All the cries of ageism but there have been countless leaked reports of US Senators being treated for dementia and clearly cognitively impaired senators still serving. They're doing a weekend at bernies with McConnell right now!

Absolutely there are sharp people >65, but there is no question that cognitive decline starts in middle age and the risk for dementia increases dramatically past 65.

Then there is the argument, which imo is even stronger, of an inverting demographic pyramid and inter generational economic warfare to preserve pensions for people who won't live to see the effects of their policies. This is not at all sustainable and creates misery for the working class who will soon lack sufficient democratic power to vote their way out of it.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner, etc..

Yes, in general people place a lot of value in the wisdom that comes with age so long as the person isn’t senile.

Obviously with autocrats this isn’t applicable but there’s nothing inherently nonsensical or inexplicable about why mostly old dudes rule much of the world.

Ten in ten children have parents who are older than them

Numbers, but I couldn't find insights in the article. Is there anything worthy of take-away?

The world sucks becuase of old people and based on Hannah Ritchie's substack publications that the UK should cut pensions and its social safety net.

Which is ironic because I am younger than most HNers and Substackers who espouse this opinion and find it to be a weird form of ageism.

To me, a 45 year old and a 65 year old are equally out of touch or "old", so it feels like a pot calling a kettle black.

How many are insane? That's more important to me than age.

A lunatic, who's also clearly stupid is a far more pressing concern.

Age is not equal to wisdom

The term "Senate" comes from the Latin word "senex" meaning "old man", and obviously the US inherited the term "Senate" from ancient Rome. This is a basic structure of society.

The issue is that this particular group of people older than 65 at this particular time in world history (which you happen to be living in) are Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history, due to the circumstances of their upbringing (post-WW2, high technology, opulence, drug use, sexual revolution, peace in the developed world).

This isn't ageism, since normally old people do tend to have more wisdom and knowledge than young people.

There is something that really went wrong with the Boomer generation. The goal of every society is basically to survive their Boomer generation which many are not really seeming to manage.

Notice that Senate wasn't the only governing party in ancient Rome. Also "old" is relative. It meant "too old to serve in military", with Sulla's reforms the minimum age was 31 and even before that most influential senators were 40-50.

For emperors: out of 80 only 14 were over 65. 2 resigned/died at 66, 1 at 67, 2 ruled only few months, so really 9 out of 80. Rome is not the place to look for old rulers

Rome had a very reliable retirement mechanism: assassination. Not a process I'd recommend, but nobody got stuck with an eighty-year-old who refused to hand over the keys. Most orgs have no equivalent, and it shows at 3am.

> ...Boomers who are probably the most child-like, foolish, and ignorant generation of people in world history...

So are they the worst ever, or, like, just probably? If you are going to say something, don't weasel.

I'd just ask "measured how?" whenever someone says that. We do it in code review with "fastest" or "cleanest" claims, and they usually collapse. There's no metric for "most foolish generation" that isn't just the speaker's grudge, so the hedge is doing all the work.

First paragraph, interesting.

The rest, off the rails.

2/5 stars.

So the Senate was named for old men, and the complaint is they act like children.

Ageism.

Yes. But. Just like long-enduring CEOs of increasing disrupt-able enterprises, long-lived politicians accumulate obligations to their donors in a manner that limits their policy latitude.

Sadly, such long-tenured politicians also happen to be old. The old-ness is mostly not actually the problem. It is the constraints.

Calling it ageism skips the practical bit. Our best ops guy was 68 and nobody doubted him, but we still had a plan for when he'd retire. Leaders with no exit plan and nobody being trained to replace them is the actual problem, whatever the age.

There's a reason why every American worker is paying 6% of their income to give checks to the richest cohort in society, and every politician is afraid to touch the program.

Can you expand on what you mean? I may be ignorant but my understanding of the system is you would technically get more back percentage wise as a low wage worker? Of course this is not just some cost benefit analysis, that money means more if you make less while you are still paying in. This is not a comment on the system at large, just more specifically I want to understand what you are implying.

1 in 2 Americans are over 39. 1 in 1 Americans have a governor over 39.

In 2026 scare quotes around the word "leader" should be obligatory in all cases.

Well, one in twenty people is a doctor and nine in ten go see one if they have a stomach ulcer.

9 out of 10 doctors say that smoking a Lucky is good for you. of course 87% of statistics are made up

The takeaway is the gap, not the raw age. Cameroon's median citizen is about 18 and Biya is 93. Compare that to Europe, where 60-ish leaders roughly match a median population in the mid-40s. The mismatch is biggest where the population is youngest, and that's the part I'd chart.