Young People Should Not Run Things

The list of things young people are good at is pretty short. “Auditing the federal government for waste” is not on the list.

Last week, I read a post whose writer had met laid-off government employees “squirming” at the fact that, after losing their jobs to a DOGE-purge, they would have to “lobby for a living.” That did not sit right with me, so I wrote in reply:

But isn’t part of their pique simply that a lot of them have built up expertise, and Trump and musk are hiring people often with little traditional expertise, like Hegseth at defense or Kennedy at HHS? It’s not like they’re getting replaced by Republican versions of themselves. They’re getting replaced by people with real disdain for the work of government. I mean, I tend to think that all the work whether by conservatives or liberals should be done by people in their 40s or 50s who have built up some real wisdom. Musk seems to trust 19-year-olds. Is that a fair assessment in your point of view?

At which point another commenter replied to my reply:

Age of signatories at signing:

James Monroe 18

Aaron Burr 20

Alexander Hamilton 21

James Madison 25

Thomas Jefferson 33. Your gut sense would have gutted the spirit of 1776, pun intended ;)

My main point had not been about age, but rather about expertise. Nevertheless, this commenter came at me by saying, hey, the Founders were all a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings, and they founded a pretty good country.

There are two possible responses to this. The first is, Well, yeah, but they were geniuses. It’s not my sense that Musk’s elite strike force comprises people of that stature. But the second response, which occurred to me after the first, knee-jerk response, was to think, Wait a second … I don’t think there were eighteen-year-olds signing the Declaration of Independence.

And indeed there weren’t. Except Jefferson, none of those guys signed the Declaration. The youngest signer was Edward Rutledge, twenty-six, but the average age was forty-four. I wrote back, pointing this out to the commenter who had commented on my comment. He replied, eating crow (sort of):

My point is there’s a difference between average and only, which is a more elementary statistical mistake than the one you caught me in ;) As a middle aged man, do I trust 20 year olds? Not especially. Do I trust octogenarians who somehow made $80 million fortunes in careers of public service? Not especially. And do I trust us self-dealing middle agers, as some magic compromise between youthful naivety and old age’s corruption? Not especially.

Of course, I had not caught him in a “statistical mistake”; he’d seemed to think Monroe, Burr, and Hamilton had signed the Declaration of Independence, all at the age of today’s undergrads; they had not. But no matter. He went on to make a useful point, if only because it’s so widespread these days. Age doesn’t matter, he argued. He doesn’t trust them at twenty … or at eighty … or in between.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this argument.

First, if the point is that age doesn’t matter at all, that’s clearly fallacious. Almost nothing doesn’t matter at all. There are skills involved in governing; some are sharpened with time, while others might degrade or get corrupted. One might say, “With so many variables at play, I don’t know if it’s better to have a young person for a bureaucrat—idealistic, hard-working, at peak memory—or an older person—who has seen more, has more context, maybe has a more even temperament.” Just because we can’t figure out how age matters doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.

Young people trying to audit a budget, with lemurs.

But actually, we know how age matters. We know the brain keeps developing into one’s twenties. We know that young males are the most violent members of society, with the poorest impulse controls. We know that becoming a parent seems to make one less aggressive. There is a wealth of statistical evidence out there that twenty-year-olds should not be given a lot of responsibility—except, perhaps, for making pop songs or carrying balls.

There is evidence that younger people are more successful as pop stars (whether because they are better, or because of audience taste, it’s hard to say) and, obviously, as athletes. They have better vision than I, at age fifty, do—I’d pick a young man or woman to be captain of my archery team. But the list of things that young people are good at is pretty short. And I don’t imagine “auditing the federal government for waste” is on the list.

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Liberals over-value youth, too

If DOGE-pilled Trumpies are the latest to embrace this form of ageism, they are hardly alone. Although it has been seldom written about, we are in a cycle of extreme ageism at least twenty years old now. Long gone are the days when teenagers looked up to older people and aspired to be mature and sophisticated; today, older people dress like teens, talk like teens (like, right?), and want to look like teens.

I have met people of all ages unaware that ageism in the workplace is illegal, that it’s not okay to say, in a hiring meeting, “Let’s find a terrific young candidate”—a comment every bit as illegal as saying, “Let’s find a terrific white candidate.”

And I have come of age in a journalism culture in which young people have been valued for an imaginary special sauce that they don’t have. I benefitted from it at the beginning: I wrote for Slate when online journalism was new and they wanted younger, zeitgeisty writers. I became editor of an alt-weekly at the age of twenty-nine (and I was woefully under-qualified, and made all sorts of mistakes I would not make today), in part, I am sure, because the publisher thought I’d somehow know how to bring in younger readers. I have no idea if being thirty-six—and, not, say, fifty-six—helped me land a Times column in 2010.

But at every stage of the game, in every job I got, I’d have been better if I were ten years older.