Opinion | We Have Age Minimums. Why Not Age Maximums?

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How old — and without having to reveal everyone’s ages? How old are you in your head? I think I’m 38.

38 is when I finally got the job I always wanted. And I suddenly, like, the world was sort of unfolding before me. I had recently gotten married, had my first son. This was suddenly like, oh, this is my life.

Look, I’m the opposite. I mean, every time I think about the degree of maintenance required to keep myself from just falling apart, every time my back cracks or my tendinitis in my elbow flares up, I’m like, oh, I’ve got to be 75.

I was going to say that I feel ageless, although I recently learned that one should not —

That’s how I think of you.

— one should not refer to an older person as ageless because it’s coded language for old, but still in pretty good shape.

I aspire to be ageless.

I would too. I would too.

If it’s followed by wonder, “ageless wonder —”

“Ageless wonder.”

— I’ll take that.

What I will say is that life has just gotten better as I’ve gotten older. That corner may turn and I’ll look back with nostalgia. But I’ve been very lucky because it just keeps getting better and better.

Well, now we all hate Lydia.

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From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

So as you guys may have noticed, Americans are not getting any younger. Indeed, some of us on this podcast may not be getting any younger.

And not only are we getting older, we’re also retiring later. And this is especially true of some very powerful people in Washington, DC. There’s the president, Joe Biden, who would be 86 years old by the end of the second term that he’s currently running for.

And then there’s California Senator Dianne Feinstein. She’s been in the news a lot recently because she’s resisting calls to retire. And those calls are coming because not only is she nearly 90 years old, but as some of our colleagues at The Times have reported, she’s increasingly reliant on her aides, who tell her things like how and when to cast her votes.

So, guys, we’re going to talk about this strange situation, which is strange, right? Because many Americans, maybe most Americans fantasize about an early retirement. So why does it seem like people in power are so unwilling to let go? And how does that affect the rest of us?

Well, I mean, I’m just going to take a moment here to do a little bit of Feinstein appreciation. I think it’s worth remembering that this is someone who’s had a really, really legendary career in our politics. She was elected to the Senate in 1992 in the Year of the Woman. She was the author and helped usher the passage of the 1994 assault weapons ban.

You know, she was an incredibly important Senator on the Select Committee on Intelligence. Really sort of brave and courageous around the huge rupture of norms around torture and interrogation. She’s just been this kind of legendary figure, which I think highlights the tragedy of what’s unfolding right now. This person who’s had this incredible career is now being wheeled around the Senate and hidden behind pillars so that news photographers can’t take pictures of her and so reporters can’t doorstep her.

And so it is this kind of incredibly tragic moment. And it’s almost like a kind of “Weekend at Bernie’s” thing. It’s very, very unfortunate.

And you do have to fault the staff to some degree. I mean, what happens in these situations — and you’ve seen it in the past with, we all remember Strom Thurmond at 100 or Robert Byrd in his 90s. Their staff starts running things. And that’s an intoxicating situation to be in. And so they’re just more than happy, in some cases, to let this go on indefinitely.

And then when it comes time to re-elect, unless there is something kind of visibly falling apart, you have the twin issues of incumbency, where everybody’s like, yeah, maybe they’re a little old, but I know it’s the devil I know. And then you kind combine that with the fact that all of America is getting older. And older voters tend to not have as many problems with, say, Joe Biden as younger voters do. So you have a couple of things kind of pushing that age ever upward.

So will anyone make the case that Feinstein or, let’s say, Feinstein’s staff, since maybe it’s ambiguous who is actually deciding that she shouldn’t resign, is doing the right thing? Is anyone up for a defense of the sustaining of Dianne Feinstein as US Senator?

No.

OK, because if not —

No, I can give this a shot.

Carlos, our hero.

I mean, I think it’s a little easy to sit back and say that fill-in-the-blank person should retire with dignity, should sort of do the right thing and step down or not run again for whichever office we’re discussing without necessarily thinking about what the person in the office finds dignified as an end to a career. I think we live in a country that worships youth and vitality and considers old people to be burdens and annoyances, not repositories of wisdom and experience, but as an inconvenience, right?

Think of what you’re telling someone when you’re saying that you should resign or not run again because you’re too old. You’re basically no longer working, right? You no longer serve the purpose that I want for you. They’re not dead yet, but we’re kind of effectively killing them early on a more convenient schedule for ourselves.

Wait a minute, no, no.

And we’re taking away the thing that has given their life meaning and purpose. We will honor Dianne Feinstein when she is dead. Oh my god, the obituaries, the columns, the multimedia packages will be out of this world. But until then, we’d rather not see you around, right? You don’t look so good. You’re inconvenient. I can’t bring myself to be part of that course.

It is not that she is inconvenient. It is that she cannot do her job. She had to take months off to go home to recover from some —

Will not be the first senator who did that.

No, and I think they should have gone too. The difference is, in a very, very closely split Senate, it stops the process. And I think unless you want to have more discussions about blanket retirement ages and blanket competency tests, you need to have some acknowledgment that different people age in different ways. Nobody’s calling for Chuck Grassley to drop out because Grassley seems to pretty much be able to do his thing on a regular basis, as opposed to Dianne Feinstein, who has basically become something to, as you’ve noted, hide from the public. So this is not just a question of, oh, ageism, she’s not as spry as she used to be.

Well, let me bring up, since Carlos manfully stepped into the breach, the case of John Fetterman, the United States Senator from Pennsylvania, who is obviously not, God willing, near the end of his life, but was elected to the Senate following a severe stroke, has been hospitalized for an extended period of time with depression during his first year in the Senate, and has attracted — there’s been an argument around Fetterman that is an interesting analog to the argument around Feinstein.

So do you guys think there’s a big difference between the case of Fetterman — allowing that he is, I think it’s fair to say he’s much more competent than Feinstein at this point on the evidence we have. But he is taking breaks from the Senate. He is clearly not at full capacity. Is there a big difference between those cases?

There’s precedent, obviously, of people stepping away from very, very important jobs. People take leaves for various reasons — for health, to take care of an ailing relative, to give birth to a child, all those kinds of things. And Fetterman’s case seems to lie somewhere between those different kinds of absences.

And it was extended. And I think there was a lot of conversation about it. But I but I do think that he does seem to be on a trajectory of recovery, which is very, very different than the situation that we’re seeing with Feinstein.

Yeah, people were complaining about long before she had to go home for her case of shingles or her current syndrome that she is suffering from. This is not a one-off for her. But that’s why when you’re talking about a gerontocracy, what is it that we’re really concerned about? Are we concerned that they can’t do their job, which is clearly the case with Feinstein’s discussion?

Or is it that we just worry, as happened with the past House Democratic leadership, that because they are a certain age they don’t represent new blood, fresh ideas, they have stale approaches to things? So that’s one of the questions that often gets squashed together.

I think it’s funny, as you were talking, I was thinking about one of the most interesting and innovative and exciting presidential candidates that we’ve seen in recent memory is Bernie Sanders. And he was real old when he ran. So I think the idea that new energy and ideas only come from the young is definitely not the case.

So preparing for this conversation, I went back and looked at the writings of George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter to see if I could find anything about how they saw sort of the proper age for the presidency or what one should be doing in one’s 80s. George HW Bush has this wonderful book of letters called “All The Best, George Bush.” It’s huge.

But towards the end, he writes about what it’s like to get older and also the age at which one can be of use in the presidency. In one letter to a friend, right after George W. wins re-election in ‘04 and he is 80, and he writes, “I wish I could help this son of ours. I wish I could do something to help ease the burden, but I cannot. I am an old guy. My experiences are out of date. Perhaps my instincts aren’t as good as I once thought they were.” So he says, “Now it’s just back to our tiny house in Houston, back to watching crime TV, to listening to Imus.”

You know, that was how he felt he could be use at that point in his life, even though he was certainly vital enough to be an engaged citizen. He just felt that he was too old for the presidency, not just in his stamina, but even in his worldview. And I thought that was very interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I do think just pivoting a bit to the presidency — and we should talk a little bit about Joe Biden and his age and the signs of his age. I think we had an excellent piece in The Times about this. But, you know, I think that there have been lots of different approaches to sort of “vigor” in the presidency, quote, unquote.

I think there are some presidents who are real workaholics. And sometimes that gets read as micromanaging, as in the case of Jimmy Carter. You know, I think Barack Obama put in a lot of long hours in the Oval.

And so these questions of, how much time you spend in the office? Do you get tired? Are you vigorous? Sometimes those are related to age, but not always. What do you guys think?

I think with the current match-up that we’re expecting between, say, Biden and Trump, it’s a question of style. So Biden is 80 years old. But he’s also just calm and quiet. And Trump, on the other hand, seems incredibly in-your-face. And I do think there is a tendency to equate combativeness with vigor. And so what you’re looking at is with Trump, there have been plenty of people who’ve gone back over his appearances over the years and discussed that his vocabulary is shrinking. His mental processes do not seem as sharp as they once were.

But the dude is bombastic. I mean, he is always out there shrieking about something. And so he does not come across as frail. A little bit unhinged, but not frail. And when you’re talking about age, Biden just comes across as you’re kind of slowing down uncle or grandpa or whatever.

Or great-grandpa.

Or great-grandpa.

He’s in his 80s.

I mean, if we think of, what is the purpose of stamina, right? It is ostensibly to take on a very demanding job. And Trump had what was the term? Executive time? Remember? Trump had all this time built into his schedule where he was just — he was on Twitter or he was watching TV. He was calling friends. You know, very few meetings scheduled throughout the day.

Biden seems to have a very similar schedule to what Obama had, except in the evening. In the evening, he will kind of retire for the evening, whereas Obama kind of kept reading briefing books or whatever he was doing. And so if it’s a matter of how much time someone spends on the job, how much time they can devote to the job, there’s kind of different ways to schedule the day. And for all of Trump’s perceived vigor, he actually devoted much less time to governing, unless, of course, you assume that tweeting and talking on the phone and watching TV was his form of governing.

Yeah, that’s basically as good as he got.

I mean, that’s my form of governing. I was going to say, I like to schedule lots of executive time for myself.

In Lydia’s repressive society —

And it’s an imperial mode of governance. I mean, I think the thing is, with Biden, the challenge with the presidency, right, is that there’s also crisis management, which falls on the presidency in a way that it doesn’t fall on really any other office in our republic. And that is where I think the argument for some kind of age limit and maybe as a matter of policy, we have a lower bound. You have to be 35 to be president. I don’t think it would be crazy to set an upper bound. But even just on a case-by-case basis, I think for someone I disagree with on a lot of policy, I think Joe Biden has done an OK job as president in terms of day-to-day management, policy choices, even some tough foreign policy decisions.

The idea of Joe Biden four years on from now facing Cuban Missile-style crisis having to do with Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan or a COVID-style crisis, it just doesn’t seem like an appropriate thing to ask of someone that age and to lay these kind of — the US presidency carries existential powers in a way that separates the presidency from other parts of this debate.

I think that’s right. Although our colleagues’ reporting indicated that he actually was great at the 3:00 AM call.

It was actually at 3:00 AM.

It was actually at 3:00 AM when it seemed like maybe the war was extending, Ukraine was extending to Poland. And he was able to sort of wake up in the middle of the night and handle the crisis.

But I think the thing that’s a little harder to talk about is, at a certain point, you do break out your actuarial tables and play a little bit of geriatric, you know, prognosticating. And, you know, I think the big question is, will Biden live through another term? Because when you get to a certain age, it just, death becomes more likely. And these are very hard things to talk about, but it’s true. And so I think that’s going to be something that’s going to be foremost in voters’ minds is they’re thinking about what the overall ticket looks like. And that, I think, is one of the biggest vulnerabilities that Joe Biden has is that he’s got a relatively untested vice president.

So we’ve gone from each person is different and each person ages in their own way, in their own pace to maybe we need some hard and fast upper limits. Nikki Haley has been talking about — I mean, it seems a fairly political ploy to kind of draw the distinction between her age and that of Trump and Biden, but she’s been suggesting there should be mental competency tests for candidates 75 or above. When we get into that kind of nitty gritty of like, how do you actually make this real? How would you operationalize some kind of upper bound or mental test? How do you do that? I mean, we don’t want to get back into the person, woman, man, camera, TV land.

Trump’s amazing accounts of how he passed his — passed his test.

Yeah, his presidential cognitive test. He’s sharp as a tack.

I don’t think the competency tests are particularly plausible. I think you just have to sort of accept some kind of arbitrary limit. I speak as — I’m a member of the Roman Catholic Church, which has long experience with gerontocracy and has, for that reason, two layers of restraint on older bishops exercising power. First, at the age of 75, all bishops have to offer their resignation to the pope, who can accept it or not.

But then there’s also just a rule that cardinals can’t vote for the next pope and be of a certain age. And that can be unfair. I think, as it is unfair that at 25, I was not allowed to run for president. Totally unfair. I was ready. I was tested.

Let’s drag this back from —

Michelle wants to take us away from the papacy. I want to keep going. But go ahead, Michelle.

I would like to drag this back from God. I would rather have —

?] Once again.

— the voice of God —

?] Yes.

— not involved in our discussion.

The aggressive secularism of “The New York Times,” my god.

Yeah, I’m going to go aggressively secular and say that there are plenty of examples where people have decided that there need to be just kind of blanket age limits. I think Ross is correct that trying to do individual competency tests is just asking for trouble. It’s going to degenerate into something really ugly. But, you know, there are plenty of law enforcement careers, air traffic controllers, pilots. In private companies, a lot of directors on corporate boards are expected to retire, especially in the S&P 500 boards, the big ones, if for no other reason than to bring in fresh blood.

This is not something that is completely beyond the pale. And none of those jobs, I’d just like to point out, is nearly as important or as stressful as the presidency. You know, we talk about how the presidency visibly ages everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. And those guys were two decades younger than what we’re dealing with Trump or Biden.

In their 40s, yeah.

So it’s not as though this is some kind of crazy, you know, outrageous infringement of personal rights. It’s something that could be done. And there is plenty of examples out there.

What’s interesting there too is that all of this that we’re talking about is pegged to the idea of asking people who don’t want to retire to retire early. And, of course, there’s an entirely related conversation in an aging society that’s about normal people, where the question is sort of the reverse. Can we ask people to work longer than they are right now? And that’s what we’re going to talk about in our next segment. So let’s take a quick break here. And we’ll be right back.

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And we’re back. We’ve been talking about the challenge of politicians working deep into old age by choice, apparently because they can’t imagine life outside the halls of power. But most people in rich societies expect to retire much, much earlier than Dianne Feinstein or Joe Biden. And the dilemma for society as a whole is a bit different than the dilemma facing Democratic staffers, let’s say. It’s not how to persuade the old to step aside, but whether in societies with low birth rates and long lifespans and, eventually, shrinking working-age populations we should expect people to work longer, well past current retirement ages. So let’s make this personal. When do you guys hope to retire?

I mean, I would love to have a French-style retirement, you know, retire at — what is it? 62, full pension, all your benefits, and just move to the American equivalent of the South of France and enjoy the rest of my life.

See, I’m just trying to get that Tuscan Villa.

All right, all right, so we’ve got two votes.

That’s it.

I think it’s telling that you both chose to move to Europe on the attitude that Europe —

I said the American —

Why do you hate America?

— the American equivalent of the South of France.

?] I apologize. I apologize. I should not have questioned.

Florida, Florida.

Absolutely not. Great place to get harassed in a bathroom.

Hey, man, I’m all for The Villages. Those giant retirement communities where everybody sits around and —

Carlos, will you —

I will take Ross’s question seriously —

Thank you.

— and say that I would find our entire conversation a lot more persuasive and honest if we felt that term limits or age limits also applied to, say, “New York Times” columnists and editorial writers.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Touché.

There are “New York Times” columnists who have been columnists for — Ross, you’ve been a columnist for like 15 years. You know, when is too long? When do we need new blood, as we’ve been talking about our politicians?

OK, notably, they do have people come off the masthead jobs at “The Times.” Not to get too in the weeds here, but they do cycle in fresh blood on the masthead. They just let Ross go on as long as he wants to.

See, I was going to say that I am open for the good of the American economy, which needs people in the workforce paying taxes to pay for Lydia and Michelle’s cushy retirements, I’m willing to keep going, writing my column, sharing my podcasting thoughts ‘til the age of 80. But now Carlos has made me feel guilty about it. So I’m not, I’m not so sure. I mean, I do, I both have a desire to retire and a difficulty imagining myself spending 35-odd years just sort of hanging out.

But, I mean, this is one fascinating thing that you saw in the protests in France just in the last year over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to modestly tweak the retirement age is that not just older people, but younger people were in the streets protesting, basically expressing the idea that retirement is sort of the heart of the good life, right? That sort of what you do or become in retirement is essential to one sense of Frenchness, if you will. And that’s not really the view we have in America.

But we’re also pretty proretirement in America, as the difficult politics of Medicare reform make clear. But I’m curious what you guys think about that sort of moral question. Is there a kind of right to retirement, as sort of an essential part of the liberal bargain with the citizenry?

I mean, I think absolutely yes. It’s the idea that we as, you know, quote, unquote, “knowledge workers” who are laptop keyboard warriors are going to keep hammering away at our columns and podcasting into our dotage is one thing. But if you are a taxi driver or you are a health care worker or — there are professions that where you’re thinking about your work and it involves your physical body in a different way.

And I think that there are also professions that require really, really long hours and that maybe will make people want to think about calling it quits at a younger age. So I think that we shouldn’t mistake ourselves for representatives of the population at large. And I think that the idea that a life of hard work, of contributing to society, to contributing to Social Security, saving, and so on, definitely entitles you to a period of rest at the end of your life.

But, but, but this requires the sort of social planning that America is not great at. We have vanishingly little prep going on for the wave of baby boomers that are already hitting the system. So if you’re going to expect something like that, you’ve got to do better in terms of actual economic structuring.

I also think that in the American psyche, in the American character — I don’t know — the idea of work and this kind of Protestant work ethic is so fundamental to who we are. I mean, I think about my grandfather, who worked from a very young age. You know, came out of the army after World War II and got a job at 3M as an engineer and then was, in the 1980s, pushed into early retirement at the age of 55.

And, you know, I think he enjoyed some aspects of being retired at that age. And he and my grandmother took wonderful trips around — they came to visit us in Africa and they went to China and, you know? But I think it was really hard on him to feel that all of the things that he had learned and all of the wisdom that he had — I mean, he was an incredible tinkerer. And you could just see that there was a part of him that was — that was sort of lost in retirement and this life of building things and designing things and being an engineer, that there was something that was really missing from his life as he aged.

Lydia, I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, it’s so important to kind of personalize and humanize this conversation alongside of the big picture policy conversation. Because there’s a difference between the question of whether there’s a right to retirement and then deciding when that retirement needs to start.

Yeah.

And, of course, that’s a policy question. But for each human being, it’s incredibly different, right? And I also think about my grandfather. The person I’ve admired most in my life is my maternal grandfather, for whom I’m named, who was a law professor and legislator and cabinet member and a scholar of Roman law in Peru.

And he worked deep into his 80s and until he died in his late 90s. Was he as effective in his 80s as he was in his 50s? Probably not, right?

But he was no less inspiring or dedicated a teacher. He may have been wiser for those who were listening. And when he stopped working, even at that late age, it really did sort of sap some of the life out of him. And, for me, it’s something that I always draw from when I think about, at what point do I want to quote, unquote, “hang it up.”

But we have to also — coming back to the idea of tradeoffs. I mean, there’s all these millennials who have been complaining that they can’t move up in certain businesses or careers or jobs because the, I mean, the millennials are complaining because the baby boomers just won’t clear out. For every 80-year-old who is clinging to the job that they love, there is a 45-year-old who’s like, well, what about me? And when you have an entire society like that, you do need to start thinking about, is there a way to have some kind of system set up for post-retirement meaning?

In Japan, they have had systems for years that are set up to help older retirees work in jobs that can give them some sort of meaning and sense of accomplishment after they have retired from their regular job or whatever. We just don’t think that way. But there is no such thing as a system where you don’t have tradeoffs.

You know, we do live in a country where our politics are really dominated by, our politics and, therefore, policy, are really dominated by old people, right? Old people are the most reliable voters. And that means that we have a drug benefit added to Medicare, but we don’t have a whole host of benefits that could help young people, like seems like we’re not going to have student debt forgiveness, for example. But I do think that this kind of structural problem with our electorate also sort of plays into some of these larger policy and, frankly, cultural questions that we have around aging retirement, how long people hang in the workforce.

And on that note, we’re going to retire this conversation and take a quick break. And when we get back, we’ll get hot and cold.

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And we’re back. And it’s finally time for everyone’s favorite moment of the week, Hot-Cold, where one of us shares something we’re into, over, or somewhere on the thermometer in between. So who’s got something for us?

Oh, I am all over this. I am downright frosty on QR code menus. I am tired of going to a restaurant and being expected to whip out my phone, try to scan that little square, and then have everybody at the table sit there scrolling through. And they always organize the menus in different ways. So am I going down past the brunch menu into the drink menu? It’s just like, enough already. Give me a damn menu.

I think this is a good example of what you might call technological regress where the menu, the traditional menu is a great technology. It’s big. You can share it with the person next to you. You can look at what someone else is looking at. You can point out things in obvious ways on the menu.

Most everything is presented together in the same space. It’s just a big step backward to push it into the digital — until, I guess, we get the menus on the new Apple Goggles, which I will be cold on in a future episode.

There is a serendipity to menus, to physical menus that is wonderful. I think you’re more likely to try unexpected dishes from a physical menu. I would equate it to the print newspaper, right? You are less likely to curate your intake.

You are more likely to find unexpected treasures buried inside a print newspaper that you will never find when you have your own predigested newslettered — no offense Ross — newslettered diet of news. There is a serendipity to both print menus and print newspapers that I think we will miss.

I have nothing to add to you bunch of geezers. I just think next time we go out to — next time we go out to lunch, we can —

Lydia, get off my lawn, all right? Get off my lawn.

All right, on that note, Carlos has an archaic codex to leaf through. I have a newsletter to write. And that’s all from here. We’ll talk to you next week.

Bye.

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“Matter of Opinion” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett, and Derek Arthur and edited by Stephanie Joyce. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.