Age

When I was preparing a lecture for geriatric medicine, I heard the news of President-elect of the United States at the age of seventy-eight. 

Should there be an age limit for the election? 

Yes, I know, that might seem like comitting the sin of ageism. Still, I have to say that there is nowadays an imbalance of power that favors the old. 

It is not just in politics that our performance peaked when we were relatively young. This is also true in science and mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan who discovered the structue of ribosome. In his book Why We Die, he talked about people working into their seventies or eighties – or even longer – with unwillingness to admit getting old. 

Surrounded by scientists trying to hang on for as long as they can, Venki Ramakrishnan discussed the time when our creative powers peak. The first answer that came to his mind was the age when scientist did their best work. For Nobel Prize winners, they nearly always make their key breakthroughs when they are young and not very powerful. 

Next, he turned to the most innovative companies (think Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the artificial intelligence company DeepMind): they were started by people in their twenties or thirties.

The same was true of literature. Kazuo Ishiguro said it was hard to find cases where an author's most renowned work had come after the age of forty-five. If you aren't convinced, think about War and Peace, Ulysses, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights. These novels were all written by writers in their twenties and thirties. 

No wonder more than 1.2 million people marched in France last year to protest against the government's proposal to raise the retirement age a mere two years from sixty-two to sixty-four. Dosen't it make sense?