President Joe Biden is 81 years old. Former President Donald Trump is 77. And, it certainly seems that we are heading towards a Biden vs. Trump electoral rematch. So, whoever wins, we are going to have a president serving into their 80s. That’s right voters: if you think Biden is too old now, that’s how old Trump will be if he actually wins this time and then finishes his term. Yeah, math. So, the question: is someone in their early-80s too old to be president?
As a former retirement researcher, I have actually thought about this issue a lot. The main takeaway is that blanket statements about age and work aren’t really appropriate. Older people have some characteristics working against them, but others actually improve. And, some older workers are likely to fare better than others. In other words: it’s nuanced in a way that seems to have no place in our national discourse. But, let us try.
What Types of Skills Decline with Age?
For people aging normally (i.e., without the intervention of a disease), some skills associated with life and work do decline. As someone now in their 40s, I have noticed a few things going sideways. For example, if I’m playing basketball and some young whippersnappers come in (that’s what I call young people now) they seem able to jump much easier than me. My reaction time is also a bit slow, and sometimes I lose my balance and just tip right over. Plus, when the youth speak with new slang terms, I have trouble picking it up. No cap.
Indeed, when my colleague Anek Belbase and I dove into the literature on aging, these sorts of skills are exactly the ones that decline during people’s working lives (see this paper for detail and references). On the physical side, any kind of explosive strength — like jumping — is the first thing to go. Reaction time, balance, and flexibility are also known to decline. Luckily, we don’t ask presidents to use most of these skills. Gerald Ford was perhaps our most athletic president. Yet, according to most historians, Ford ranks below President Taft, the president falsely accused of being so rotund that he got stuck in the tub.
However, my inability to keep up with the kids’ new language is more exemplary of skill decline that might matter to a president. It turns out that “fluid” cognitive abilities, which help people acquire new information and make decisions, begin to decline even in people’s late-20s. The ability to generate new ideas and draw conclusions from new information likewise suffers. One could imagine the reduction of these skills being detrimental to a president.
Then again, other skills increase with age and can offset some of this decline.
What Skills Increase with Age?
As you age, it is not all doom and gloom. On the basketball court, I still have the stamina to keep up with younger people, and my hand-eye coordination remains solid. That isn’t particularly surprising — with training, cardiovascular strength can largely be maintained with age, as can the ability to control movement. But, more importantly, I also have a lot of experience on the court. From this experience, I know my own limitations and can pick up on the strategies of others quickly. This ability makes up for some of my lack of quickness and balance. I can anticipate what is going to happen better than I could when younger.
This ability to pull from a large well of accumulated knowledge is one skill that actually improves with age. As I wrote about a few posts ago, older workers do not suffer from actual or perceived declines in productivity at work. This would seem to fly in the face of a decline in the ability to generate new ideas or use new information. But, it turns out that this decline in fluid cognitive ability is often offset by increases in so-called “crystalized” intelligence — the accumulation of knowledge with age.
Older individuals are able to take advantage of their crystalized intelligence in two ways to offset any declines in their more fluid skills. First, their accumulated knowledge means that they need to learn less new stuff in the first place. Second, that accumulated knowledge allows older individuals to use cognitive tricks to work around their lack of fluid abilities.
A low-stakes example of how crystalized knowledge can offset declining fluid skills is crossword puzzle performance. The figure below shows how crossword puzzle skill evolves with age. Basically it increases up through the 60s and then doesn’t fall off. Older people may have trouble learning the newest craze, but they have a well of words and the ways in which those words are used to make up for any pop culture deficiencies.
Figure 1. Ability to Finish New York Times Crossword Puzzle by Age, in Standard Deviation Units (Positive Means Above Average)
Could we hope for a similar lack of decline for our presidential hopefuls? Would you settle for “maybe”?
Age-Related Decline is Occupation and Individual Specific
So, age doesn’t mean the inescapable decline of all skills. But, being president is a lot different than doing a crossword puzzle. To understand how the skill changes associated with normal aging affect people’s ability to work, my colleague and I constructed something we called a “Susceptibility Index.” It measured how much various occupations relied on the skills known to decline in the course of normal aging. For example, the worst possible job is dancer — it uses strength, balance, flexibility, and requires constantly learning new moves.
But, how about the job closest to being president — being a Chief Executive Officer? Luckily, this job is somewhat insulated from age-related decline. We found that being a CEO falls in the lowest 10 percent of all jobs by susceptibility to aging. Although CEOs have to adapt to new trends, they also rely a lot on crystalized knowledge and not a whole lot on any physical skills. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the average age at Fortune 500 Companies is nearly 60. So, maybe being president is something that can be done relatively well even by older individuals.
But, what about these older individuals? Here, it’s harder to say, as the rate of individual decline with age varies. Figure 2 illustrates this fact. It shows the results of a cognitive test administered to several thousand individuals over a 7-year span starting when the were in their 70s. It shows two things: 1) people differ in their initial performance; and 2) that their initial performance tends to correlate to decline. About 30 percent of people are high-performing “Maintainers”. These folks see very little cognitive decline. The remaining 70 percent do have some sort of decline in their early 80s, including 16 percent that are “Major Decliners.”
Figure 2. Change in Cognitive Score over 7 Years, by Magnitude of Change
Obviously, we don’t know which of these three groups our two candidates fall into. But, if you think that they have so far showed themselves to be high-performing, then they are also more likely to be “maintainers.” That would be good news for all of us. But, If you think that they have showed themselves to be low-performing, then you might be worried. As for my opinion…I’m not going to wade into that one. Just know that the question “how old is too old to be president” doesn’t have a simple answer.