Live is different at 60 than it was at 30. You do have less energy, and get tired faster. You do have "senior moments", where you go somewhere and suddenly don't remember why you went in the first place. You aren't as much up to date with the latest news, or memes, or music, and tend to make references that younger people you talk to don't understand (Superman changing in a phone booth? What's a phone booth?). If you consider a typical job, where the company wants the employee to be energetic, quick on their feet, and able to work long hours, it is understandable that the company would prefer a younger person. Especially if that younger person earns less than the older person. And that leads to a perception of people in their 60's at some point becoming "too old to work".

In November of this year, the United States of America will have a presidential election in which the average age of the two candidates is 80. Partisan commenters argue that their candidate is "sharp", while pointing out the age-induced gaffes of the other candidate. But the sad reality is that both candidates are too old for the job. Both have shown signs of dementia in public, and being able to still pass a basic cognitive test isn't exactly a job qualification for becoming the leader of the free world. It was probably a good thing that JFK was 45 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and not 80, because we can be sure that the president didn't get much sleep during those two weeks, and was under a lot of stress.

Electing somebody around 80 to the office of US president also has a weird constitutional aspect: In American politics the office of the vice-president is considered to be some sort of a joke, and the vice-presidential candidates are selected as an after-thought in the presidential campaigns. But the probability of somebody around 80 dying of natural causes over the next 4 years is rather high. Actuarial tables suggest the chance could be up to 25%, although those tables are for the general population, and one might argue that a president gets better health care. Still, the probability that the 48th president of the USA will be one of the vice-presidential candidates of the 2024 election is certainly unusually high.

How do we bridge the gap between considering a 60-year old "too old" to do a regular job, and an 80-year old still young enough to perform one of the most important jobs in the world? Shouldn't there be a mandatory retirement age for politicians? It isn't just presidents, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are both only retiring at over 80, in the case of McConnell after showing serious age-related decline symptoms in public. How do we bridge the gap between companies complaining about a lack of skilled labor, while simultaneously giving early retirement packages to their most skilled people?

I think that retention of skilled labor could be achieved by replacing early retirement packages with age-adjusted job descriptions. Companies should have jobs for older people, in which their skill and experience is valued more, and the hours and conditions are adjusted to their diminished physical abilities. If you send two electricians to solve a complicated electrical problem, there would be no harm in one of them being old and experienced, while the other is young and energetic. Macro-economical it makes more sense to create value from experience than to draw an arbitrary "too old" line, just because the 60-year old isn't fully suited to do the same job as the 30-year old. With most OECD countries having serious financing problems of their pension schemes in the coming decades, that might be quite necessary. And maybe even old politicians could be given advisory roles, rather than being in the heat of the action.