Why the Old Elite Spend So Much Time at Work
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Everything in America is getting older these days. In practically every field of human endeavor—politics, business, academia, science, sports, pop culture—the average age of achievement and power is rising.
Politics is getting older. Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Remarkably, he is still younger than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And they aren’t exceptions to the general rule: The Senate is the oldest in history.
Businesses are getting older. The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is very likely at its record high, having gradually increased throughout the 21st century. And it’s not just the boss; the whole workplace is getting older too. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Americans under 45 accounted for the clear majority of workers. But that's no longer the case, since the large Baby Boomer generation has remained in the labor force longer than previous cohorts.
Science is getting older—not just in this country, but around the world. Discovery used to be a young person’s game. James Watson was 24 when he co-discovered the structure of DNA, and Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his famous papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity. But in the past few decades, the typical age of scientific achievement has soared. Nobel Prize laureates are, especially in physics and chemistry. The average age of an investigator at the National Institutes of Health in 2008, and the average age of principal investigators receiving their first major NIH grant increased from about in 1990 to about in 2016. In fact, all of academia is getting older: The average age of college presidents in the U.S. has increased steadily in the past 20 years. From 1995 to 2010, the share of tenured faculty over the age of 60 roughly .
