially for those I did start to get stir crazy in the second month.
One difference between that and retirement though is that with retirement you can make longer term plans for part time jobs, etc, or personal projects.
That may or may not help when it comes
This sounds a bit depressing to me, not seeing meaning outside of work. But then again I retired at 38 and hated every hour I spent in various office jobs. Now I would like to return to work part time but it’s difficult as most interesting jobs demand full time commitment.
I don't think enjoying your work is the same as not seeing meaning outside of work. In other words, I think it's quite reasonable that two different things that you think have equal amounts of meaning for you require different amounts of time investment for you to extract that meaning.
I'm retired. My morning coffee and reading the news (and substacks!) can stretch to a couple of hours. It's so nice. Maybe I'll have another cup of coffee. Then I'll get some stuff done, go to yoga class, etc.
Not having to hurry is the biggest luxury in the world.
I love this lifestyle for about 2 weeks. Then it drives me insane.
And I'll admit that I get tired faster than I did 25 years ago.
About a year ago, my DIL had a commitment that took her out of town, and my son's job is insane and high-pressure. So my husband and I went out to help my son with the adorable granddaughters, who were around 18 months and 4 years old. In the mornings we'd get to their house with bright shining faces and my son went off to work. At 5 (he was coming home early for us) he found us *literally* lying on the floor in exhaustion while the girls played happily nearby. We bailed and made him deal with dinners and bedtimes, which he was not pleased about.
He made it to adulthood so supposedly we kept him alive and fed and got him to bed every night decades ago? It's all a blur. And I *could* do it now if I had to, but damn.
You just need more practice.
My retirement is decades in the future, but I expect to spend it reading, playing video games, spending time with family, and maybe doing some traveling if I can afford it.
I sometimes wonder what it will be like in a couple of decades when people who spent most of their life playing video games as a hobby retire in large numbers. How will it affect the state of gaming?
I was expecting my Dad to go crazy when he retired. He was such a workaholic. Turns out he was perfectly happy as a bridge-maven
people say this all the time but i just struggle to understand it. don't get me wrong, i believe you, but it's so foreign to my own experience it's incomprehensible.
when i quit being a teacher, the only thing i really missed after a year was the long breaks.
I know good teachers who feel this way so I don’t begrudge this. I think sincerely I have always liked work even when I worked at a Boston Market making corn bread I was cheerful to go to work.
Teaching and foster parenting really does fill the kid shaped hole left by infertility. But then it’s gone and I’m left just with hobbies without it and it’s notable.
I'm the same as Andrew. If I retire at 65, I'll just find another job to do in retirement. Or near full time volunteer work or something. I'm bad at self-motivating but find accomplishment extremely fulfilling so, like, I need structure. I've been this way since I was a kid.
The idea of retiring at 65 feels completely insane to me, but for the opposite reason. If I'm still working at 65, something has gone horribly wrong with my financial plan. I'm pretty sure my job is reducing my life expectancy each year I do it.
What does your father do?
My dad seemed fine working into his 60s, but one or two health incidents and then looking at how much your pension will pay out compared to showing up for work each day changes the calculations.
He’s some sort of senior but not c-level executive in business insurance, mainly trucking. He also travels a lot with part time work from home with my step mom who’s a tenured professor.
Admittedly even less physical than my job which isn’t that physical as long as you retain basic mobility.
Get a boat! Then there’s always something to do in retirement. Preferring work seems a failure of imagination!
But why isn't there anything outside of work you take seriously?
Good luck with your future challenges, Ben.
I'll retire in a few years when I'm 60 and *I can't wait*. I will gladly hand things over to the youngsters. I'll ride my bike, master that second language I've been working on, play my drums, and start a Substack as a repository for my intellectual projects. (I'll have money, but none of those activities require a lot of money, they just require *time*). If you dread retirement because you're not sure how you'll fill your days without work, I frankly feel sorry for you.
My in laws and husband are like this. For me, I’ve learned the hard way more than once that while there’s an infinite number of exciting things I *want* to do, I won’t without some amount external structure. If I want to exercise or do a hobby, I have to take a class for instance. So, I’ll either need a very structured retirement with volunteer commitments and clubs etc. or part time work.
That's a legit challenge. Some things I'm confident I'm just going to *do* and enjoy doing (they are not projects as such, but just enjoyable time spent), but for some things (intellectual projects, second language) progress depends on discipline and consistency, so I might need a course, or some other accountability device.
Over on Astral Codex Ten there was a recent review of "school" (i.e. the general overall concept of modern mass schooling that every nation practices) and one thing it talked about is the "5% problem" which is that (it seems) about 5% of people are "no structure learners", a huge middle is "low structure learners", and then there's a decent sized tail of "high structure learners". And I think the same applies to people's work/retirement relationship too.
Some people need the little bit of structure that some kind of part-time work would give. Some people need the awful lot of structure that full time military service provides. And a pretty small number are just fine without any structure.
You see some retirees build up that work-like structure on their own again via some combination of binding commitments to volunteer work, clubs, etc. But it is definitely more effort than just accepting a job offer and will almost always be lower commitment than "I need money to live" that a job has.
I retired early years ago and I'm a no structure kind of person. My wife works because when she's tried the no structure life she mainly just sits on the couch on her phone for 16 hours a day.
Different people are different and I'd be hesitant to call one kind of person "sad" anymore than I'd call an introvert "sad" given homo sapiens very clearly evolved to be hypersocial.
Great comment, and then add on top that there's no way this comment section is remotely representative of the general population on this issue
The bicycle hobby can get expensive really quickly if, like friends of mine, you start doing Backroads tours over the Pyrenees and adventures like that. It's a fun way to go broke, though (so they tell me).
The worst part of gerontocracy is that the median homebuyer is now 56, up from 45 just as recently as 2021: https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-homebuyers-56/.
I don’t understand why a lot of old people hoard so much wealth. Some people worth eight figures don’t even pay for their kids’ school because they didn’t want to spoil their kids, literally preventing them from having grandkids. Meanwhile they will lobby for estate tax repeal so their kids can get millions of dollars when they’re too old to really even need or enjoy it.
There is a good book called “Die With Zero” which explains that people lose the capacity to actually enjoy their wealth much when they’re older because they’re set in their ways but don’t appreciate how quickly compound interest snowballs, causing people to oversave. The average net worth of a 75 year old is more than $1.6 million: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#range:1989,2022;series:Net_Worth;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:mean. It would be better for people as well as society for them to spend down their wealth earlier, and to beef up the safety net to discourage excess precautionary saving, like maybe providing an option for people to buy an annuity to top off their social security so that they have guaranteed income in old age without hoarding wealth.
The median age of the *first time* homebuyer is 38. Once you own a home, you’re much more likely to resell and purchase a new one, so of course the median age of ALL homebuyers is higher. Some of these buyers are downsizing, which is perfectly appropriate for an older person. I don’t know that 54 is a meaningful figure.
Average new worth is wildly skewed by a few ultrarich. (That same chart says under-35s have a net worth of $180k, which is laughable to the vast majority.) The median net worth of a 75yo is around $330k, which seems like a reasonable amount to cover end of life expenses.
I'll go further than that and say this median-age factoid may be my new go-to example of how easy it is to mislead with statistics (not ascribing motive to the top-level poster--you can also use them to mislead yourself).
The median net worth for those over 75, though, is only $335K. A few outliers can skew the average pretty significantly (Warren Buffett, for example).
Still, your points are well made. Another item of note: the entire financial planning industry is designed to accumulate assets and avoid spending. It will be hard to push change into that fee structure.
The savings (not hoarded wealth) a 75 year old has may have to last another 25 years. You don’t know if you will be the outlier living into your late nineties, and that is probably going to require caretakers. Most of my family lives into their late eighties, but we have a few who lived to be nearly 100.
Yeah. We're watching my 92yo MIL burn through every penny right now. I'm glad she "hoarded" her small wealth, since we'd be paying for it otherwise.
Thinking about this just makes me hope my relatives put me out to pasture if I live past 90...I'd hate to be a financial drain for that long personally! But maybe I'm a bit callous.
For many older people, outliving their savings is their biggest fear. More than fear of dying.
Yes to medians, and also this "net worth" they are holding - at those corrected lower median numbers - is mostly the home they live in.
There is a weird generational warfare lie going on that claims old people are sitting on fat stacks of riches, when it's more like they have paid off their home and have enough money for food & clothes.
Yes, it’s become fashionable for younger people to blame boomers for their economic situation. The reason they’re not succeeding is because someone, somewhere, is stealing the money that’s rightfully theirs.
When of course the reality is that every generation is doing better *at the same age* than the one before it!
https://x.com/BenGlasner/status/1932907496290595044
(cited by https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-4c7)
They are. It’s called NIMBY
In my state, New York, the poverty rate among people over 65 has grown over the past couple of decades, even while the overall poverty rate decreased. I don't know if that is an anomaly of our state - maybe because we have a high number of foreign born residents? - but it does give pause. It is a growing concern for our state government.
I think that is a very difficult nut to crack and we want to be careful with incentives. The one thing that may be worse than a bunch of wealthy retirees hoarding resources may be a bunch of destitute retirees who become wards of the state or their already overburdened children.
That said I do think it may be time to repeal or significantly amend the ADEA, and consider ways to incentivize behavioral changes later in life. The next stop from the nursing home is the graveyard, so for people and so for countries.
Edit: I now see you mentioned the ADEA in another comment. Great minds.
Isn’t that why we use median? Buffet is offset by one penniless person.
But that's why John is saying we _should_ use median.
Oh misread the original post missed the only.
Actually he is not. Think about the math.
I am thinking about it. I’m generally trying to figure out what you mean because if we pick 5 people and one has hundreds of billions of dollars he doesn’t exert pressure on rank 3. He’s cancelled out by the poorest candidate. It doesn’t matter if the richest position is richer by 10 dollars or 10 billion dollars they’re just rank 5.
Maybe I’m missing something I’m not a statistician but this is literally the textbook case for why we use median instead of mean to avoid outlier skew. Is there some advanced statistical reason why it would skew the median?
I misread what you were saying - my apologies. I need to quit commenting when I’m in a hurry.
The age is up because of the interest rate increase. A big chunk of those buying are older people downsizing and paying with the equity of their previous home.
Old people “hoard wealth” BECAUSE THEY STILL NEED TO EAT AFTER THEY RETIRE, and that saved money is it for them.
Yes, a person who retires at 65 might need to support themselves for another 30 years, including expensive medical and hospice care. Medicare, contrary to some younger people’s assumptions, is not free.
A friend of mind retired from the same organization I work for, and is currently spending 1300 per month on health insurance.
Many people aim to save a lot of money by the time they’re old,, not because they’re greedy and don’t want to share, but because they’re understandably scared of needing to go to an old-age home that costs absolutely eye-watering amounts of money. And you have no way of knowing, a priori, how long you’ll have to live in one of those places.
“Just move in with your kids!” Not always feasible if, say, you have advanced dementia or another condition that requires around the clock care.
Your kids might have something to say about it, too. Like, "Hell no."
I’d happily do it to ensure that my mom’s money goes to my sister and me rather than some care home or facility
Exactly - one of my motivations to build a good retirement nest-egg was so I wouldn't be a burden on the younger generation. They'll get whatever is left when I'm gone.
A study back in 2012 showed that 46% of people had less than $10,000 to their name at the time of their death.
https://news.mit.edu/2012/end-of-life-financial-study-0803
I am in an online group for people caring for their elderly parents. The discussion definitely encourages me to "hoard wealth" because medical care, senior living communities, devices like walkers, etc. cost a lot of money, and offspring are stressed out about what to do when the money runs out.
My parents are doing fine with their SS and pensions [1], but if you fade and need live-in long-term care that's very very expensive. $1 million can be gone rather fast.
[1] I've really come to appreciate pensions.
Older people 'hoard' wealth because nursing care is incredibly expensive and Medicare won't pay for it and LTC insurance sucks. If you don't want to end up in a home featured on 60 Minutes, you should probably budget for $100k per year per adult to be prudent. If we had a better system for elder care, it wouldn't put all the onus on the individual to pay for care and some of these distortions would go away. Shocked that we still have this cobbled together system, given the political power of older voters.
>The worst part of gerontocracy is that the median homebuyer is now 56<
What an astonishing statistic.
As others have noted, it’s not that astonishing. If you buy one home when you’re about to have kids at age 30, and then downsize into another home a few years after your kids turn 20, then all it takes for the median to be in the 50s is a few people moving to a new city when they retire.
> people lose the capacity to actually enjoy their wealth much when they’re older because they’re set in their ways
Do they? My grandparents spent their wealth traveling the world until very recently. They spent around 1/3 of their time on some trip or another. They also did things like buy a large house specifically so they could host the whole family for visits and stayed engaged in rotary clubs and the like. It seemed like their activity levels didn't drop from when they were still employed.
Every well-off but not rich senior I know is afraid of the cost of care if they get sick or need assisted living. You don’t know if you’ll go instantly or be in a home for a decade spending easily 100 or even 200K a year.
>The worst part of gerontocracy is that the median homebuyer is now 56<
What an astonishing statistic.
Having people stay in the labor force longer provided they remain productive is a very good thing. Part of the problem is adjusting what aging workers DO. Maybe we could find ways to shift aging, highly paid workers to tasks (including mentoring younger employees) that better suit them and their companies. Maybe the standard career trajectory it not up up up until out but up, over , over, ... out.
Let me use a recent personal experience as an example. For a post I needed to follow a citation to a paper based on a mathematical model I could not possibly reproduce or find technical fault with if it had any. But I immediately saw that it did not do what the person citing it claimed. When I was younger I could have engaged the model at a technical level, but would I have seen the significance for the point at hand?
Maybe the standard career trajectory should not be up up up until out but up, over , over, ... out.
Also, the 40 hour work week is not great for the kind of career flexibility you're talking about. What I expect from a senior employee is a kind of consultant role - come into meetings, immediately recognize the good and bad ideas, give your feedback, and peace out. You could easily pull that off working 20 hours a week at a high end-of-career hourly rate and then go golfing at 3 PM. And then the company doesn't feel a need to force out their senior employees because their total compensation is low even if their hourly rate is high.
Lord, yes. I would love to thoughtfully stroke my gray-trending-to-white beard 15 hours/week until the day I die.
Exactly the kind of thing I have in mind.
The rest of the day to work on their Substack! :)
I feel this can be solved by regular outcome-based appraisals. If you can marshal your accumulated skills and experience to continue to provide competitive outcomes, then by all means, stay in your role. If the outcomes that you produce are no longer competitive compared to those of younger workers, there should be less of a taboo to you being replaced.
Ideally yes, but outcome-based assessments are hard in a lot of elite white-collar fields. I've been working on the same project since I started my job three years ago and it's still not done. I've taken it a long way but in a very real sense I have produced nothing of use. Is that because it's just a very hard project and work of its type takes time or because I'm not good at my job? I'm not always sure myself.
There isn’t a taboo about replacing any worker, including older workers, in corporate America.
Has the author worked in a business? This article appears to be describing a type of corporate job stability that vanished at least thirty years ago.
Ben was talking about the workforce more broadly, where social and institutional forces mean that Academics and Politicians aren't so easily replaced. It may be similar wrt partners at law firms, some CEOs or tenured high school teachers.
Academic tenure is an extreme exception in the workforce.
Very few public school teachers go past full retirement age.
CEOs are controlled by their Boards.
This is a problem in a very few professions - NOT the regular workforce.
Sure, and now I realize I should correct my last statement. Ben is less talking about the workforce then about the very upper rungs of the workforce - it's clearly in the title and subtitle: "Gerontocracy" "Elite Workforce.
So yes, we can both agree that the typical worker can expect to be replaced.
But it's among the elite of the workforce and institutional leaders and decision makers where replacement is not happening nearly as fast as once did. That's what the author talking about.
Great point. I would add, however, that old people in general are working as long as they can, mostly because they need to.
"I feel this can be solved by regular outcome-based appraisals"
In some roles, sure. But take politics for example, where "regular outcome-based appraisals" are elections, and 80 year olds with fast-fading abilities are regularly re-elected.
There are probably other situations where boards and co-workers may have a tough time ousting elite 80 year olds, in part because outcomes are very hard to measure. For example, CEO's or Film Directors or Law Partners. And then there are tenured academics.
Film directors?
I agree. That is ultimately what it comes down to. I’m talking to the generic expectation.
BTW the experience I mention is as Substacker. :)
The real pillar of gerontocracy is inheritance. In most families, the accumulated surplus of past generations ends up in the hands of the oldest living members. That means the eldest often control not just their own lifetime earnings, but the surplus from four, five, even six generations—plus compound returns.
Someone in their late 40s or early 50s, by contrast, typically controls only what they’ve accumulated so far. That alone gives the old enormous power.
Post–World War II was a historical anomaly. As Piketty noted, high inflation and strong wage growth in the 1940s and 50s meant that recent income could outweigh inherited wealth. But when inflation and wage growth fall, the balance flips. The deeper past starts to dominate the present, and the oldest generation reclaims the economic high ground.
This generation holds so much power, people are often reluctant to point out how heavily it hinges on the achievements of the dead.
The annual flow of inheritances in the US is now over 10% of GDP and in some countries like Italy it’s approaching 20%: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/12/how-to-invest-your-enormous-inheritance. This is only going to grow as people who benefitted from the post-1980 stock and housing markets start to die. We’re headed towards a society where work doesn’t mean very much and your living standards are going to be primarily based on inheritance (which people especially those working more “fun” jobs like journalism already see when coworkers with the same income nonetheless have vastly different lifestyles). It plus AI are going to be the big economic conflicts of the future (and AI will reinforce it by further transferring economic power from labor to primarily inherited capital).
Compounded by concentration via progressively smaller families to inherit said wealth. Estate tax reform is such an obvious Democratic initiative that has not gotten much traction.
Estates should be taxed as personal income to heirs (with some kind of standard deduction), not on the total value of the estate. Encourage the Eliot Rosewaters of the world to divide their fortunes
Absolutely the key point. I'd love to see a political program of future-targeted investments (various subsidies to child-rearing, infrastructure and R&D investments). Paid for by increased and broadened estate taxes (i.e., not only on the largest estates).
That sort of future vs. past agenda doesn't appear to have any constituency in our current politics though. We're still mostly about rich vs. poor class conflict when we even talk about economics at all. Otherwise it's all culture wars all the time.
Maybe the abundance faction could get there eventually?
In your list of consequences to upper rungs of society being increasingly dominated by older people, you can add NIMBY taking off or at least becoming more powerful. I’ve noted before that the reason the YIMBY vs NIMBY debate is often cross partisan is it’s often more a debate about young vs old.
The median home buyer used to be under 40 years old as recently as 2000. Now it’s close to 50. Given there is a tie between age and resistance to change it shouldn’t be surprising that NIMBY has gotten so strong over time. And has Matt has noted, NIMBY is much worse in the UK and sure enough the median age in the UK is higher than here.
A coworker had a condo in a 3-unit building. One elderly woman insisted that absolutely no money, at all, be spent on any kind of long-term maintenance. Her plan was to die and she didn't care what happened after that. (Also hoping that the other 2 units would pick up the slack out of their own self-interest to not have the building fall down around them.)
Yeah, we’re looking at moving my MIL up here and we’re worried about that. She’d have to sell her nice house that she owns outright to get at most a 1 bedroom condo, and even if we pay the association dues for her as we intend to, a “special assessment” could wipe her out.
But now her entire family is up here in Seattle since my BIL moved in with us, so there’s not much reason for her to stay in Memphis besides the house.
Eh, Germany is also older than here and doesn't have the saafter all. of nimby issues. The advancing age of buyers is more likely a symptom of NIMBY-dom and the resulting higher prices than a cause. NIMBY-ism began taking off in the much younger 1970's afterall.
https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates
Germany homeownership is much much lower than most other countries in the western world. You're pool of homeowners who can gum at the works is just a much lower percentage of the population than in other advanced countries.
Should also note that it's not a mistake that NIMBY power is most pronounced in countries like US, UK, Australia and Canada. There's probably a cultural element involved, but the other is that legal systems based on common law make it much much easier for individuals or a handful of individuals to block or at least seriously delay the building of housing developments.
The Vogons were inspired by British bureaucrats, after all! “Getting [a legal document] signed in triplicate, burying it in peat moss, then submitting it to public inquiry” sounds an awful lot like getting a 5 over 1 permitted
Especially in CA with its ludicrous property tax exemptions
One thing that undercuts the significance of several of these statistics: the years 1930-1940 had fewer births than any of the other years of the 20th century, earlier or later, and the earlier years had a lot of people die in the war (or not enter the workforce, because they were women). Thus, 2010 is really the first year there were a significant number of 65-year-olds available to fill positions. Of course the number of 65-year-olds in jobs was going to start rising quickly right then, even if every individual keeps the same likelihood of working at any age!
Re: old Congesspeople: feels like an easy first step would be not giving out things like leadership assignments and nice offices by seniority. That pretty directly incentivizes hanging on as long as possible, no?
Newt Gingrich did that on the Republican side.
But Democrats are attached to seniority for all sorts of reasons, from the coalitional to a misguided notion that ushering people out is invidious discrimination.
It’s probably saved them from the binge-and-purge dynamics of the GOP, though.
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.)
+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.
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.
The dependency ratio in the US, assuming an age 65 cut off, is set to rise by 33% in the next 25 years. This would eat up 1/2 to 3/4 of our expected productivity gains over that time.
Raising the retirement age to 69 just about reverses this. The workforce is going get older, or we're going make the younger generation pay more to support free riding former DINK olds. How we shorten the training time for productive professions and provide mobility for both 2nd careers for older workers that's not volunteering at the animal shelter and upcoming workers is more complicated than what Ben has explored here.
re: free-riding DINK olds --- I kind of feel like we should either make childless people pay into social security at a higher rate or else give them reduced benefits when they retire. They really are free-riding on everyone else's kids.
Reminder that parents can claim their children as dependents and receive credits that DINKs never will. There's already a mechanism in place, but apparently no political will for expanding it. And there's definitely not some large DINK contingent blocking that.
And Social Security's issue is that it it's going to the older people (whether they had kids or not) who don't need it. Making the formula more redistributive should achieve this without targeting anyone if we assume DINKs paid more over their career.
Eh that cuts both ways. DINKs pay taxes for schools, don't get family tax benefits, etc. You would certainly not countenance the argument that everyone else's kids are free-riding on them while the DINKs are working
So that's true, and I suppose you could be an economist and try to make a transfer system that accounts for all the costs and benefits and tries to make it perfectly fair.
The reason why I enjoy the idea of social security benefits/costs related to children is that I think that having social security and the entire idea of saving _money_ for retirement obscures the underlying reality that if you want to retire, you need people to work for you. The money doesn't grow the food or repair your house or change your bedpan, it's _people_, and specifically people who are younger than you are. If everyone saved all their money and had no kids, nobody would be able to retire. Social security really is young people paying for old people to retire, and if you haven't contributed much to making new young people you should perhaps not be entitled to draw as much from the young people's labor when you get old.
(Of course, as you notice, even DINKs contribute to the raising of young people through taxes and supporting schools and such, but I think we all agree that they do not contribute as much as actual parents.)
DINKlife for the win, you miserable haters! :) My my wife and I are both paying in max SS contributions and will do so until we retire, unless something goes horribly wrong. I don't anticipate needing SS benefits, but it is nice to be able to count on it just in case. But we don't get child tax credits, and last time I checked our property taxes fund schooling. It will all be for naught anyway... can't wait for the AI-UBI fights in like 5 years.
Haha, well nobody said being a free-rider wasn't enjoyable! ;)
But more seriously you make a good point, which is that we are all in this together and even people without children contribute to society and indirectly help to raise the new generation. However, if nobody had kids, nobody would be able to retire. It wouldn't matter how much money you saved or how many tax credits you didn't take, if there were no young people coming after you then you would have to work until you died.
Robots are the answer I tell you :/
I expect this will sorta happen on its own organically. If the dependency ratio gets worse, you either raise taxes or cut benefits. Cutting benefits is politically difficult, so I guess we’ll see tax hikes.
The more you raise taxes, the better the tradeoff is to earning less market income but having more kids who care about you and will help you out in ways that don’t show up on anyone’s 1040.
Recently, cutting benefits seems to be startlingly easy. Raising taxes has been nearly impossible for decades now.
From about 2003-2022, interest payments on USG debt as a fraction of gdp were low and stable. In that environment, I think it’s particularly difficult to raise taxes, since there’s no immediate benefit. Since we’re now back in the 90s, in terms of interest payments, I’m hopeful that we’ll have a political economy more like the 90s, in terms of possible openness to tax increases.
Do they get a refund of that part of their property taxes that went to pay for schools, libraries, public pools, etc?
Wow yet another group to resent (and envy?)
This kidless professional supports the idea.
> To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.”
I think this suggests that many companies *believe* that AI will reduce their need for lower-level jobs and are placing bets on this reality. I do not believe that we yet have evidence that it is true. Right now, many companies are trying to stay innovative by shoving AI into their processes as rapidly as they can, often without due consideration of their use cases. I think we will need to wait a few years to see how much of the hype pans out. Many decisions like this may be rolled back as expected gains are not realized.
In the software industry this is already coming true. Also it’s any day now for the legal and medical industry.
I don’t think that’s true for tech.
What I see is that we’ve all been smacked hard by interest rates and using AI as a way to keep investors from worrying about our personnel trends.
Legal, sure. I imagine AI can do the work of a verbose 50th percentile paralegal fine. Medical, no, except on the insurance side, and that’s mostly been replaced by software already. Also radiology may go by the wayside, lots of folks are developing AIs to read films, I think that’s low hanging fruit tbh and one where AIs will eventually do better than people.
But medical is mostly a caring profession, and it’s thankfully shot through with state occupational licensing. You think Boston Dynamics is ready to have its robots wipe every ass in America? Ai isn’t replacing most doctors, nurses, physical therapists, etc anytime soon.
Good luck Ben! Banger of an article today!!
I'm 78 and still working. Whose fault is it that people want the services of us elders? I'm proud that many of the young folks to whom I gave their first jobs with significant responsibilities went on to great careers, and hope to continue launching great careers.
Saying "old people are hogging all the good jobs" is a good example of zero-sum thinking, which we usually avoid around here.