The news of President Biden dropping out of the race is known to all. We do not comment on political matters as an organization, but we do want to comment (using data) on all those who continually write and wrote about the age of the US President (Joe Biden) and the Republican Presidential candidate (Donald Trump) as a factor which affects their ability to run for office. If they are physically and cognitively capable of running the office, ageist remarks are unnecessary, and the data shows us clearly that they are NOT too old to do so (again, not making any assertions on their qualifications or cognitive/physical abilities to do so – just their age).
The argument from the ageists is simple. The age of US presidents and presidential candidates have increased at a very high rate. When George Washington was elected the first president of the United States, he was only 56. John Adams (the 2nd US President) was 61, Thomas Jefferson (3rd) was 57, James Madison (4th) was also 57 and James Monroe (5th) was 58. The numbers looked similar for many years.
If we look at the average age of the US presidents at the start of Presidency (see chart above) the right side of the chart definitely seems much higher than the left. The trend line is not really your friend here, since there are ex-Presidents like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or John F Kennedy who push the averages down, but overall the increase in age is quite clear. Simple piecewise trend lines make it clearer. Below we have the average presidential age by decade with a piecewise trend line breaking at 1900.
This seems to clearly support the hypothesis that Presidents are older and possibly too old to run arguably one of the most powerful offices in the world.
But we think we should dig a little deeper, maybe. The price of gold when George Washington was president was around USD 20 per ounce, which hovers around the USD 2200 range now! What happened? Well, inflation did. And the real price of gold (when adjusted for inflation) did not increase 12 times, which it did if you look at nominal data only. So, what about age?
Well, the life expectancy at birth in the United States since George Washington was president (thanks to the marvels of modern healthcare and sanitation) has more than doubled. When Washington became President (at age 56) he was 40% older than the average age of mortality (about 40) for Americans. The chart below compares the two trends and provides a clear answer to the question.
From the 1900s when we see the average age of US presidents rising significantly in our first chart (our ‘break’ in our piecewise trend line) matches (more or less) the time when the decadal presidential average age fell below the life expectancy at birth for the country. In ‘real terms’ (when compared to life expectancy), the age of US Presidents has not really been going up…the trend line of life expectancy clearly shows that Americans are living much longer than earlier, and it can only be expected that their presidents will be older today than they were 200 or 250 years back.
The ramification of comparing age and life expectancy goes beyond the US presidents. The retirement age was first set in Germany in 1881 by Otto van Bismarck at 70, and later was reduced to 65 in 1916. The average German lived 38-40 years in the 1880s and 47 years in 1915. So, the retirement age was about 1.5 times of average longevity implying that one could work nearly as long as they wanted. Having the retirement age at 60-65 today, when most people around the developed world live well beyond their 80s, puts an increasing amount of strain on social security systems. Policy makers and ageists might start thinking seriously about these numbers. As an organization which works closely with the technological aspects of skilling, recruiting and public policy, we see more than our fair share of ageism. This is a call to all that age is just a number and the definition of ‘old’ will keep changing and age should not be a factor when making hiring or other decisions, abilities and attitudes should.
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