IQ tends to decline pretty dramatically after age fifty, and AFAICT the most competent people in academia/industry seem to be between 25 and 50. So I want people in office to be below the age of fifty.
This reminds me that I should raise the age limit at-appointment for chief executive to 45, to be more consistent, since they only have a four year term.
Ok, I’m bumping the age limit 10y after a conversation with a friend. They make the point that people in private industry and academia might reasonably tend to want to finish their careers and then move on to senatorship, which makes sense to me. I’m generally against gatekeeping government positions to career government officials.
This seems rather valuable. People between the age of 40-60 are generally the most productive people in industry, specifically because they are typically in managerial roles that are somewhat analogous to roles in governing, and that seems to me to be the sweet spot for age you want for government leaders: enough experience that they have some wisdom to draw on, but not so old they are in cognitive decline or totally out of tough with the needs of younger generations.
Do you actually want “the most competent” people in the senate though? At least in my mind a government delegates optimization problems to the civil service and the elected officials are more like “alignment”. So them being too old could result in issues relating to older people having priorities that are not quite lined up with the overall population, but similar issues could equally arise from them being disproportionately rich/poor male/female minority ethnic. Ideally the senators are setting targets and checking that the civil service is pursuing these goals without simultaneously doing bad things.
IQ tends to decline pretty dramatically after age fifty, and AFAICT the most competent people in academia/industry seem to be between 25 and 50. So I want people in office to be below the age of fifty.
This reminds me that I should raise the age limit at-appointment for chief executive to 45, to be more consistent, since they only have a four year term.
Ok, I’m bumping the age limit 10y after a conversation with a friend. They make the point that people in private industry and academia might reasonably tend to want to finish their careers and then move on to senatorship, which makes sense to me. I’m generally against gatekeeping government positions to career government officials.
This seems rather valuable. People between the age of 40-60 are generally the most productive people in industry, specifically because they are typically in managerial roles that are somewhat analogous to roles in governing, and that seems to me to be the sweet spot for age you want for government leaders: enough experience that they have some wisdom to draw on, but not so old they are in cognitive decline or totally out of tough with the needs of younger generations.
Do you actually want “the most competent” people in the senate though? At least in my mind a government delegates optimization problems to the civil service and the elected officials are more like “alignment”. So them being too old could result in issues relating to older people having priorities that are not quite lined up with the overall population, but similar issues could equally arise from them being disproportionately rich/poor male/female minority ethnic. Ideally the senators are setting targets and checking that the civil service is pursuing these goals without simultaneously doing bad things.