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Is America a Gerontocracy?

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Is America a Gerontocracy?

A chart crime sends me down a rabbit hole

SimonM
Nov 8, 2022
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Is America a Gerontocracy?

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tl;dr My best guess on the US is that nothing strange is really going on with the age of it’s legislators. They have been ageing roughly inline with the population - society is just getting older.

There is a chart which did the rounds a few days ago. eg Liberty's post from last week:

Liberty’s Highlights
348: Tacit Knowledge, Charter, Stripe Layoffs, Hollywood, Meta's Computational Biology AI, Floppy Disks, and Age Segregation
Read more
a year ago · 13 likes · 4 comments · Liberty

This looks to me like the age of Congress has gone absolutely parabolic in the last couple of years… but is this true? I hate the gerontocracy as much as the next guy, so I was inclined to believe it, but it did look a bit too convenient to me. After all, when you look at the tail of a distribution, if you shift the mean a bit, then the number above a threshold can move very quickly.

Plotting the median age of Congress (and various percentiles) Congress has actually been ageing fairly gradually.

Source: Our World in Data; https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators; Wikpedia

It looks to me like congress has been ageing in-line with the median age in the US. (Aside - if anyone knows how to get historic demographic data from the US census going back prior to 1950 - let me know - or similar data for a range of other countries legislatures)

So what is going on with the over 70s? Well if I assume a random distribution of ages, following the median member of congress and the standard deviation of the members of congress, I very easily match the %age of congress over 70 chart:

Source: Our World in Data; https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators; Wikpedia

This is what I mentioned at the start. As the centre of the distribution shifts, the amount over a threshold can increase quickly. If I just plot the relationship between average age, and “%age over 70” we can see a fairly non-linear relationship over the range of median age we’ve seen over the last few years:

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