Does age matter for a president?
🗳 221 days until the U.S. presidential election
Today: The antitrust case against Apple and a guide to making good career choices. Written by Scott Lamb
How important is the age of a U.S. president? It’s a big theme of this year’s election, with both political parties trying to frame the question in a way that works best for them. It’s not just a political party or media driven issue: Most Americans favor age limits for elected officials and Supreme Court judges (according to a Pew Center study from last fall). But what do you think about it?
Two recent Medium pieces helped me understand the issue differently. First, as health writer Kathleen Murphy points out in Crow’s Feet (a publication exploring aging), we’ve been here before: In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan (then 73) was facing Walter Mondale (then 56) and their age gap was a big dynamic in the race. In that case, Reagan spun age as experience, and won. (When asked in a debate if he was too old to be president, he famously replied, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”)
An exploration of the topic in Wise & Well explores how cognitive testing — instead of age limits — might be a useful way to judge the fitness of a candidate. “Results of cognitive testing would represent a common-sense disclosure analogous to other disclosures routinely made by politicians,” said one researcher.
Another question may be what happens in the future elections — the median age of presidents at inauguration is 55, so a return to the mean would include a much younger slate of candidates in 2030.
What else we’re reading
- Cory Doctorow looks at the antitrust case against Apple, and sees in it another facet of the enshittification that has taken over so much of our experience of technology: “The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells — the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware — represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.”
- A UX designer explores why design trends have been moving towards a more neutral palette over the last decade, an outgrowth of “McDonaldization” driven by capital, in “Why is the world losing color?”
- Harvard’s Avi Loeb wonders about the state of academic innovation with a thought exercise: “Would Albert Einstein End Up in Academia in 2024?” (Spoiler alert: He thinks no, Einstein would probably drop out and join a startup.)
- And for a trenchant, pressing investigation in photos that any parent will relate to, check out “What’s in my 4-year-old’s bag?”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom about: making career choices
There are a lot of ways to evaluate a potential job and its place in your career, but this framework — modeled on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — provides a way to continuously monitor your progression. As you grow it’s important to keep “aiming for purpose and meaning.”
Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis
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