Why are politicians so old nowadays?

BRIC leaders tend to be old-timers:

In Brazil, Lula is back as President, a job he first held in 2003.

Vladimir Putin has been around since 1999.

In India, Narendra Modi, age 73, now entering his 11th year in office, looks likely to win a third term in the current election.

Xi Jinping in China has been in office since 2012, after lifting the 10 year term limit on his predecessors.

If you go with the BRICS acronym, the African National Congress has finally dropped below a simple majority in South Africa, but I wouldn’t be surprised if incumbent Cyril Ramaphosa winds up back on top.

What about other countries? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been top man in Turkey since 2003. Justin Trudeau in Canada still looks callow, but even he has been in office since 2015. Bibi Netanyahu has been Israel’s supremo, on and off, since 1996.

And, of course, America’s presidential election pits two old men. I first read about Joe Biden a half century ago in Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1972. White felt he needed to write something about Today’s Youth and Biden had got elected to the Senate that year at age 29, so got a chapter. Of course, Joe didn’t have much in the way of insight into the late 1960s.

Donald Trump started showing up on magazine covers in the mid-1980s.

Of course, some other countries, such as Britain, have been running through a whole bunch of Prime Ministers lately. Britain will likely will have yet another one in July.

Why are so many leaders so experienced and/or old these days.

One reason, I suspect, is because plastic surgery helps politicians look younger. Biden is visibly deteriorating these days in his 80s, but it’s worth remembering that he got weirdly better looking in middle-age.

Here’s a photo from 1976 in his early-to-mid-30s when Biden looked like a John Cazale character.

But I presume that after he married Doctor Jill the next year, she started him on the road toward a hair transplant and other steps that had him looking surprisingly good as a senior citizen vice-president.

More fundamentally, populations are older these days than a generation ago. Consider the term “population pyramid.” In 1960, when presidential candidates JFK and Richard Nixon averaged 45 years old, the population pyramid looked like this:

You can see the indentation due to the Baby Bust of 1930-1945, but, in general, it looks like a pyramid. There were more young people due to fairly high fertility and due to older people dropping dead. In contrast, here’s the latest Population Tower:

So, assuming (for the sake of a simple model) that talent is evenly distributed through the generations, there used to be more talent among younger people because there were more of them.

Probably more importantly, the increasing average age means that the value of brand name recognition has gone up because there are now more old voters.

On the other hand, Israel’s population pyramid looks like this:

So that Bibi’s career can’t be explained by an aging population.